Contrast with games that are mostly about exploiting the thing our brains do when good and bad outcomes are fundamentally left to chance. Clover Pit has some luck manipulation stuff but in my brief time with it it seemed to get a lot of its pull from the alluring powerlessness of gambling.

Despite using similar visual (and even literal) language, gambling and gaming are fundamentally divided by the former's absence of meaningful choices. (Besides "play" or "don't play.") Balatro works because it takes video poker and jams it SO full of meaningful choices that it practically bursts.

Meanwhile, the ur-game here is Luck Be A Landlord, the only game of this ilk that deploys its gambling structure to a point, where capitalist society is a rigged slot machine and exploiting the game is the only way to make rent. Compare with Clover Pit, which seems to be about nothing? Basically?

That's my thing, I guess: I just love spite so much.

It feels especially interesting to me that the Creature still reads Paradise Lost but seems to take so little from it. He's not so much a Satanic archetype as a smaller, handsomer King Kong.

I have affection for Del Toro but I think his essential sympathy for the Creature robs Shelley's story of a spark of nastiness it needs. I only know the book secondhand, but what I know of its Creature, its willingness to be cruel, is way more interesting than Elordi's babe-in-the-woods act.

The actual upshot of all this is me revealing publicly that I'm basically Nate from Baby Steps

If you read this, roll your eyes at my brain problems, and think, "This actually sounds like it kicks ass": Fuck yes! I did my job.

One viewpoint I'm always confused by is that a negative write-up like this is me arguing that something I don't like shouldn't exist, or even that it's bad. All I'm doing is explaining how something hit me, in the hopes that you'll learn something about how/why it hits you.

I don't know how universal the feeling of realizing "This game triggers my specific mental disorders in a really gnarly way" is, but here I am, with the brain I got

I do not play video games to Be Perceived.

I was doing a match on my own and I'd gotten roughed up by robots. (Good and proper.) Then another player saw me limping and used the proximity voice chat to ask if I needed help. I had a genuine panic attack and force-quit the game, get the fuck away from me with that stuff.