Through a combination of uninteresting coincidences, Pokémon has almost entirely passed me by—I’ve never played the games, seen the show, read the manga, watched the movies, or collected the cards. Last month I decided to rectify that by trying Pokémon X.

This is the third time this year that I’ve been a newcomer to a Nintendo franchise, after Fire Emblem: Awakening and Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Both of those games felt like they made conscious efforts to broaden their audiences. Pokémon X seems to do the same, although for whatever reason it hasn’t been as effective on me.

My Pokémon-playing friends say that the series’ usual tedium has been largely smoothed away in X/Y. That may be true, but every indication is that the game is still presuming more familiarity with, and affection for, the Pokémon than I actually have. For example, there are a number of small mechanical details that either go unexplained or are only mentioned in passing by random NPCs. (I had to look up what “HM” and “TM” stand for, what the difference is, and why I can’t unlearn one of them.) It’s not enough to impede my progress, but it does make me constantly wonder if I’ve missed something.

A more egregious example is the in-game celebration of Pokémon, which borders on overbearing. NPCs talk almost exclusively about Pokémon. All of the examinable objects are Pokémon-themed: bookshelves are full of Pokémon books, hutches are full of Pokémon knickknacks, and TVs show Pokémon programs. Historians study Pokémon history, scientists study Pokémon sciences, and gyms are related to Pokémon in ways that I am still trying to understand. (They’re still real gyms, right? Kind of? I mean, one of them has a rock-climbing wall…)

Pokémon are neat, but I don’t feel the same compulsion to collect them that fans do. I’m willing to accept that this is because I have no preexisting attachment to the series; if I had a Game Boy and played Red/Blue at an impressionable age, maybe my imagination would have let me project more personality onto the Pokémon. Or, if I had grown up watching the TV show, I would feel more warmly towards, say, Pikachu. As it is, though, I feel about as much attachment to the various Pokémon as I did to the similar Familiars in Ni No Kuni, which is to say: some, based on how cute or silly or useful they are, but not really that much.

In practice, this is all fine. Professor Sycamore makes a point of saying that completing the Pokédex is not the only way to become a Pokémon Master, and encourages trainers to find their own paths. Still, when I come across a debate about which Pokémon some fictional character would use, and I see the degree to which fans can ascribe significance to such a choice, I can’t help but feel that I’m missing something fundamental about how to relate to these games.

All of this is not to say that I’m not enjoying myself, because I am! I’m a particular fan of the relentless cheerfulness. The RPGs I play are too often gloomy and portentous affairs, even when there are lighthearted elements mixed in; it’s refreshing to have the balance tipped the other way and see a focus on friendship and self-discovery. Everything from the music to the encounters with other trainers to the clothes shopping give the game a pleasantly saccharine quality that makes it seem strange that there are actually antagonists.

I guess I’m just a little sad knowing that I’ve missed the boat on Pokémon. Even though I’m enjoying it, I no longer have access to the fandom I might have cultivated if started when I was younger.

XOXO 2013 was about one question, though it appeared in various contexts.

One context: already-successful creative people exorcising their demons onstage. Jonathan Coulton coped with feelings of inadequacy stemming from discomfort with the epithet “internet musician.” Marco Arment sold off his popular software projects Instapaper and The Magazine after intense anxiety over dealing with his competition. Jack Conte’s band Pomplamoose became obsessed with writing a “hit song,” and their impossibly high standards forced them into an accidental hiatus. Cabel Sasser teetered on the edge of a mental breakdown as his company Panic worked on a long-awaited update to their flagship app Coda.

Another context: taking the community to task for its shortcomings. Molly Crabapple spoke about the continued dominance of the wealthy and the exploitative nature of social networks, concluding that eschewing publishers has not leveled the playing field as much as we’d like to believe. Jay Smooth pointedly criticized the lack of diversity, both at XOXO specifically and in the culture it represents more generally. Christina Xu warned against categorically rejecting systems because of a misguided obsession with disintermediation, and explained that requiring creative people to take huge risks in becoming independent disproportionately benefits the privileged.

A third context lingered around the edges of the conversations I had with other attendees, and was crystallized in Andy Baio’s closing remarks. He noted that he frequently hears XOXO attendees describe the experience as “inspiring,” and then called our bluff: if we’re so inspired, he said, we shouldn’t stop at blogging and tweeting platitudes—we should actually make things. If he saw evidence of this in the coming months, he would consider organizing a third festival.

This isn’t everything that happened at XOXO, of course. But it is—in my mind—what XOXO was about, because all of those talks are really about the same question: What now?

You’ve made it (whatever that means) as an independent creator, and to some subset of people you appear to be living the dream. What new challenges do you face? What scares you? How will you move forward?

