When Gabriel told me the story, it was at once completely silly and eminently sensible. It reminded me a little of The Mancraft Saga, insofar as they both map cyberverse and regular ‘verse at a one to one ratio.

Videogames are definitely simulations and not “real” in terms of being constructed out of the typical materials we surround ourselves with. But the virtual worlds and the people that populate them still bear all our human metadata; our brains are ridiculously compatible with these places. Maybe it’s not weird at all that they can do that. I’m not a brain person. I guess most of the things we make in there resemble conceivable space. It’s a hell of a trick, though.

Playing games online via the kind of Internet you get on an airplane is typically a non-starter, but you can do okay with some card games - and I ended up playing Duelyst for probably four straight hours. I’m officially obsessed with it, so obsessed that I sicced the business guys on them so that we can try and do some kind of a project together. I’m lucky that I don’t have to send them out just to keep the lights on; I can send them out to make treaties with Houses that I legitimately respect and want to work with. We’ll see what happens with that, hopefully something, but if I’m gonna talk about the game as much as I want to I feel like that sort of has to be on the table.

I’m not a competitive person as I have said a thousand times in this space. I make a point generally to emphasize that I am not good at games, nor am I compelled to dominate others, so that multiple senses of the word are enunciated. Gears was an exception, in that the slower pace and legitimately horrifying death animations compelled me to great feats. In Duelyst, making a TCG less abstract and more spatial allows me to conceive of the higher order strategies at all. I got in late in January, but made it up to rank 14 before they started the next Season, which is so unlike my normal usage pattern that I’m trying to figure out what’s happening here. I usually wash out as soon as it gets mean, when you crack 22 or so. And I did stall there, like I always do. Usually I can’t accept that I’ve learned the game incorrectly and everything I think about it is wrong and stupid. But not this time.

(CW)TB out.