leaving the party

a journal-style blog ostensibly about role playing games

recent posts

    • stop fucking playing the wordle

      sorry this ones not about role playing games

      On Tuesday last week, the failing New York Times published an op-ed by world class dumb ass Bret Stephens with the following headline: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.“

      This is, of course, flatly untrue. Since the October 7th attacks in 2023, there have been more than 60,000 people killed in Palestine by the Israeli regime, a number which Bret Stephens at the New York Times basically scoffs at in his first few paragraphs. Israeli military violence against Gaza is also still ongoing, meaning this is not a final count or even a truly accurate estimate: last month, DW reports on an independent study that this death toll may actually be too low by 41%.  As I type this, Israel continues to choke resources out of Palestine, starving the people of Gaza and even shooting and killing people who were seeking aid from U.N. aid trucks. This is not even mentioning the long history of violent occupation between Israel and Palestine, for which I highly recommend reading The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. Straightforwardly, Israel’s relationship to Palestine is a campaign of total annihilation, and has been for a very long time. I feel this is the single most important political issue of our current moment.

      There is a very small “journalistic” part of me that feels compelled to link the piece so you can read it yourself, but I’ve decided not to. Don’t worry too much; you’d probably get paywalled out anyway. Still, though, if you can help it, I suggest you don’t click on their website at all. And if you’re on your web browser at your job right now, I suggest you close the tab you have open for today’s Connections. In fact, I’m writing today to propose something that seems at this point obvious to me but still needs to spelling out: I suggest you divest completely from the New York Times. That means no reading their publishing, no clicking on their links, no sharing links to their articles, and crucially, no more playing their games. That especially includes Wordle.

      I suggest this because the failing New York Times seems to be editorially invested in the destruction of Gaza. This new op-ed from Bret Stephens is not the first time the newspaper has made controversial headlines defending the violence of the Israeli occupation. The New York Times has a long history of uncritically publishing pro-Israeli voices. In a January 2024 analysis published by Adam Johnson on the Intercept, we see pretty clearly that there is a pro-Israeli bias in the New York Times and its contemporaries in the first several weeks of Netanyahu’s siege on Palestine, its coverage prioritizing Israeli narratives and routinely devaluing the lives of Palestinians. This has continued since then, just as the genocide and mass starvation of Palestine has. 

      Wordle, of course, is just a harmless little word game. It’s pretty simple: you have five boxes for five letters, allowing you to guess one five letter word, and the game tells you by coloring the boxes in as green or yellow which letters are in the word and whether they are in the correct spot. You have six guesses total, and as long as you can get the word correctly within those six guesses, you win. It’s an incredibly simple yet powerful feat of game design, and usefully, it’s very memetic too, allowing you to share your Wordle scores simply using emojis to replicate the state of the board at your victory. The New York Times purchased the game in 2022 for a seven figure sum and it has been a staple of their games section ever since, overtaking even the popularity of their long established crossword. It has become indisputably the breadwinner for the New York Times game section.

      I call Wordle their breadwinner because thanks to the New York Times purchasing it shortly after the explosion in Wordle’s popularity, they have made a lot of money off of their games and expanded their games page to follow suit. It now features several other word games like Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, and the crossword. This is important because, whether they like it or not, the NYT is a gaming company now. In 2024, many people (including Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku in April of that year) have pointed to the data gathered and created by NYT investors which shows that their gaming page now drives more traffic to their website than all of their journalism combined. This means Wordle is bringing in even more subscriptions for the New York Times, since subscribing now gives you access to their backlog of all the daily games they have been posting over the years since this pivot. They even offer a unique, less expensive Games subscription, giving you access to their archive of word games and crosswords and nothing else. The New York Times has again and again demonstrated an editorial bias toward the genocide on Palestine and Gaza that has proven destructive. None of this is even to mention their biased and false coverage on the wave of transphobia in the United States, a wave that they helped to create in the first place. They do not deserve your money, your ad revenue, your site traffic, or your time. 