The economy represented at XOXO, built on services like Kickstarter and Etsy and Breadpig and Patreon, is now well-established. What old problems are still endemic to this system? What new ones have arisen? How can we make it better?

And if you’ve been inspired to create or to change, will you do anything about it?

What now?

I don’t know that I have a good answer. Maybe the bloom is off the rose a bit since last year, but I’m excited to see people looking forward.

(This is not really a review, but I’ll make a recommendation up here just in case: if you are the kind of person who plays games for their stories, even sometimes, you should play Hate Plus.)

In my reading of Hate Plus, there are three layers to the experience.

The first layer is the content of the Mugunghwa’s logs—the meeting notes, diaries, and letters that make up the bulk of the game’s text and depict its society’s regression into patriarchy. Reading these logs is pretty brutal. While there is humor and tenderness and lust and love, those are brief moments in stories suffused with betrayal, humiliation, despair, sexual assault, suicide, and murder. Basically, if you become emotionally invested at any point, be assured that your spirit will be crushed.

Unfortunately for the would-be stoics, the logs are also incredibly well-written. It’s gotten difficult to compliment narrative elements in games because of how much we’ve diluted all of the usual platitudes—”the characters feel like real people!”—but that doesn’t make the praise any less deserved here. I’m not sure I could do it justice if I went into specifics here anyway, so suffice it to say that even without the visual novel wrapper, the story underlying Hate Plus is a compelling work of fiction.

The middle layer is the story that happens during gameplay—the real-time experience of reading the logs with *Mute and/or *Hyun-ae aboard your ship. As in the prequel Analogue: A Hate Story, the conceit in Hate Plus is that the game’s interface is the same as the one the player character sees (thus allowing the AI characters to plausibly say things like “Can you click on me, please?”). There are also still the occasional dialog-wheel-based conversations about what you’ve read so far, which still hilariously terminate in romantic subplots.

There are a few new features in Hate Plus as well. One is a wiki that dynamically updates as you learn about each character, which is very welcome given the number of them to keep track of. Another is an enforced three-day schedule: after you read a certain number of log files, your ship runs out of power and you must wait twelve real-world hours before you can progress any further. This requires some narrative gymnastics to keep the story arc intact—one of the logs is conspicuously unreadable until the end of the second day, and a bunch of new logs suddenly appear on the third day—but it’s effective as a pacing device.

This may sound odd, but the best new feature is that the AIs now read logs alongside you. As you scroll, they make faces, interject with commentary, connect disparate plot threads, and generally express their boredom or anger or horror or discomfort. (The effect is not unlike keeping an eye on Twitter while watching television.) It’s a great mechanic that injects dynamism into the reading experience, helps characterize the AIs, makes the game feel less lonely, and reinforces plot details that the player may misunderstand or overlook.

The top layer is, for lack of a better term, the meta-experience. I’m probably getting a little nebulous here, but I’m thinking of things like the achievements, the fourth wall silliness, and even developer Christine Love’s interactions with her fans.

Hate Plus playfully acknowledges its game-ness. It wears its allusions on its sleeve: the three-day schedule clearly references Majora’s Mask, for example, and Old *Mute’s appearance evokes Metal Gear’s Big Boss. There’s a seemingly unattainable achievement called “Level Four Revive Materia,” a reference to the futile attempts to save Aeris in Final Fantasy VII. (Fans on the Steam forum seem particularly irked by that last one, especially because Love has steadfastly refused to explain it.)

Allusions aside, the fourth wall is under constant threat in Hate Plus. Characters suggest that dialog wheels were designed by a shut-in otaku, condemn the player for behaving like someone in a “tacky ero visual novel,” accuse each other of being tsundere, and so on. At one especially memorable point, *Hyun-ae asks the player to bake an actual cake in real life (she can provide a recipe), and there’s an achievement for emailing in a picture with proof.

As with Analogue, there is a “harem” route in Hate Plus. Getting there involves using outside knowledge to rescue both *Mute and *Hyun-ae from the Mugunghwa, which is impossible under normal circumstances. The game explicitly calls this route out as non-canon, which frees it to be even more goofier than the normal routes—*Mute complains about being covered by a talkative *Hyun-ae’s text box, for example. It’s like a screwball comedy where all the actors are looking at the camera.

All this is to say that the top layer of the experience is surprisingly lighthearted. By the time you get to the theme song, or see Love solicit and retweet Rule 34 fan art of her characters on Twitter, you might have almost forgotten about that bleak first layer. Almost.

Of the games that comprise the genre I facetiously call “walkin’ around games”—Proteus, Dear Esther, Journey, etc.—Gone Home is my new favorite.

