And here we are galloping towards a full year since my last post. The chief factor in my silence can be summarized as “work”, and summarized slightly longer as “the worst, most extended crunch period of my entire career”. It wasn’t eleven months long, but it was long enough to completely get me out of the habit of blogging, and habit is the most important thing.<\/p>\n
But there’s another factor as well. Last year, I violated the Oath<\/a> in a completely new way: by purchasing a game on Steam when, according to the Oath, I was not allowed to. It was one of those cases where a game was so zeitgeisty and in-the-moment that I felt like I had to play it in order to keep up with the broader online discussion of games in general. And, having done that once, it was easy to decide to do it again, and again. Now, I’m accustomed to breaking the Oath by posting late. And I know what to do about that: just write the post late and move on. But I wasn’t sure what to do about this new infraction, and that uncertainty has paralyzed me.<\/p>\n These are the games I purchased this way: Her Story<\/em>, The Beginner’s Guide<\/em>, Undertale<\/em>, The Witness<\/em> 1<\/sup><\/a>Thekla, 2016; not to be confused with Stu Galley’s The Witness<\/em> (Infocom, 1983). I’ve contemplated pulling the same joke as I did with Portal<\/em><\/a> but I don’t think it supports it as well.<\/span><\/span>