      I have a very very stressful and taxing job which usually involves a computer. Many – almost all – of my coworkers have played the Wordle. Most of them still do it every day, sharing and comparing their scores amongst each other in our work group chats and on their screens. At risk of being a huge killjoy, I have decided to stop using it entirely, and have recommended to some to do the same. As the BDS calls for boycotts and divestment from Microsoft for their support of Israel, Wordle is among games like Minecraft and the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater remakes which I have decided to turn away from: simple, elegant, and incredibly well designed games that are now at the mercy of publishers who elect to support genocide. It is frustrating to have to stop playing some of these, but a small sacrifice in the face of the violence these companies choose to support.

      There are, thankfully, lots of alternatives. If you like crosswords and little puzzle games you can play on a laptop or desktop at work, I recommend Puzzmo! A series of puzzle games that update every day, including a crossword if you’re like me and really into that sort of thing. I really like the Flipart game on Puzzmo; you simply rotate the different shaped blocks until all of them fit perfectly into a rectangle without overlapping. It’s a relaxing bit of simple and satisfying light interaction that I could see myself doing all day. The crosswords, or “cross|words,” have a clean looking design that emphasizes when an answer is actually multiple words with thickened “space bars.” These games are each meant to be accessible, easy to understand. They’re meant to invite you in. There’s tons of games like this, including several clever word games, a poker hand building game where you try to build a 5×5 grid of poker hands which work in every direction, or “Really Bad Chess” which is just a game of chess with all the pieces in different places each day. Each game is well conceived and designed, and gives you a score so you can see where you place on the leaderboards or see some words other people found or how fast someone beat this or that puzzle. I have made a habit of checking Puzzmo pretty much every morning, and it’s been a incredibly easy way to satisfy the craving for short form daily word games.

      I even like their manifesto quite a lot, which I recommend reading in its entirety. I want to quote my favorite piece of it here:

      Games are people. Games are made by people, designed by people, and written by people. Games are little pieces of us that can come out and play when little pieces of you show up asking. Being together as people makes games very special.

      EDIT: lol so i’ve since publishing this learned that puzzmo was kind of sneakily acquired in its infancy by hearst newspapers, one of the largest media companies on earth. this does kind of suck, and make the construction of this post really weird. im not rewriting it but i dont want to be dishonest either so here’s the disclaimer, make of that what you will.

      So there’s my plea. If you care about people, and I know you do, then care about the people in Gaza, and the trans people in your life. Please don’t buy a New York Times subscription, and don’t buy a games subscription either. If you have one, cancel it! Stop giving them your money. If you’re still playing the Wordle, go play something else. Mostly anything is fine. If you absolutely need to play the Wordle, play any one of the Wordle knock offs or play Unlimited Wordle as much as you want. Play some PokeDoku! Why not. I really like Raddle, another daily word game puzzle! My friend Tess has been playing this quiz where you name every country in the world. Could be fun! I’m interested in puzzles that come from a place of love for games, for play, and for people. The New York Times, on the other hand, has made clear that their editorial bottom line is mostly concerned with death.

      thanks for reading

    • catgirl (2025)

      some spoilers for a free 2 hour game

      I struggled this week with a weird internal pressure to make something. I’ve had this website going for a couple weeks now, and I’ve really liked writing it so far! But I’ve been beginning to think to myself: god, I should be writing something for next week. I’ve had to tell myself to relax. It doesn’t really matter. We’re just having fun here. But there is a demon in my brain, a creativity consuming little Worm called “perceived responsibility.” The Worm crawls in my ear, squirms around in my temples, whispers: “you should be working… you should be writing… you should be productive,……” So at the beginning of this week, I wrote some slop I didn’t care about, and just five minutes ago, read it again and still didn’t care about it! I could say something like “it doesn’t meet my standards of quality” but I don’t have those or want to. It’s even worse than that. I just thought it was boring to read and write. It has forced me to re-evaluate what I’m doing here. Why write a blog every week (or so) like this, having spent money and time hosting and building a website for it? What am I seeking to gain from this experience? Some kind of profit? Clout? Be serious! Of course, the answer is obvious: I do it because it’s fun, and I like to share it with my friends. So why the stress?