When a new Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto comes out, or any game with a detailed setting, some breathless reviewer inevitably claims that the world is so rich that they found themselves just soaking it in, ignoring the quests or missions. Those quests or missions, it is implied, are the game proper, but the world in which they’re set is of such high caliber that one might accidentally play the game without, you know, playing the game.

Gone Home calls bullshit on that distinction. Here the game is the setting, and the player’s only goal is to explore it.

It works. The writing and the voice acting, while sparse, are top-notch, and the Fullbright Company is very, very good at environmental storytelling. Most importantly, Gone Home has an uncanny sense of real-world authenticity. It evokes the drama of being a teenager without devolving into sitcom-level cliches. It leans on 1990s nostalgia, but not in the pandering way of VH1 shows and Buzzfeed articles. And, through the accretion of hundreds of small details, it tells a story that feels like it could be real, about people who feel like they could be real.

This quality is noteworthy both because it is so well done and because it so rarely exists in video games. (Consider the believability of your average gruff space marine or starry-eyed RPG protagonist.) Even other non-combat games tend to avoid being grounded in the mundane. Journey is a template of the Campbell monomyth without the blanks filled in; you are an anonymous wayfarer on a pilgrimage to a nameless mountain in an unknown land. Dear Esther’s story is so heavily cloaked in purple prose and evasive metaphors that it functions more like a backdrop.

I like both of those games and there’s nothing wrong with their approaches, but they do have a distancing effect. It’s as though the developers feared that their carefully constructed abstractions would crumble under the weight of specific details, or dissolve like dreams if inhabited by real people. Probably, they would.

But in Gone Home I am Kaitlin Greenbriar, and it is June 7, 1995 at 1:15 AM, and I am alone in my family’s new house at 1 Arbor Hill, Boon County, OR, and I am looking for my younger sister Samantha Greenbriar who goes to Goodfellow High School and listens to Bratmobile and dates Yolanda DeSoto, et cetera, et cetera, and the effect is electrifying. My breath quickened when I saw the red spatter in the upstairs bathtub, and my heart skipped a beat when that one light blew out in the hallway, and my hands were clammy as I climbed the stairs to the attic, expecting the worst. I was there in a way that I rarely am in video games, and I think it’s because for once there were no zombies or robots or space marines—just people.

Here is what usually happens at my office when a highly-anticipated video game comes out: A bunch of people receive their preorders or rush out to buy it. I’ll overhear everyone talking about it over lunch for a few days. After two weeks or so, people begin to finish the game and discussion slows. A few copies may go up for sale on the internal company newsgroups. A month out nobody is talking about it anymore, and depending on the game I may never hear them do so again.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a notable exception in that three weeks after its release, excitement still appears to be growing. Everyone I know who has a 3DS is playing Animal Crossing. Many people who do not have 3DSes are buying them, and then buying Animal Crossing. Some people who already own 3DSes are buying 3DS XLs to play Animal Crossing on a nicer screen—and then selling their old 3DSes to coworkers, who use them to play Animal Crossing. There are 3DSes littering people’s desks because they’re trading fruits over lunch or leaving their town gates open all day for others to visit. When I get home I invariably have a full party of ten StreetPass visitors in my plaza, and at least seven of them will have recently been playing Animal Crossing (yesterday it was all ten). It’s approaching an epidemic.

I’ve tried to describe Animal Crossing by comparing it to other games—“It’s a little like The Sims,” or “It’s what FarmVille wishes it could be”—but the best point of reference I’ve come up with is Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Both have a calming focus on repetition and rituals, and a disarming sincerity that precludes cynicism and irony. Both evoke the playfulness and wide-eyed curiosity of childhood. And through some ineffable combination of qualities, both are wellsprings of warm nostalgia and feel somehow reassuring to visit.

In broad strokes, you always end up doing the same things when you play Animal Crossing; there are always weeds that need plucking, fruits that need picking, flowers that need watering, and so on. It is, inevitably, repetitive. And the pace of the game is intentionally glacial—no matter how diligent you are, you can’t complete more than one public works project in a day, or score more than one K. K. Slider bootleg in a week. Even running through your town is not only unnecessary but often deleterious—you’ll not only scare away bugs and fish, but ruin the grass and kill the flowers. The best way to play is to embrace the routines and the slow pace such that the game becomes almost meditative.

Town upkeep notwithstanding, the minute-to-minute experience of playing Animal Crossing still often feels like doing chores—deliver that package, sell that furniture, pay off that loan. Thankfully it’s easy and pleasant work, and yet it’s still meaty enough to tickle the part of the brain that derives pleasure from accomplishment. The upshot is that playing Animal Crossing is sometimes not so much fun as it is satisfying. A few times now I’ve put down my 3DS and decided to take a break from work for a while, only to realize that I hadn’t actually been doing anything productive. (Interestingly, running a town is meant to feel like work within the game’s fiction as well; note the escapist language surrounding the Dream Suite and the tropical island, and the job-well-done tone of Isabelle’s public works project celebration speech.)

