Half-Life: Blue Shift
developed by Gearbox Software (Plano, TX)
first published June 12, 2001 by Sierra Studios, for Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT, $29.95 [original site]
~290 MB (+ 40 MB of Half-Life)

Played to completion in 4 hours, 1/2/15—1/3/15

[Here’s a video of a complete 2-hour playthrough]
[And here’s the 2-minute official trailer]

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Yes, here we are back in Half-Life yet again. And there’s quite a bit more Half-Life to come, because I bought it all at the same time.

Here are the notations I made:

It’s a fine line between doing the same old stuff over and over (Take the tram! Turn on the power at the generator! Teleport to the alien world!) because it has become generic (in the sense of forming a genre unto itself), a rewarding ritual like fairy tales with three wishes etc., and doing the same stuff over and over because we are making believe to be surprised each time, like grownups playing peekaboo: “Oh no, where’d you go? Oh, there you are!” I’m not sure which motivation is intended here. Am I supposed to feign not noticing that this is all old hat by now, or am I supposed to be taking my weekly communion at the altar of old hats? (I feel this same uncertainty at musicals all the time.) My experience in Blue Shift was that it was neither fish nor fowl: not a bedtime incantation, and not a novelty either. It was just something happening again.

The design was a tasteful, inoffensive monotony. Even fanfic can run out of enthusiasm eventually.

The original Half-Life has a music to it, like the best Disney rides do. Imagineering is actually a very old art, out of aristocratic entertainments: ballets and tableaux vivants and stuff like that. Not to mention paintings in series, altarpieces and so forth. The arts of theater transposed. Half-Life has that: hall gives way to elevator shaft to control room to fan vent to garage to desert canyon with a confident, inescapably theatrical rhythm. Opposing Force is a little scrappier but still applies itself to that art. Blue Shift has all the same elements in a limp, danceless arrangement.

Or have I just gotten used to the state of the art, in that respect, and become impatient for more and better? I say no. That’s a dangerous supposition, in fact, because it’s what makes designers get off track and fix what ain’t broke. No, the original game still works, isn’t dated. It bears replaying. (If you don’t believe me, just ask Youtube!) Like I said, its writerly attention to dramaturgy was its greatest asset.

The almost purely architectural version of audience manipulation found in computer games is something that even Disneyland doesn’t take to this level. Could you build one in real life, a dramatic experience to be walked through? Haunted houses purport to be that, but the walking itself doesn’t generally have any discovery in it. Over Christmas I was taken to see Longwood Gardens outside Philadelphia, and our walk through the fantastical conservatory structure there, strictly prescribed at high-traffic times by cordons and so forth, was about as computer-game-y an architectural experience as any. All they’d have to do to really bring it to the level of first-person drama (besides adding a story and all that) would be add places where you had to look around until you realized you had to crawl through the ventilation shaft. It’s feasible.

The question of dramaturgy in any interactive medium is interesting; in particular, how do you deliver good pacing when the user’s personality and skill level are going to determine the rate of progress? My gut tells me that drama mostly scales — a good story arc over 10 minutes will also be a good story arc over 10 hours as long as the proportions remain the same. And in games that call on a consistent skill set (or just a consistent user stance toward the material), this tends to work out — a part of the game that takes a fast player 10% of his/her total time will probably take a slow player 10% of his/her total time too. I made a graph to convince myself:

Thanks for the nice colors, Google Docs. The successive regions in each row are the 19 chapters of Half-Life (the game is continuous but every now and then a chapter title appears briefly onscreen) as percentage of playtime for me (top row) and 11 playthroughs I found on youtube, arranged from slow to fast. The very first and last chapters are fixed at 6 and 2 minutes respectively for everyone, so you can imagine the scaling from that.

