![]() That said, there do remain some rays of light amidst all this heat. I’ve made a job out of analyzing old games, and even I sometimes want to say, “Dude, they’re just old games! Really, truly, they’re not worth getting so worked up over.” What an odd thing to construct a public persona around. As far as I know, there’s zero street cred to be gained in the wider culture from being good at playing weird old videogames - or for that matter from being good at playing videogames of any stripe. For today I will just say that, even aside from their ugliness, I find such sentiments strange. Just why so many angry, intolerant personalities are so attracted to computer games is a fascinating question, but must remain a question for another day. This rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion is all too symptomatic of the uglier sides of gaming culture. ![]() Some of what I’ve written here over the years has certainly generated its share of heat as well as light, not so much among those of you who are regular readers and commenters - you remain the most polite, thoughtful, insightful, and just plain nice readers any writer could hope to have - as among the ones who fire off nasty emails from anonymous addresses, who post screeds on less polite sites to which I’m occasionally pointed, or who offer up their drive-by comments right here every once in a while.Ī common theme of these responses is that I’m not worthy of writing about this stuff, whether because I wasn’t there at the time - actually, I was, but whatever - or because I’m just not man enough to take my lumps and power through the really evil, unfair games. Still, one thing my years as a digital antiquarian have taught me is that you tread on people’s nostalgia at your peril. I like to think that this approach has made my blog a uniquely enlightening window into gaming history. From the beginning of this project, I’ve worked to remove the nostalgia factor from my writing about old games, to evaluate each game strictly on its own merits and demerits.
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