Reading the strip reminded me I needed to use the credentials I had been given in order to enter the consensual hallucination of the Krahulik Hytale Server. The comparisons to Minecraft are very frequent, but Minecraft came out in 2009. In truth, the most Minecraft thing about it is that they did what Notch did: own every cent the game produces per sale by having you buy directly from them. Anyway, it's obviously a clone of Infiniminer. Kids these days!
- I just uninstalled Gambler's Table and I've never felt so free in my life. I hate this game and want to fight its creators in a Denny's parking lot at three in the morning. I played a show once with The Fine Print down in the Tri-Cities, they didn't pay much but they let us have an unlimited tab, which was a bold gesture to extend toward four men of twenty-two years. Had they known what hell we would wreak upon their taps and kegs, they might have done better to pay. That's the state I'd like to be in when I found the devs: they would be in no danger, yet as I whirled and struck ghosts I would feel absolute vindication.
I think that Gambler's Table is intended to serve as an entertainment product, like a toy or game, when what actually happened was that I inhaled a spore of it or something and it seized control of my central nervous system. People fear the day when cordyceps makes the fateful leap to a human host, but I think we're already there. At the fifth hour or so it was everything I could do not to climb up a tall blade of grass and clamp down hard with my mandibles.
It's somewhere between an idle game and direct interaction, like life itself - and it's based around coin flips. Where Q-UP turns the flip of a coin into a metanarrative esport, Gambler's Table - with its perfect coin animations and interactions - turns it into black-tar heroin. I guess there's an upgrade tree and different table mechanics; it's all as if a dark dream. It was so pure and clicky that it peeled the rest of the interactions away and I could just see the impulse, jolting through the system, riding the naked nerve that all games prey on. Utterly stripped of ennobling fiction about art, culture, or identity. The human animal, degenerated, lashed to a post; the autoflagellator, something the universe invented to jack itself off.
I had to play this game just to beat it, to kill it, twist its head off like a bottle cap, just so I could get my life back.
(CW)TB out.