My takeaway is: yeah, mostly the proportions are the same, so you can see how the dramaturgy could basically hold up. But it also shows the extent of variation, which is not insignificant. And apart from me, these are all self-selected “hey watch me play” Youtube fellows. Other personality types might have different issues and show more drastic variation; you may notice that my row is an outlier here in several respects. In retrospect I think the drama would have been even more satisfying had I been closer to the average pacing seen here. But of course that’s not something a first-time player can aspire to. Most of these other guys are playing through an old favorite for the Nth time. (Though not all of them.)

I’d be interested to see charts like this of, say, the scenes in multiple productions of the same play. Or times for chapters in multiple readers’ experiences of the same novel. I bet you’d see slightly better consistency.

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Regarding first-time playing, I do have a criticism of this genre generally: by making ammunition a limited resource that is tracked onscreen and must be replenished after use, the game insists that management of ammo is a satisfying activity for the player to make a part of the fantasy. But while doing this on a second-time playthrough can be based on strategy (e.g. “I know that I won’t get any new grenades for a long time, so I’ll make sure to save this one for use on that sniper who’s coming up two rooms from now”), on the first-time playthrough it can only be based on hunches about the level design (“Well, the game seems to keep giving me plenty of shotgun shells and this area doesn’t seem to be really too focussed on combat, so I probably won’t regret using as many as I need on the two aliens that just showed up.”) This kind of speculation, besides forcing the first-time player to keep guessing about completely boring facts that second-time players will just know (i.e. when’s the next time I’ll be given ammo?), is also bad because it can only be thought about by stepping out of character, since the character would have no grounds for imagining that he’d ever get any more ammo, even after it had miraculously happened 10 times. Even on the game story’s terms, it’s miraculous. In a real scenario, even a comic-book one, there would not be ammunition lying around on shelves in every single storage closet in this lab. It’s absurd. And yet all this ammunition is necessary for the format of the gameplay, which I accept. I understand there’s a problem here. I’m saying it’s not satisfactorily solved, or at least hadn’t been by 1998/2001. And I’m not aware of any new progress on this front. Is there any?

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Computer games have always clearly been systemic, rule-based/model-based games with only some thin veneer of story applied to the surface. Half-Life‘s strength was the grace and sensitivity of its handling of that veneer, to the point where it felt like the balance tipped: maybe the story actually comes first! (Behind the scenes, it didn’t. But they disguised that fact better than anyone had before.) But that new illusion was still very precarious. Further artistic exploration was needed to build a really sturdy mode of expression here. As far as I know that exploration is still underway. Blue Shift is so unambitious on that front that it actually backslides a bit. Yes, there are scenes and surprises, but they’re not arranged with much flair. I’m in this for the flair!

In the original game, the scenario was meant to be witty, tongue slightly in cheek. The whole vast sprawling underground government laboratory bunker fantasy was deliberately exaggerated, starting from a comic-book norm and then multiplying it by X. Like the enormousness of the Star Destroyer that goes overhead in the first shot of Star Wars. In 1977 that offered the grinning thrill of overkill. But you know how things always go: along come the sequels, tasked with expanding respectfully on what was once lighthearted, so they have to stop being lighthearted. By the time Mel Brooks did a parody of the same shot 10 years later by making it even longer, he and George Lucas and everyone else had forgotten that that had already been the idea! Nothing like a follow-up to drain the humor out of light fantasy. Just ask Bilbo.

So that’s what happens here. The Black Mesa Incident is now something serious. Even the scientist’s voice is no longer Dr. Frink-ish “funny scientist voice.” It’s just some guy spouting too much sci-fi blahblah like it’s supposed to be really interesting. The charm had been that we easily got the whole scenario without anyone having to say a word, or too many words anyway: well of course they discovered teleportation to another world and well of course they had been experimenting recklessly with it. But in later installments, without any new ideas, all that’s left is to belabor what had once been breezy. Just ask Harry Potter.

