As I write this, I'm hanging out at San Francisco's main airport, wondering if it would be truly crazy to leave my terminal for burritos I've been missing for over a year now. My stomach...it hungers.

On my flight, I've been digging deep into Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. If it seems like Danganronpa only came out a few months ago, that's because it's mostly true. The original game was released on Vita back in February. With all the other games coming down the pike in the next few weeks, I'm trying to use some travel time to get the game's hooks in me. Unless that happens soon, it's not hard to see Danganronpa 2 joining a pile of games I'll convince myself to try during the holidays. Of course, I never will.

I can't imagine I'm going to put Danganronpa down how, though. I mean, look at that screen shot.

One last aside: I was pretty happy with the comments section on last week's Worth Reading. Obviously, we're going to disagree on a number of points regarding the last few weeks, but a sincere thanks are in order for the many people who worked to articulate those rhetorical distances calmly. As always, if you have anything you want to ask or discuss in private, my message box is always open.

You Should Read These

Feelings on Destiny have been mixed, though I fall on the side that's liking it. Much of what doesn't currently work--loot drops, mission structure, frequency of public events--seems fixable. I'm not sure the story can be salvaged, at least the story being told right now. The reason Destiny's storytelling fails, however, is something we're still teasing out. Cameron Kunzelman does a good job articulating the storytelling decisions made by Bungie's writers.

"In the article I mentioned above, Petit mentions that Destiny has a lot of the same trappings as Star Wars. At the heart of this similarity is something we could call 'the evocation effect.' The perfect illustration of this effect is the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars. Luke Skywalker walks in, the camera cuts around the room and shows you lots of different kinds of characters, and then time goes on. The film tells you nothing about them, but they are intended to evoke a world beyond the camera. “Dang!” you’re meant to think, “I bet they all have stories!” They don’t. (Or didn’t at the time. The Expanded Universe probably has total family genealogies for all of them at this point.)"

If I'm lucky, I'll have the opportunity to write about games for a long time. Besides occasionally helping Vinny and Drew push around audio equipment, there's no manual labor involved in my work. So it doesn't surprise me to see more games like Cart Life, Euro Truck Simulator, and Papers, Please. While Ian Williams' piece explicitly focuses on the trucking and farming side of things, they all come from a similar place: experiences greatly unlike our own lives.

"We live in a post-industrial America, one where old notions of alienation of labor have been made to seem not radical enough by half through the increasing abstraction of our work. The factory worker of fifty years ago could at least touch the things he or she was creating, even if it was only a piece or two of a larger whole. Now, we’re coders, pounding out lines of a foreign language we might only partially understand in order to create intangible end products for companies skimming more and more of our compensation. Or we call an order to production, only for it to go halfway around the world for quick delivery to the stores we work at, with nothing produced or even handled by anyone we will ever know by processes we’re never really privy to."

If You Click It, It Will Play

These Crowdfunding Projects Look Pretty Cool

Age of Grit wants to fuse the wild west with a futuristic RPG.

Grimoire features wizard-on-wizard ass kicking, and I can't really argue with that.

Judged: A Court Simulation Games gives me some Papers, Please vibes.

Writing From Giant Bomb's Community, Courtesy of ZombiePie

MeatsofEvil lays out his ambitious plans for this years' ExtraLife charity stream.

regularassmilk on the current state of game difficulty levels.

Mento celebrates the 20th anniversary of Master of Magic with a detailed retrospective.

thatpinguino examines the often tenuous relationship between the NFL and the game industry.

Marino has a nostalgic throwback and retrospective of the old Whiskey Media trading card system.

Tweets That Make You Go "Hmmmmmm"

Dear @notch: Congratulations. You deserve it. Dear Microsoft: Don’t fuck up Minecraft or its community. Signed, Millions of players. — Wil Wheaton (@wilw) September 15, 2014

I love problem solving. Everything is hard, until it isn’t, because you solved it. — Alexander Bruce (@Demruth) September 15, 2014

Here's a secret - there's nothing immoral or wrong about selling indie games for money. And if someone pays $2.5 billion, more power to you. — Robert Boyd (@werezompire) September 15, 2014

All these seven-out-of-ten reviews for Destiny only make me want to play it more. — Rami Ismail (@tha_rami) September 16, 2014

People tried to hack my personal accounts last night. I gave 6 years to illuminating the best parts of video games and this is what I get. — Chris Plante (@plante) September 18, 2014

Oh, And This Other Stuff