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Not Good Enough

Just over eight months ago, at the end of April 2020, I wrote the “I’m back guys” part 2 to the post from August 2019. I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go with my first substantive new post. I saw a really bad take on gaming on Twitter and thought I might take the bait. Why not?

This is not that post. I mulled it over for a couple weeks, wrote a rough draft in the middle of May 2020, and then a murder in Minnesota changed the entire media and psychological landscape of the parts of the world I live in. It just didn’t feel right to be on my usual bullshit. I know that what happened was not new. That’s kind of the point. The uprising that followed, though, felt different than the last several times that the news blew up over a person killed by police. It was different in ways that I didn’t feel I could adequately describe in detail. I didn’t want to write something I would be cringing at in a matter of only days or weeks, so I didn’t write.

Then, in June of 2020, I started writing another post. More random internet dude’s musings about whatever he calls “philosophy.” Maybe I could parse out the highly intellectual nuances of why it’s morally good to stand up TO Nazis but not stand up FOR Nazis even if both things involve doing actions and saying words… tHe SaMe ThInG, amirite? Surely there was definitely a shortage of that kind of content online as the pandemic proceeded to give more and more people more and more time on their hands. Maybe I should get into podcasting now too?

Yeah. This is not that post either. It should come as no surprise that I rattled off another draft and never posted it, nor did I even record a scrap of audio. Deep dive into several old games I use as comfort food for my brain? Yep. Another Skyrim playthrough? Yes, definitely siding against the would-be revolutionaries wearing furry horned hats this time (it’s a bad look for 2021). More exploding internet spaceships? Definitely did lots of that in the second half of 2020. Casual space piracy doesn’t have as much of a “be a part of something bigger thank yourself” angle as participating in the larger scale campaigns waged in  sov-null space but it’s fun. I did play some new vidya games that were kind of cool, participated in some TTRPG online, but on the most part I did what most people did in 2020 – sat around staring at the screen, waiting for the world to restart so we could all get back to living again.

Person sitting at a computer
Ready for another day at work, job interview, night at the pub, board game party, or social event? Never before has this stock image been so versatile!

Every day, several times a day, I thought about writing a new post. Every time I thought about it, I could not even bring myself to open the site in my browser. Nothing I could possibly post would ever come close to being good enough that anyone (outside my closest social and family circles) would want to read it. Isn’t everyone’s mental and emotional fatigue at a high enough level already? And after all this time – almost a year and a half since any kind of regular activity! If I was going to quit this project, the least I could have done was announce it in a timely manner. Right?

Well, like so many things that I should have already had done long ago, I never got to either getting it done or deciding not to quit. I still wear my wannabe brand on my Twitter account and a few other places. It’s not going to just go away by itself. I’ve either got to pack it up, or get back into it starting with some new header images (on Facebook and Twitter) for a new era. If the latter, then I am going to have to accept that nothing I can write will ever be “good enough” for me not to feel like I tried and failed to show that I can create something worthwhile on the internet using words. I continue to find it very difficult to do that.

I can, however, rest a little bit tonight easier knowing that if any of my recent hot takes on Twitter are leading anyone to check out this website there will at least be an explanation for the lack of promised content and the regular behinds-the-scenes security updates are all caught up now. It’s not good enough, but it’s more than nothing.

Anno Quo Est?

I, the Draugr of the forgotten crypt, am slowly starting to move after collecting dust for several centuries. What year is it? What form of life disturbs my slumber after all this time? Cultists seeking a hideout? Bandits looking to rob an ancient grave? Oh, they’re going to find that the dead sometimes do fight back. Here it comes… wait, did it just unhinge its jaw and consume nine raw rabbit legs, a dozen carrots, a casks’ worth of potato soup, and two sweet rolls? By the nine! After all these centuries, my final doom has arrived. It is the Dovahkin, and it is purging the land of threats like the undead because it needs more money to pay for sawn logs and quarried stone to build its house.

OK, so I wrote the “I’m back” post about eight months ago and then, as I tried to swear not to, disappeared again right after that. I know that most of the people reading this will have some kind of opinion on why it’s not good or fair to judge myself based on completely arbitrary standard of “productivity” when it comes to writing these posts. These people are not wrong to question that, nor do I lack appreciation for what they seek to do for me as a person. However, that doesn’t inspire me to feel like this project of mine is any more alive than the dusty skeletons in my favourite fantasy games.