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Key staff at Gearbox seems to have been essentially the same as last time: Randy Pitchford, Brian Martel, Stephen Bahl, Rob Heironomous, David Mertz. But the scope of the project was different — these levels had been initially designed not as an add-on, but as bonus content for the Sega Dreamcast port of the game. Then when that was canceled, they were repurposed as this product, marketed as though it were something parallel to Opposing Force, even though it’s significantly less than that, and the design team must surely have recognized as much.

The publisher knew to lower the price $10, but $29.95 still seems like a lot. It only took me 4 hours, and I’m slow. It’s never terrible, but it doesn’t really feel like a whole game and it has more infelicities than what came before, places where I got stuck because things weren’t quite as elegant as the standard I had come to expect. Still not bad for the $0.94 I paid.

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The fourth item in the “Half Life 1 Anthology” that I bought on 1/1/11 was Team Fortress Classic. This is a pure multiplayer game and I’m scared to play such a thing. In theory I like the idea of multiplayer 3D running-around-and-shooting-each-other games, but I am a shy sort and scared of putting myself out there to be shot at by kids who have been playing these games every day for their whole lives. In my very limited experience playing such games, I am not a natural and tend to make lots of silly mistakes. I would really only enjoy myself paired with similarly unskilled and similarly meek people, and my social anxieties tell me that that will not be easily arranged on a public server. Especially not one for a 16-year-old game that at this point is only played by diehards. So I’m skipping it for now, not out of disinterest but out of fear, to which I am here owning up. I will address future multiplayer games on my list as they arise.

By the way, each of these three Half-Life games so far also had multiplayer options. I didn’t even touch them. I’m okay with that.

If you want to count Team Fortress Classic as a completely wasted purchase, a non-purchase, then I guess each of the THREE games I got in the “Half-Life 1 Anthology” actually cost me $1.24, not $0.94. I’m comfortable with that price, too. So far this has all been basically good stuff.

Half-Life: Opposing Force
developed by Gearbox Software (Plano, TX)
first published November 19, 1999 by Sierra Studios, as an add-on to Half-Life (1998), $39.95 [original site]
~270 MB (+ 40 MB of Half-Life)

Played to completion in 8.5 hours, 12/30/14 — 12/31/14.

[Here’s a video of a complete 3-hour playthrough in two parts.]
[More feasibly for the casual reader: here’s the 1 minute official trailer.]

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This is the second item in the “Half Life 1 Anthology” purchase from 1/1/11: an “expansion” for Half-Life, released exactly a year later. I have never known what to think of expansion packs and add-ons and the like. In fact I don’t know what to make of spin-offs, tie-ins, and secondary merchandise generally. Such products always have that air of cynicism, greed, insincerity about them. It’s probably because one can so effortlessly imagine the cigar-chomping business calculations from which they spawn, whereas original works tend to have mistier, less easily imagined origins. But of course all those images are equally unfounded; earnest artists are just as prone as greedy executives to return over and over to the same well. And there’s really nothing wrong with cigar-chomping anyway. Good art can come out of cold greed. There just needs to be an inspired artist somewhere in between, to do a conscientious conversion of the one into the other.

Expansion packs for computer games say “Hey customer: you want new milk from your old cow? Coincidentally we do too! Let’s see if we can reach an agreement: you pay us a nominal fee and we give you nominal content. We can’t promise you much, but at the very least it will be enough to give you Christmas Morning Feeling™: you’ll get to open a box and reenact your brand loyalty. Sound good? Requires Old Cow!”

(This is actually less offensive than Hollywood sequelism, which is the same deal but far less candid about the terms. e.g. “THIS OCTOBER: THE EPIC CONCLUSION TO THE EPIC HEPTAKAIDECALOGY! THE HOBBIT CHRONICLES 17: IT ALL. COMES. DOWN. TO. THIS.”)

(Who’d ever have known was a “kai” in “heptakaideca-“? Wikipedia is who.)