Perhaps the most surprising part of Animal Crossing’s appeal is its multiplayer and social features. There is a remarkable variety of options: you can have multiple people play asynchronously in the same town on one cartridge; you can visit others’ towns over a local network or Internet connection; you can “dream” about others’ towns via sharable codes; you can play minigames with strangers through Club Tortimer; you can capture homes via StreetPass and buy things from them; and you can create sharable QR codes for custom designs. By mixing these together you can show off your creativity, share resources to everyone’s mutual benefit, and enjoy others’ company in live multiplayer. The implementation is fantastic across the board, and never feels exploitative. Would that every company creating social games had Nintendo’s intuition and restraint.

It’s easy to forget how different the technological landscape was when the Xbox 360 launched in 2005. YouTube had just come out of beta. Netflix still dealt exclusively with physical media. Valve was just beginning to court external publishers for Steam. Facebook had fewer than 10 million users (they now have over a billion). There was no Reddit, no Tumblr, no Kickstarter, no Twitter, no iPhone, and no iPad. In short, when the current generation of game consoles began, the products and services that mediate hundreds of millions of people’s experiences with technology either did not exist or were still small potatoes.

The perceived perils of launching a new console today, after all of those changes, are well documented. What has me excited coming out of E3 is that all three manufacturers have different and interesting approaches.

Microsoft’s strategy is the logical conclusion of their experience with Xbox Live, where the usage of entertainment apps like Netflix grew until they surpassed the multiplayer service in popularity. Now Microsoft is betting that the future is in multi-use boxes that offer a variety of media options, not in gaming-focused consoles. Their framing of that strategy could have been better, as could their reassurances about the system’s DRM, though I suspect the PR hit was largely localized to the gaming community. Personally, I’m more curious about what those “restrictions” mean for developers—what possibilities emerge when every player is guaranteed to have a broadband connection and a high-resolution Kinect?

Sony, meanwhile, is doubling down on games of all shapes and sizes, and has positioned itself as the consumer-friendly choice. Given the vibrancy of the indie community over the last few years, this seems like an equally valid approach to me; it was heartening to see all of those developers on stage during the keynote. (Who could have predicted that a console pitch would ever include a game like Octodad: Dadliest Catch?) There is still some risk, in that we may indeed find that gaming-focused consoles can’t survive anymore, but I think the wide-ranging developer support will be enough to make it work. Given that, I expect to see a lot of PC+PS4 releases in the near future.

Nintendo, as ever, is doing its own thing. The Wii U has a bit of a rough year, offering few of the blockbuster first-party titles that have traditionally been the company’s bread and butter. Many of those games are on their way now, though, and they look as solid as ever (now in HD, and at sixty frames per second!). Nintendo may not be attracting a lot of third-party support, but they make up for it by developing some of the best games in the world; I think they have every reason to be hopeful for a 3DS-like reversal of fortune once their fanbase gets on board. I’m hoping for more weird experiments with the touchscreen controller and asymmetrical multiplayer design as well.

With any luck, all three of these strategies will pay off, and we’ll end up with a wider variety of games to enjoy.

Last week my company, Harmonix, announced our most recent project: Fantasia: Music Evolved, a music game that we’re developing in collaboration with Disney. Polygon has a big feature on it today and GameTrailers has some footage, if you’d like to know more (and I hope you would!). I also recommend this thoughtful essay from lead programmer Mike Fitzgerald, which gives some context for how we’ve ended up where we are.

When I worked on Rock Band, I’d occasionally get sucked into thrilling production meetings about updating DLC spreadsheets or scheduling conference calls. It always sounded strangely incongruous when someone mentioned Nintendo in those discussions. One part of my brain has had them filed under “magic fun times” since childhood, and just hearing the word “Nintendo” short-circuits the other part that considers them a corporation that we do business with. We might as well have been updating spreadsheets for Santa Claus.

So it is with Disney. The first thing I think when I hear “Disney,” from years of watching the animated films, is some nonverbal equivalent of “Hooray!” And so after two years, it is still incredible to get messages from Disney email addresses, to meet Disney employees when they visit the office, to see “Disney & Harmonix Present” atop our game’s logo and realize that I’m a part of that team. Perhaps it will not stop being incredible. I hope it doesn’t.

After five and a half years of sporadic and scattershot updates — and a compromised WordPress installation or two — I’ve decided to relaunch this site. The old posts are backed up in case they’re needed, but at the moment I’m excited to start fresh.

So: welcome, or welcome back!