I tried, and failed, to restart my regular writing schedule in August of last year. I just could not find the time. It was that any time I could find for gaming; it was that it all got sucked into the playing rather than the writing about the play. Using games to temporarily escape the nearly intolerable levels of stress and anxiety from “the real world” lent itself better to starting a new run of Skyrim than it did writing blog posts about anything.

Hey Bosmer, are you ready to make Skyrim great again?

So what now? The world has always been changing, but we now find ourselves in a whole lot more change than we did in the fall of 2019 and early 2020. Whatever standards for “productivity” I should or should not have adhered to are now relics of a bygone era. But now something stirs in my tomb of escapism which can’t be ignored: the need to find a new way of being because the old way is gone. Just as the reanimated Draugr can’t simply ignore the would-be demigod in its midst, I can’t simply embrace the reasonable advice and normal impulses to give myself a break. Not to say I shouldn’t do that, but clearly that’s not the whole of what is needed.

In this excellent and timely video, Dr. Ali Mattu encourages us (at about 19:29 in the video, but please do watch the whole thing) to start with solving our immediate problems. Sure, it sounds trite and he immediately acknowledges that, but he goes on to offer more about how to go about it and makes a good case for it. One of my immediate problems is that in the period between my last post and right now as I write this, I have thought a lot about having promised and not delivered. Some days have been better than others when it comes to how much I have dwelled on the thought and/or how much negativity I was feeling when I did think about it. But even on the best day, the fact still remained that I had declared an intention to write more posts and I was not writing more posts.

Announcing an end to the blog would, in some ways, solve the problem of being unable to stop thinking about the facts about where I left off. This does not, however, seem like a good solution because there are good reasons to have a creative outlet. Formally closing one up without redirecting energy to something else doesn’t seem any more effective at making my life better than having a creative outlet on the shelf, ready to be used when I get around to it which seems like it will be never.

To tackle the problem all at once, I’d be writing something I could be proud of. Something with insight, something engaging, something that fills a need in myself and others, something that makes everyone forget how long it has been. That’s really hard to do if I am not carried to the right head space by inspiration. And so it makes it harder to log in and bash keys if I know it’s not going to be worthwhile.

Rebuilding the Temple of the Mythic Dawn in Starbound was a project of relatively tiny scale compared to other things I could have been doing, but perhaps it was a better project than trying to outdo the more ambitious builds with something I might not have been satisfied with. And yes, it is free and open to all citizens of the Protectorate.

So, in the spirit of solving an immediate problem, I am publishing this post despite the fact that it’s another self-indulgent ramble instead of the content I wish I was making. Like my recent last-minute entry into the official Starbound subreddit’s “museum” build of the week contest, I’m not going to try to write something grand today. I’m just going to throw this out there. I will be able to say that I logged in. I will be able to say that I wrote words. I will be able to say that I hit the publish button. That might not be very much, but maybe it will be enough for today.

The Six Months Hoist

It was just about eighteen years ago when I was a member of a youth parliament and we were to debate a contentious piece of legislation. It was not a hot-button issue or related to the events of the time. It was the internal bylaw which defined the age limits for the membership of the parliament. During this debate I could see that emotions were running high. I believed that the proposed changes were the right thing to do, but could also see that it was not going to be helpful to be more forceful in words. Perhaps there was some kind of procedural trick we could employ to end the debate for the moment, depressurize our emotions before resuming, but not defeat the bill and risk sending the message that the changes were not a good idea.

Aha! Right there in the standing orders: the six months hoist. We can take a little while to cool down and then move on to pass the bill, right? Wrong. Due to the way the Westminster system works, when a session of parliament ends all bills not passed are basically tossed in the bin. Being that our sessions lasted for one week per year, to move to adopt a six-month pause in one of our debates was to, essentially, pick up a pen and introduce a motion never to discuss it again. Or at least until a similar bill is drafted from square one, now with the baggage of having been recently voted down in its previous form. The pause button I was looking for simply did not exist.

The big change, if you are curious, was to define the age range to be 15-21 instead of 15-20 with an extra year available only to a 20-year-old who wins election to one of the four top leadership positions. It was the right thing to do at the time. It eventually happened, though too late for me. But that’s not the point of the anecdote.

