Burke's Joystick

As I just blogged about , I am getting increasingly fatigued by modern gaming.  Everything is "hurry, hurry, hurry!"  Or, if not that, it is often about "second life" experiences.  That is, it is about deep experiences where the player can invest hundreds and hundreds of hours immersing himself in a virtual world almost as tangible as his material reality (games like Skyrim and Eve Online , come to mind).  Now, I am a fan of such experiences - in fact, I think such games are what is best about modern gaming - but it can get all so tiring after awhile.  Sometimes I just want to be able to sit down and quickly and easily invest myself into a game.  You know, sort of like with a board game where you read the rules, set up the board, and off you go!  No muss, no fuss. Usually Chess is my go-to game in this regard.  Despite its 21st Century online trappings, it remains first and foremost a classical board game in style and temperament.  Ind...

[Note:  I am sorry that I haven't had much to post here the last week or so.  Don't worry, this blog is not done yet!   Rather, I just needed a break to handle some matters.  Eyestrain headaches were starting to kick in from the writing I was doing here and elsewhere, plus I found myself spending more time that I thought possible finding and installing a new video card toy for my old PC - what a difference it has made in my CoD:MW3 performance already!   Lastly, it is the closing days of summer, so I didn't want them to go to waste as I have all fall, winter, and spring to blog! Moving on.... One of the reasons I love modern gaming is that I find it to be a hypothesized science fiction future made real in the here and now.  We don't look at it this way because like most science fiction that has become science fact, we sort of just accept it as another humdrum facet of the modern world.  I mean, imagine taking such incredible title...