In the case of Opposing Force, the fee was not in fact nominal — 80% of the price of the original game — because the content is not nominal. This is basically a whole game unto itself, at least in form, quantity and level of care. On the other hand it is deliberately derivative, bearing a kind of Back to the Future Part 2-style relation to the original, overtly spying on it and imitating it.

This is extension-by-abstraction, where the sequel generates newness not by marching forward carrying the same torch but by stepping back and knowing what has gone before. That knowing (naming, referring, owning, rationalizing) is necessarily new, because a thing-itself is never yet knowledge of itself. It’s also the timid way forward. But timidity is obligatory if you want to maintain “respect” for the original — that kind of respect is based on giving it authority over you. Like that guy on the Harry Potter reference site said that I quoted here a long time ago: “How can it be canon if I’m the source?” That’s right, it can’t be. Because that’s the essential meaning of “canon”: something that is good because it came from a higher authority than you.

Opposing Force is an extension farmed out to a different developer, who have here done absolutely everything they could — new characters, new weapons, new monsters, new locations, new puzzle ideas, new music, new story — without ever challenging the utter authority of the original to determine absolutely everything important about the experience. I have to respect that — really, how could they do otherwise? — but it ends up feeling like all that considerable creative energy and skill was needlessly constrained. It’s fanfic that’s as good as fanfic can be, which can only leave one bemoaning the fact that it had to be fanfic at all.

Fanfic and franchise work is always defined by that knowing that is its only edge over the original. It has a better rational grasp on the matter at hand, a worse irrational grasp. That means that things get ever more streamlined and ingenious, and the dream on offer gets less and less right, less resonant. So too the audience must adjust its interests toward the rational, and more and more appreciate the work rather than the experience. Opposing Force was so impressively well done. That’s very different from being valuable.

A “brand” is exactly the rationalization of the unrationalizable. This is why talk of “brands,” and their deliberate manipulation, always seems so suspect: the thing they’re claiming to know all about and have well in hand is not properly knowable or graspable. But this suspicion, again, usually ends up being unfair to cigar-chompers. It’s not that the effort to grasp the ungraspable must be a front for malice and oppression; it’s usually quite sincere and, in the abstract, benevolent: “let’s get better and more efficient at giving people what they want and need.” It’s just that it’s futile. Only the heart can feel what heart is.

This game probably had harder and more interesting combat, for those who are interested in such things. It is more condensed and thus faster-paced than the original, for those who are interested in such things.

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The in-game credits imitate the Half-Life credits exactly and don’t give anyone’s roles, but they appear in the manual. The most important few figures seem to be:

Randy Pitchford (Production/Direction/Level Design/Writing)
Rob Heironomous (Lead Level Designer/Writing/Sound Effects)
David Mertz (Level Design/Writing)
Brian Martel (Art Direction)
Stephen Bahl (Music/Sound Effects/Art)

Plus about 10 others.

Half-Life
developed by Valve Software (Kirkland, WA)
first published November 19, 1998 by Sierra Studios for Windows 95/98/NT, $49.95 [original site]
~500 MB (~40 MB program, ~460 MB resources.)

Played to completion in 17.5 hours, between 12/18/14 and 12/29/14.

[Here’s video of a complete 6-hour playthrough in two parts. I played with the “HD” upgrade from 2001, this guy does not, so his characters and weapons look a little clunkier than what I saw, but otherwise the game is identical.]

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I bought this exactly 4 years ago today, on 1/1/11. It was in a bundle with three other games for $3.74, so that’s $0.94 I paid for it. Approximately $0.05 per hour of play. Good deal.

I am here going slightly out of order of purchase: on 11/28/10 I bought “The Orange Box” on sale because I wanted to check out Portal (which I did immediately and thus have no need to revisit for my current purposes). The bundle included the much-praised Half-Life 2 and its two episodic follow-ups; I figured I’d eventually play those. Then on 1/1/11 Steam put “Half-Life 1 Anthology” on sale, so I bought it because of course I’d want to have the option of playing the equally much-praised “1” before “2.” And so that’s what I’ve done now, even though I bought them in reverse order. Even my OCD approves.