On second thought, let’s not go to parliament. It is a silly place.

So why do I bring it up at the beginning of the eighth month of 2019, when my most recent post was close to the start of the second month of the same year? Because it was never my intention to disappear entirely. I had intended to follow up with the conclusion of the short D&D adventure I was running at the time before running more Full Steam Ahead. But one week turned into two, one month into two, and every week that I failed to post, the worse I felt about getting down to writing anything or even logging in to see if there was a comment to approve, an update to install, or traffic numbers to look at.

And so while I never got around to announcing the start of it, I am here to announce that my six months hoist is now complete. I have been running more D&D adventures that I will be unpacking in this space. There is more Full Steam Ahead in the hopper. I am getting into some other projects that are kind-of gaming-adjacent, and certainly things I can talk about from an intellectual perspective. I’ve been really getting into Don’t Starve Together despite my apparent inability to get my dedicated server up and running. I’m still alive and things are happening, but it’s going to take a few weeks for me to get into all of it.

This is not an apology. Saying sorry for not posting often enough is usually the last post on blogs that have been dormant for several years and counting. This is what trying to break out of a rut looks like. I started this project because I knew that going any further in writing and publishing starts with showing up, and so there is no time like the present to get up and get my head on straight.

December 23, 2013

Five years ago today I volunteered to drive a friend to her brother’s house, about two hours each way, so that she could spend Christmas with her family. When we got to the town we were headed to, before we found the house and went inside for tea I decided to ask her if she was interested in us being a couple. Today I am posting from where my wife and I are spending Christmas this year with her family.

For some people there are no special holidays at this time of year. Some of “the holidays” have already come and gone while other folks will be waiting another week or two for their holy days to arrive. For some, Christmas is a profoundly holy time while others are less moved by religion than by their love for the time of social and cultural celebration with loved ones. For some people this is a time of joy, for others it’s difficult. Whatever your tradition and/or disposition, it is my hope that every person reading this will find blessing in their own way as the wheel of the year completes another turn and the light begins to grow longer each day.

I’m back from holidays for a year-end post next Sunday where I will talk about some of the content you can expect to see in 2019.

Four Characteristics of a TTRPG

Picking up from two weeks ago, I had mentioned that the World of Darkness campaign I was playing in has gone on indefinite hiatus. I sat down for tea with the storyteller who was running that show to talk about what happened and why. I wanted to try and put some names to the thoughts and feelings we were having, and we came up with four characteristics of a tabletop RPG which separate the kind of game that our different players want to play. It’s not intended to analyze every aspect of the TTRPG experience, but to provide some language we can use when talking about being more intentional about choosing those games. The four we came up with were:

  1. Setting
  2. Agency
  3. Characters
  4. Decisions

Setting: It’s more than aesthetic preference. Some people just don’t care for playing pretend in medieval Japan and would much rather go to space. Some settings also lend themselves to differing levels of agency and characters: it’s not impossible to do survival horror in a high magic pseudo-Arthurian setting but it’s not easy to pull off. Likewise, heroic power fantasies are not often draped in the low light and cigarette smoke of a noir setting. The other thing to consider is how much absurdity vs. consistency people enjoy: Monty Python and The Holy Grail, or Lord of the Rings? Even if you love your friends, they might not be suitable players for that OSR dungeon crawl and that’s okay. I am here to say that it is okay to tell your friends that zombie apocalypse is not your jam.

Agency: One of the reasons I have a little bit of trouble with enjoying survival horror type games is that I love when my choices matter more in the fictional world than they seem to in the meatspace. It’s not enough that there seems to be a revived interest in the kind of thoughts Lovecraft had about race in the real world, now I have to pretend that ancient monsters are on an inexorable warpath to drive humans insane and kill us all? I’d much rather be a dashing rogue who at least tries to shoot Cthulhu in the face and keep his composure while doing it – and at least have an outside chance of being a little bit successful.

