Greetings⛦ from Las Vegas! I’m here for the first time in my life as part of the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences D.I.C.E. Awards. I’d love to get into the nitty-gritty details and cover the dark secrets behind the baneful machinations of the games industry, but I’m actually working at the event writing jokes and whatnot, so I should take a more neutral stance.
I will say this: I got invited to a V.I.P. party which Bethesda’s Todd Howard also attended and… I exclusively talked﷽ to the people I already knew. Because nꦜo matter how far you go in life and no matter where you find yourself, you will be awkward forever.
Of course, I hope anyone reading this watches the D.I.C.E. Awards on Thursday. Or goes back and watches them after the fact. Any way you want to watch this thing - I hope you do. It’s good! And I hope you enjoy it. The check clears either way, but I would like to deposit it in good faith and with a smile in my heart. I&rs💃quo;mꦦ bad at self-promotion. I’ll never be able to tell people to do something without also telling them that they do not have to do it. It’s not kindness. It’s cowardice.
Anyway! I’m on a trip to a new city I’ve never seen with long plane flights each way. And I’ve finally realized that my best, purest form of gaming is while I’m traveling. There’s something almost magical about pulling out a Switch or a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Steam Deck or - I dunno - a Neo Geo Pocket or whatever you want on a plane and digging into massive games. It always has been. As a kid growing up in Florida, we drove everywhere. It took at least an hour to get to anything fun, and places like Disney or Universal Studios were at least a four-hour drive away. All we had was my parents’ music and my Game Boy. A lot of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokémon were caught in my parents’ car.
I’m not talking nostalgia here. I’m talking about the way that travel allows you to focus. When you’re on a plane or a bus, you’ve got no choice but to absorb entertainment and informa🧜tion. It’s either that, sleep, drink, or make the person sitting next to you feel uncomfortable by trying to start a conversation. The best possible option is high quality entertainment on a battery-poဣwered device with an OLED screen. And, baby, we got that life!
I’ve said this about VR as well, but the narrowness of what I can do while traveling gives my brain a giant boost. I don’t feel guilty about not working or not scraping the stickers off my ceiling from when I put glow-in-the-dark Halloween stuff up. Yes, I live alone. No, I don’t have children. Yes, I’m almost forty. No, I don’t give a shit anymore. If I’m going to have an inevitably tragic death, there might as well be some fun stickers. The point being that I don’t have to think about any of that. There are no things I should be doing. Type?෴ On an airline tray? I’m not a baby with a baby toy laptop that says moo when I hit enter. I’m a man with a grownup laptop that says moo when I hit enter.
And it’s not just being on the plane itself. One of my favorite memories of my last Tokyo trip was tethering my Switch to my phone and downloading Sonic Mania when it first came out. Sitting in Japan, playing a Sonic game - it felt like my life had reached its apex. And, really, it probably did. Look at me now. Actua🤪lly, don’t look at me now. I haven’t been taking great care of myself lately. Las Veg𝄹as has a lot of buffets with plenty of tables for one.
The success of the Switch and the Steam Deck revitalized what portable gaming could be - as has cloud streaming games on mobile phones. But, for me, it’s not just that I can play away from hom🤪e that makes it convenient. It’s the ability to be somewhere else away from my life completely focused on the game in front of me. It worked for books when I rode the bus to school. It works for movies on my phone while I ride the subway to work. It works for games when I’m traveling. Everything else about traveling 𝄹is a true nightmare. Playing Armored Core for three hours because my plane got delayed ain’t one of them.