Nice thing about writing up games is that they take so long to play and are so readily paused that taking notes during the process is quite natural. Not like having to steal glances down at your notepad in the dark during a movie. So I have a bunch of notes here already, and I think once typed up, my entry can be done. I hope this can be my basic procedure with these game entries. i.e. LET’S KEEP THIS EASY, BROOM.

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It’s bullet time.

• In the game, what are you doing is what’s happening to you, what’s happening to you is what you’re doing. Your actions both determine and are determined by the show you’re watching. They are it and it is them. Half-Life gives us free will as an on-rails experience, agency as a dark ride. Freedom to go anywhere, look at anything, shoot anybody, is subject to, and dependent on, continuous chaperoning by the universe. Every situation cues you to act freely in a predetermined way. Every ventilation shaft into which you must sneak contains your free choice to sneak into it. Active is passive; they are identical.

This is healthy. Videogame theorists and designers talk about the ideal of freedom, pure and unfettered freedom, but the experience of freedom in the real world is indistinguishable from the experience of fate. Games that attempt programmatic freedom run up against a philosophical point that is highly nuanced in the real world but like a brick wall in games: subjective freedom is not determined by objective freedom.

“Non-linearity” does not exist; life experience is linear. We tread a single path, in a single direction. The celebrated tram ride intro encapsulates this central grace of the game; this is why it is so celebrated. You are trapped in a tram and free; free to be trapped in a tram. Being able to move and look around during a staged dramatic sequence “in-engine” is more than just technical showmanship: it is the crux of the experience games have to offer. Just as with Pirates of the Carribean: you determine your own experience as long as it takes place within this boat, whose path is fixed. The special pleasure of Disneyland, as of Half-Life, arises from that equation of opposites, of agency with fate, of acting with being acted upon. This is the existential condition. Merrily merrily merrily merrily.

• First and foremost what is successful here is the writing. Not because the writing is remarkable as story or dialogue — it’s all quite gleefully, cheekily cliché — but because it is a singularly apt scenario for the underlying m.o. of all first-person shooters. This is good writing defined as good congruence with form, writing that lives in (lives the essence of) its medium. The scenario allows us to feel more wholly what we would already have been feeling below the surface.

• That is to say, this game is a thing of beauty because what it is IS what it is. Its realization of its own poetics, its Bachelardian underpinnings, is so sure and pure. The rest is window dressing. I was thoroughly entranced by it despite caring generally not at all for its constituent elements. Gross aliens, gore, weaponry, gunplay, military action. It didn’t matter that none of that is for me. I don’t like Pirates of the Caribbean because I like pirates. Rather the reverse, I’d say.

• Despite the considerable element of horror, revulsion, and tension, I found to my surprise that long sessions of play tended to clear rather than rattle my head. Fantasy, I think, is distinctly healthy for the mind. I used to think only gentle or mottled fantasy was wholesome, and extreme and pure fantasy was dangerous or embarrassing, but that was only a measure of my personal anxiety, which is to say my ideology of what kinds of repression were good and right and important.

Fantasy is healthy because it is inevitable. Repression doesn’t actually alienate us from our imagination, it just presses and molds it until its fantasies resemble reality as best we can manage it. But for all that they are still fantasies, governed by the same laws of irrationality. Occupation with overt fantasy, computer games and whatnot, is healthy because your mind is going to indulge in fantasies whether you like it or not, so better to have them freely and know them for what they are, rather than confuse them with real life, where they can actually do damage. Games and movies are useful to me because they absorb all my obsessive image-making power, vacuuming all those ectoplasmic images from out of the tangles of my life where they have lodged. At least temporarily.

“Escapism” as a pejorative is a destructive misnomer. I knew this as a child and now I know it again. The mind is always half-occupied with images that stand apart from the senses. Constantly forcing them into pseudo-compliance is far more destructive a form of denial than is clear-eyed interest in their natural dream content.