Characters: Robin Laws’ Player Types describe what kind of players come to the table. In my discussions with the storyteller from my most recent campaign, we decided that distinct from the player type, there are also character types that certain players tend to play while others like to mix it up with different types of characters even if they mostly represent the same player type. We identified the following:

  1. A fantasy version of the player themself as a whole person
  2. Pretending to be something the player wishes they could be, but aren’t
  3. Playing a part of the player’s personality, but magnified to become a defining trait rather than a smaller facet
  4. Taking a theme and running with it as a part of a carefully crafted narrative

Not all tabletop RPGs are very good at accommodating every single one of these, therefore it’s inadvisable for people who are itching to play a character integral to a big plot to go dungeon crawling. Discussing what you want to play with the DM/GM/Storyteller is a good idea and both parties should be willing to take “no” for an answer: whether that is accepting that a character concept is not suitable for the game that is being run, or declining to play that game. I have kept myself out of at least one campaign based on the fact that my two best ideas for characters were wildly incompatible with the type of game that was being run.

“And then Stanley chose the red door.” How choices are presented to players has a big impact on how much players will enjoy the game.

Decisions: What kind of choices are offered to players and how do their decisions affect the plot? We identified four distinct styles. Simply offering “good” and “bad” choices don’t make a game interesting. We know that good guys win, bad guys lose, England prevails is boring if not problematic. The simplest way to avoid this is to present situations where two good choices have different costs, or two bad choices offer different opportunities to mitigate the damage. Rather than “slay the dragon” it is “do we convince the dragon to go burn someone else’s town or do we use foul forbidden black magic to become powerful enough to destroy the dragon?” Of course, getting thrown two bad options with no third way or deus ex machina to fetch a “win” might frustrate some players. If the DM is excited to create that kind of dilemma then they need players who are into that sort of challenge.

The second style is to offer bad and worse choices, where the players cannot know which is which until after the consequences are set in stone. This is generally how it has gone in the horror type games I have played. This is especially frustrating to the power gamer sorts who love to win, but also to many other player types who are invested in their characters.

The third style is like a puzzle. There is a solution to be found that moves the plot forward and satisfies a win condition, and your job is to find that solution. This works well when players go into it with the right expectations. The trouble is when the player who loves this style goes into a game more like the second style described above and expects that there are answers to find and a correct way to do so. It just gets all the more frustrating when everything goes to hell.

The fourth style looks kind of like a fishbone diagram. There is a plot and it moves forward. Your choices affect the flavour of the outcome, but that outcome is assured. I have come to dislike the term “railroading” as it seems to get tossed around whenever a player’s zany idea gets a flat “no” from the storyteller/DM/GM. I generally don’t like games where it’s really someone else’s work of fiction but where I am given trivial decision-making power. I would much rather just enjoy a performance than have my input tacked onto the side of it if that’s what it is going to be. That I can derisively refer to as railroading. But unless the DM/GM/storyteller is VERY comfortable with improvisation, this style starts to emerge if things are going too far outside the expected narrative and I don’t mind a little bit of this if it is done responsibly.

So we’ve got all this descriptive stuff, how does this help me choose a TTRPG?

Looking at this from my own perspective as a player, I can do most types of setting except for the bleakest of the post-apocalyptic, generally play a part of myself, and enjoy a high degree of agency. If that’s the game someone wants to run, I can consider committing to it. I am not sure I can commit to doing Lovecraftian stuff where agency is minimal; if that’s what a good friend wants to run then I wish them well but won’t try to force myself to play the type of game I am just not into and hope that it won’t be taken as “I don’t want to spend time with or play games with you.”


What’s next? Full Steam ahead resumes its regular run next week and will appear at least once in October. Then my next four posts will be a deeper dive into each of these four characteristics. Now that this is becoming a series where I keep expanding each point into four more, should I come up with a name for it? Powers of Four? Suggestions are welcome in the comments section.

Full Steam Ahead – Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones.

Time logged before Full Steam Ahead: None

Run along the wall, over a yawning, dark, abyss. Jump from the wall to a nearby ledge. Sidle over to a flagpole before the ledge collapses. Drop down, swing around the flagpole, leaping to a nearby grate. Plunge your dagger into the grate, so you don’t slip down the wall. Jump to the balcony above the grate, rolling past the pressure triggered darts. Sidestep around the swinging blades, slide down a banner hanging nearby with your dagger, drop down the floor, sneak up behind the guard, and slit his throat.

How many ways can this go wrong? What are the chances that it would all go right the first time? Don’t worry, because you will get to try again.

