Countdown 2016, 17: Etched in Memory

Welcome to the Electron Dance Advent calendar. Each day will bring another post from the archives.

Have you read The Rings posted on 15 Feb 2012?

As the personal essay rose to prominence in the game critic space, I moved away from this pattern, seeing it as a kind of crutch. That is, are the ideas I’m trying to articulate good enough to stand on their own without the lead-in anecdote? The Rings is an example of the personal essay I used to do, with half its length about climbing the island of Yakushima.

The Rings is about accepting consequences in games. I don’t know if I could write this today, perhaps suspecting I was padding a short idea into a long one using a personal story.

See if you agree.

Go read it!

From the comments:

• Michael Brough (brog): “Nobody reloads from saves in a multiplayer game.”
• Badger Commander: “How do I fix that, tell me HM, how do I fix that?”
• Gnome: “Oh, and people -especially on the internet- are indeed strange”
• Steerpike: “With gaming – and everything – we all do tend to look back and remember the grass as greener.”
• LiberalEurope: “There was a point, late-game, that I was worried the game might never end. We had broken so many rules, but we nonetheless found ourselves trapped in the game.”