• First-person games are deeply dreamlike, which is to say psychologically apt. I have had many dreams in which I floatwalk through architecture that streams outward into my peripheral vision like toilet paper spinning wildly off the roll.

• Games in three-dimensional space are always principally the experience of that space, architectural experience. This experience can be very deep even when something shallow is happening in the game proper. All fantasy games have mysterious sanctums, rooms with candles, low lights, meditative, incensed spaces. This space is there to provide exactly the same fantastic welcome to the imagination that real people seek when they set up real candles. In fantasy, the values of imagined space and real space overlap, because all space is to some degree imagined. Game spaces do the very thing that real spaces do, serve the same human function.

• Of course, one must also have faith in the real world, faith that it can be just as gratifying, that candles and warmth also have a sensory reality. Otherwise one is a nerd, which is to say a fatalist about the possibility of ever living out the irrational in the world of the senses. There is such a thing as the lived irrational, not just the imagined irrational. It is a thing worth striving for.

• Half-Life is “The greatest FPS of all time” etc., and, for all I know, I concur, as above. But it is only what happens to exist, not an ideal realized. The dreams of spooling scenery are my good ones, but I also have dreams of constantly renewed skirmishes with hostility that comes skittering out of corners, of an existence that is an unending thread of necessary strategy: where to go next, how to defend next, what to fight next, what to avoid next. And dreams where the world mutates, where things are not attached right, where disgust creeps out through the walls and faces and bodies. The game is these dreams too.

• Close to the heart of the game is the alienation of all institutional lobbies, loading bays, steam tunnels, etc., etc. Why do movies always have shootouts in parking garages? This is not an arbitrary location! The production designer in my dreams agrees. Here is a hospital hallway that links to another hospital hallway that links to another: fight for your freedom. There’s a cultural/societal critique of the psychological role of institutions to be made here but I’m not tempted to go any further than this.

• At the end of all those laboratory hallways full of Giger creatures, in the inevitable inner sanctum, the final boss is a enormous mournful horror fetus floating serenely as a god in a horror womb in a dream dimension. This is apt to the logic of dream but I personally didn’t ask for it, just like I didn’t ask for all the preceding grossness. Becoming acclimated to nightmares-as-nightmares is impossible because they cease to be nightmares; then again neither is full unacclimated horror an option for entertainment. One must lose either the function or the ease, and thus the satisfaction in either case. The satisfaction on offer is the satisfaction of repression, which the game enacts ballistically. Hurl all the explosives you’ve got at the horror. The greater your facility at repression, the less frantic and more levelheaded your hurling, the greater your success on the game terms. This is not healthy. So there is a very rough price for me built into this particular fantasy.

However, for me, who is not personally at odds with any flesh or fetus, the real enemy is this price itself. So I win my personal game by playing exactly and only as it interests me, and not being bound by the implicit shaming of Easy vs. Hard mode (I played on Easy), flailing vs. skill (I quicksaved and reloaded every few seconds when there were enemies), fear vs. machismo (I was constantly scared by a game not generally considered to be in the horror genre).

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• This game is so incredibly beloved that it was completely reconstructed and touched up by fans in a more sophisticated 3D engine, to meet lavish modern graphical standards. Black Mesa, i.e. Half-Life as rebuilt in 2012, would seem then just to be a technological fleshing out of the same game. But it’s not at all. The dream-meaning of all those spaces is bound up in their limitations, their being built with wit and showmanship out of a fixed vocabulary of primitive planes and nodes. The mind-clearing quality of the 1998 game is not available to me from the 2012 game. The new space is so much less forthright, claims to know so much more than it does.