And again.

And again.

…and again, and again, and again, and again…

Going South In New Eden

I met up with a friend of mine the other night; the friend who suggested to me that if I was going to write about any MMO I should give EVE Online a whirl rather than WoW, etc. He was shocked to find out that I was still playing it and profusely apologized to me. I told him that it was OK. There have certainly been times where I considered moving on for good. The battle of  9-4RP2 is one of those (that’s the overhyped “million dollar battle” that people were excited about in late January). I came home from work that evening knowing that something big was going down, started up the game and didn’t stop for about five hours. My wife was worried about me and wanted to know if I was okay. I assured her that this was an exceptional event that would not be happening again. I would make sure of it: if it ever looks like a five-hour TIDI-fest is going to ensue then I am going to feel the need to attend to real life and log out. The lack of fun and monstrous waste of time was exactly what I am not looking at in a game.

It was not long after that when my alliance departed the so-called north (the battle mentioned about happened in Cloud Ring, while we lived mainly in Branch as a part of the Guardians of the Galaxy coalition) to move to The Spire. There we were to join the Drone Control Unit (DCU), a subset of the mighty Drone Region Federation (DRF). That did not work out so well. By the time we arrived they were already starting to break under siege. As a result, a lot of the fleets were also not a lot of fun. We would receive pings with all kinds of superlatives related to how important it was to form a fleet as large as possible. Some of these would be hours of waiting for nothing. It wasn’t TIDI, but it was grueling. And it showed in our enthusiasm. I recall one particular evening I joined a fleet with about two and a half hours before I planned to leave to attend a social event. It took an hour to form up, then we did lots of flying through gates, then docked up and waited some more. Eventually it was time to leave, and so I dropped fleet early. I did not regret it, as I later found out that they waited at least another hour before walking into a trap. Still not the kind of stuff that makes a person be interested in playing the game.

This is a third-party site’s conceptual map of the EVE Online universe. The cardinal directions I describe are arbitrarily assigned based on up/down/left/right on this map. More at http://evemaps.dotlan.net/

Due to widespread dissatisfaction with how things were going, my alliance announced that we were leaving and moving even further south (a good move considering the DCU imploded very shortly after this was announced). We departed towards Detorid/Immensea/Tenerifis. If you look at Sov Maps the south appears to be a dog’s breakfast of little territories quite unlike the empires of the Imperium/Goons in Delve or GOTG and PL in the north though the ascension of the Winter Coalition has made it a little less fractured at the coalition level (in EVE the groups of players from smallest to largest are corporation, alliance, coalition). We are no longer under the protection of a powerful coalition. We are on our own now. And yet I enjoy this game more than ever. Any day of the week has us going out and meeting up with some smaller groups for some pew-pew spaceship combat. Everyone so far has been a good sport. We win some, we lose some, and it’s actually fun. I don’t miss the security of the north or the unfulfilled promises of empire in the east. Small gang warfare is something I can enjoy as time permits. When it comes to screen-based distractions, that’s everything I could ask for. I am glad that things are going south for me in this game. No need to apologize for that.

Damaging Our Trust In The Platform

At one time I was an anti-Steam Luddite. I was used to an old model of game distribution whereby a person would go to a store, pick up a disc, bring it home, and the household would be able to play the game. I resented the very notion that my dad, my brother, and myself would EACH have to pay ~$70 for the game we wanted to play. But, as the platform grew, their extreme discounts made things more affordable, and when I was no longer living in the same house as family members with whom I might want to share I was primed for my eventual turn: there was no other way to play Civilization V. It was a choice between Steam and no Civ. We know how that turned out.

So, now the majority of the video games I play are on Steam. Ever since the Full Steam Ahead series started on this blog, at least half of the content here has been related to games that were purchased and played through the increasingly ubiquitous platform. As far as gaming and content goes, I have come to put a lot of trust in Valve’s Steam. Unfortunately, they have chosen to punch a hole in that trust. As of this morning, Super Seducer was still available on the Steam Store. In case you haven’t heard, it’s supposedly a dating sim. I didn’t think I would be writing about this genre again so soon. It’s not normally my thing. But this goes beyond things I personally don’t like. It’s very, very bad. It basically teaches men not to take “no” for an answer, and to pursue in the face of requests to desist. This “game” should not be given a platform, and I already trust Steam less because it’s been available for some time now. Sony’s PlayStation has done the right thing in not publishing this. Good on them.

