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The first game conference I ever attended was at MIT in the late 90s. It’s where I met people who actually worked in the game industry for the first time. Some were my heroes. Some I’d never heard of. I was just a student, with dreams of someday doing what they did, and I remember the conversations vividly.

This was the early days of 3D gaming, after the CD storage boom had made cutscenes a big part of video games. There was a sense that the industry was experimenting, trying to “crack the code” of video game storytelling, and a lot of the talks, panels, and just general chatter were about this in one sense or another. What was the “right” way to tell a game story, so that it wasn’t “just a movie”? All these people seemed to hate cutscenes, or even just general cinematic presentation, as well as the games famous for them.

I remember talking to one of these developers about Final Fantasy VII and how it compared to Xenogea

I genuinely can't believe Half Life Alyx is five years old.

No other video game has felt the way Alyx felt. No one else has taken such a bold swing in what a video game can be. It's burned into my mind as my Half Life game, the one that came out at just the right time for me.

It was also my "pandemic" game. While everyone else was playing Animal Crossing or Doom Eternal, I was playing and replaying Half Life Alyx.

It definitely feels like it's somewhat doomed to be less remembered in the popular consciousness than most big games that come out, and indeed the rest of the games in the Half Life lineage. Cries of "Half Life 3 when?" still abound in spite of the very clear effort Alyx made to move the story forward. But to me it feels like a game that still hasn't been topped in the five years since it came out, not by a long shot.

Half Life Alyx received a Game of the Year win from GameSpot, and nominations from a few other publications. When it came to events like The

You can see it if you check https://fedidb.org/. Monthly active users have gone from just a hair under one million to somewhere around 1.4 million and still growing. How do we think this will go? How do we feel about this influx of new users? Has PixelFed done something different that Mastodon hasn't?

I feel like I didn't really recognize having different "platforms" like Mastodon, PixelFed, etc would give multiple opportunities for the fediverse to make a "first" impression with people.

I just got finished with beating Riven for the first time. I adored the way the game seeped into my real life with pages of notes about the world I was discovering. Are there any other games that can match this feeling? That really work best when you have a journal in hand?