An elaborate “skin” is an anxious thing, a bigger kind of lie than the old puppet show. When the buttons are just blurry allusions to buttons, I know very well what they are and why they don’t work. A richly detailed texture on the other hand is more of a conspiratorial deceit, more of a Truman Show. The new claustrophobia preens and leers needily, where the old one was composed, sphinxlike. A sphinx is scarier company than a con-man but less anxiety-inducing. I know well which I prefer, but I’m at odds with the culture.

Comparison video.

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• Here are two interesting articles and one video from behind the scenes. Humanizing computer games is as strange and fascinating as humanizing animated films. The experience is so completely a product of the imagination; even the technical side is its own kind of grand fantasy. The experience of this game has less than nothing to do with Kirkland, WA.

The opening credits are simply an alphabetical list of 30 names with no roles specified; the end credits are “Valve is”… and then the same list of 30 names. This is honest to a point: a computer game is a profoundly collaborative vision. But it’s also a sort of principled evasion. I poked around and determined that the principal real credits ought to be something like:

Produced by Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington
Designed by Ken Birdwell (animation system), Mark Laidlaw (writing), Jay Stelly (3D engine), John Guthrie (level design), Kelly Bailey (sound and music), Ted Backman (art). With about 15 others, but I suspect that this is the “original cabal” mentioned in Birdwell’s article linked above.

The last computer game I bought on a physical disc in a physical box was Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb, in 2003 ($29.99? $39.99?). The first computer game I bought as a discless boxless purely digital download was Braid, in late 2009 ($9.99). Thus began the new era.

Starting at the very end of 2010, beginning of 2011 — i.e. exactly 4 years ago — I began acquiring a lot of such discless, boxless games. The retailing of these infinitely reproducible substanceless goods has become a constant parade of brief and incredibly drastic discount sales. While a clock ticks down the hours, a year-old game (or a “bundled” collection of games) might well be available for 90% off the list price. Often the discount is hard even to fathom as a discount; it’s simply, e.g.,”$1.49.” That is, very very very cheap. Impulse-buy cheap.

Between such sales on Steam, the “pay-what-you-want” charity bundles from Humble Bundle, and the various promotional freebies and deals at GOG, I have, since Braid in 2009, amassed a collection of (according to my spreadsheet) 197 games. Yes. 197.

The outrageousness of this number is in great part due to the bundles, many of which have contained eight or more games (for which I have generally paid about $5 total). Nonetheless I have to take responsibility for it. I have personally and with full knowledge bought this many games.

Of these games I have played 36 to completion. Another 18 I have at least sampled. The remaining 143 I have not touched at all. 143 games!

And still these sales keep coming, and every time I’m tempted. “Hey, of this new batch of eight games, there’s one that I have genuinely wanted to play, and another one I’m at least curious about. I’ve never heard of the rest of these. Pay what I want, eh? I guess that’s worth… $3, sure.” The logic sounds good. But acquiring more meaningless possessions does not. I feel queasy about adding to those 143 games no matter the price. 143 is a lot.

Part of the deal we make when we replace physical possessions with digital ones is supposed to be that we will still get think of them as possessions, with all that that entails. But that’s not always how it works. I’m not comfortable with how easy it is for the data to pile up into infinity without the hoard ever even slightly creaking my floorboards. Limits are reassuring where infinity is not. In the digital age it has become our responsibility to be our own reassurance.

So I have decided that to ease my conscience and reassure myself, I am going to get around to it and start playing my pile of games, dammit. At least give them each a fair shot. And as this website has been my checklist and notepad for all things checkable and listable and notable and paddable, so it shall be for this too.

The idea is to be brief about it.

Right now the plan is to proceed through the games I’ve never played (and the ones I’ve only sampled briefly) in the order I bought them. Well, all the single-player ones, anyway. Multiplayer is another kettle of fish. We’ll see about that.

The notes I am passing to myself here are just my sort of checks for my sort of checklist, and are not necessarily tailored to explicate or present these games to a general audience. If you find yourself needing to know more about these computer games, it would of course be my pleasure to respond to your inquiries. It will be the internet’s pleasure too, I’m sure.