This won’t be a platform for normalizing stalker behaviour. Steam shouldn’t be either.

Now, before anyone starts shouting “FREEZE PEACH!” at me, let me be very clear: this is not about banning the existence of this game, nor using state-sanctioned coercive force against La Ruina. This is about a private platform that has many times exercised its right to limit the content that they provide on their service. They did so in 2012 when they pulled Seduce Me, in 2014 when the developer of Paranautical Activity tweeted a death threat at the president of Valve, in 2015 when a GLBT murder simulator was removed within hours, in 2016 when Digital Homicide was deemed to be hostile to customers and when a whites-only mod came our for Stellaris, and more recently when they pulled almost 200 “spam” games which were evidently an attempt to abuse the trading card market. The point here is that they have made no pretence that their service is a completely free pipe like the internet in general.

So, if Valve does remove games from Steam for various reasons, then I see no reason why they should permit this. If they don’t want sexual content, it’s like Seduce Me. If they don’t want hostility towards their customers, they need to remember that women use Steam too. If normalizing the stalking behaviour advocated by the incredibly toxic PUA community is acceptable under their terms and conditions, it’s time to make a change. If they are not willing to do this, it is time to reconsider how much we trust their platform. And as I wrote a few weeks ago, everything runs on trust. There was a video game industry before Steam. There will probably be one after Steam. How long that period of time is may depend on how much we can trust the content on their platform.

Full Steam Ahead: Bioshock

Time logged before Full Steam Ahead: 0 Hours

I swear I’m going to talk about Bioshock in a bit. It is a game that deserves to be talked about. But if you’d all be so kind to allow me a minor digression and retrospective, I’ll make it pay off. Cool? Cool.

November 2007. I’m hanging out with my best friend who has just bought Bioshock. The game was critically acclaimed for its setting and its stellar writing. Created by developer Ken Levine, it was considered a spiritual successor of his previous game series System Shock. The game won game of the years awards from BAFTA, IGN, and X-Play, all respected sources of video game journalism at the time.

These praises and accolades meant very little to me. I knew nothing of its setting or the System Shock series. The writing was good window-dressing, but I thought little more of it than that. At the time, I couldn’t have cared less about games criticism or analysis, because at the time, games did not mean much of anything to me.

Steam-Powered Hope

Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you’ll permit me a quick aside from subjecting myself to weekly adventures in my Steam Library.

We are now entering the holiday season, and I certainly wish nothing but the best for all of you this Christmas season. However, for several people, it is a season of loneliness, hopelessness, and despair. The holidays, so frequently advertised as the most wonderful time of the year, can be especially trying to those already suffering from depression.

That’s why resources like the Calgary Distress Centre are so important. They provide a 24 hour hotline for those in need of assistance in time of mental and emotional crisis. This hotline provides a listening ear and a gentle voice to help someone in their darkest, most despairing moments. I know because I’ve used this service. It’s helped me get through some of the worst days of my life.

Furthermore, the Distress Centre does more than just provide the 24 hour crisis hotline. They also act as an information resource, they provide free professional counselling services, and they run the Connecteen, a confidential support service for teens and youth. The Distress Centre provides all these services free of charge, and their hotline is manned largely by volunteers.

In this season which promotes charity and goodwill towards all, I’d like to ask the readers of Almost Infinite to help support the Distress Centre. I know that there are dozens, if not hundreds of worthy causes asking for support during this time of year, and I don’t for a second pretend mine is any more deserving than others; this is simply the one I am most familiar with, and I’m using what small platform I have to promote it. In support of this organization, I’d like to introduce the Steam-Powered Hope funding drive.

For what it’s worth, I’m prepared to offer incentives for donation.

Below, you will find a list of every game in my library. This is the randomly-generated order of the games I’m playing for Full Steam Ahead. I decided at the start that I would play the games as the random order dictated, no matter how good or bad that order was. Now, I’m giving you all a chance to mess around with it, however you see fit.

For a $5 donation to the Distress Centre, you can move any game from anywhere on the list to anywhere else on the list. This means you could put all the games from the Prince of Persia bundle in order for $25 Or you could make me play through the Strong Bad games in reverse order. Or you could make your favourite game the very next one on the list. Or you could make me replay games I’ve already played.

For a $20 donation to the Distress Centre, I will add a new game of your choice to a location of your choosing on the list. I will cover the cost of purchasing the game, your only cost is the donation.

Donations will close December 31st. I know that it’s a lot to ask, but I’d really appreciate your support in this. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me in the comments. Without any further ado, here is the list. Game I’ve already completed have been italicized:

  1. Total War Shogun 2
  2. Assassin’s Creed 2
  3. The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind
  4. Arma 2: Operation Arrowhead
  5. Sleeping Dogs
  6. Supreme Commander
  7. Star Wars Battlefront II
  8. Jade Empire
  9. Wargame: European Escalation
  10. Half Life Deathmatch: Source
  11. Mount & Blade
  12. Street Fighter IV
  13. Arma 2 : PMC
  14. Bioshock
  15. From Dust
  16. Poker Night at the Inventory
  17. Poker Night at the Inventory 2
  18. Half Life 2: Episode 1
  19. The Ship
  20. Mass Effect
  21. BattleBlock Theater
  22. Mass Effect 2
  23. Divekick
  24. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones
  25. Age of Empires 3
  26. Batman Arkham Asylum
  27. The Ship Tutorial
  28. Sims 3
  29. Cosmic DJ
  30. Endless Space
  31. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
  32. Brink
  33. Terraria
  34. Half Life 2: Deathmatch
  35. Hotline Miami
  36. FTL: Faster Than Light
  37. Bastion
  38. Age of Empires 2
  39. Eversion
  40. LA Noire
  41. Just Cause 2
  42. Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People – 2
  43. Alpha Protocol
  44. Civilization V: Gods and Kings
  45. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 2
  46. Total War Rome 2
  47. RWBY: Grimm Eclipse
  48. Strike Suit Zero
  49. Crusader Kings 2
  50. Cities XL 2012
  51. Awesomnauts
  52. Half Life 2: Lost Coast
  53. Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People – 5
  54. Hitman: Blood Money
  55. Titan Quest
  56. On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode 1
  57. Star Wars: KOTOR
  58. The Ship Single Player
  59. Monaco
  60. King Arthur II – Roleplaying Wargame
  61. Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People – 4
  62. Psychonauts
  63. Stacking
  64. Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  65. Heavy Bullets
  66. The Wolf Among Us
  67. MLB 2K10
  68. Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword
  69. Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
  70. Blood Bowl
  71. Arma 2
  72. Sid Meier’s Pirates!
  73. Banished
  74. Company of Heroes: Tales of Valour
  75. Borderlands 2
  76. Darksiders
  77. Saints Row: The Third
  78. Darksiders Warmastered
  79. Costume Quest
  80. Company of Heroes
  81. Gratuitous Space Battles
  82. Chroma Squad
  83. Half Life 2
  84. Grand Theft Auto IV
  85. Castle Crashers
  86. Prince of Persia: Sands of Time
  87. Prince of Persia
  88. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II
  89. Arma 2: British Armed Forces
  90. Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People – 1
  91. Hitman: Codename 47
  92. Super Hexagon
  93. Batman Arkham City
  94. Invisible, Inc.
  95. Grand Theft Auto V
  96. Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes
  97. Jackbox Party Pack 3
  98. Team Fortress 2
  99. Organ Trail
  100. Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
  101. Kerbal Space Program
  102. Just Cause 2 Multiplayer
  103. Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines
  104. Half Life 2: Episode 2
  105. Influent
  106. Kinetic Void
  107. Portal 2
  108. Torchlight 2
  109. Metro 2033
  110. Papers, Please
  111. Red Faction: Armageddon
  112. Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
  113. Speed Runners
  114. Universe Sandbox
  115. Lethal League
  116. Zeno Clash
  117. Tales from the Borderlands
  118. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within
  119. Magicka
  120. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  121. Super Meat Boy
  122. Audiosurf
  123. Civilization: Beyond Earth
  124. Racecraft Tech Demo
  125. Portal 2
  126. Batman Arkham Origins
  127. Sega Classics
  128. Civilization IV
  129. Bioshock Remastered
  130. Mount & Blade: Warband
  131. Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People – 3