      This is what Catgirl has forced me to reckon with. Catgirl, a two hour RPG developed by an artist named City Girl, is an incredibly free, very funny, extremely 2 hour game about saving your doggy friend Mopmop. The premise is not very complicated, and to its benefit, neither is the rest of the game: a pretty demon lady is following you around and trying to steal all the art in the world. Mopmop loves painting, so the pretty lady went ahead and stole Mopmop too. In an effort to save her weird little dog, Catgirl has to get strong enough to defeat the demon lady Yumi and save artistic expression itself from her grasp. That’s really all there is to it, and I feel Catgirl is almost about the fact that it need not be any deeper than that. The story largely gets out of its own way in order to let the real stars of the show take the center stage; its humor, its banging original soundtrack, and its big cast of colorful and weird women. City Girl is a musician making what I can mostly describe as “chill music to relax and study to.” What she’s made here is like a terrific little album which she’s attached a terrific little game to. It’s mostly retro-style 20th century RPG inspired music with a lot of modern polish, but every now and then it seems to allow itself to go sickos. Yumi’s theme, for example, is a reoccurring song that quickly became one of my favorites: it’s a deep and intoxicating percussive and trap inspired beat with a slightly warped 8 bit melody overlaid on top and it works for me every time I hear it.

      Yumi is just one of many pretty and strange women that rotate in my mind still after playing this game. There are so many Girls… everywhere you look… Even all the enemy slimes are slimegirls! Some of the women here become important supporting characters, some are silly one off jokes, some are giant cats that serve as airships, all of them are unique and strange and lovable. I love when a woman is silly. Hook line and sinker for me.

      monty and me are kindred spirits in this way

      Mechanically speaking, Catgirl is incredibly simple. It has a turn based battle system you’ll interact with several times, which is not at all complex or particularly interesting. It’s mostly just a turn by turn numbers game, where your only option is to attack every turn. if you’re high enough level and do enough damage to beat them before they beat you, you win. Otherwise you lose. Generally you won’t find out whether you have a chance at all until after you start the fight. It’s pretty weak mechanically, but thankfully, I think they probably recognized that and made sure that it wasn’t an important pillar of the game so much as a it is a little check to see that you do everything in the right order. Often you’ll fight a penguin or slime who is too powerful for you, and the answer is not trying again, but instead going to make sure you did all the other stuff you need to do first. The core of the game is not in its battles anyway; mechanically speaking, what works about the game is its flexibility and willingness to not get pinned into being just one thing. The deeper you go, the more you’ll find totally different “battle systems” for its unique bosses. You’ll have to do dance battle rhythm games and Touhou style bullet hells way before you end up getting sick of the regular battles. It always keeps you on your toes, and it’s decidedly less Final Fantasy and more Warioware. What comes through this mechanical diversity is an effort not necessarily to make something totally coherent, but rather an effort to have fun making something fun.

      If this game has a theme, ultimately this is it. Everybody in Catgirl has some kind of artistic practice they love to make or consume in one way or another, and each of their relationships with this art is twisted when they’re forced to make slop they don’t care about under conditions they aren’t happy in. This applies to all of the major characters: with Star, who has to draw images of her captor when all she really wants to draw is cats, or with Nova, who has to change the names of all the characters in the library to the names of the antagionist, or with Jieun, who has to rewrite all her songs to be about evil women controlling her. They, too, have The Worm, this perceived responsibility to create, pushed unto them by forces outside of their control. For me it’s a real, actual Worm which tangibly exists. You can pick it up and stretch it out and everything. The Worm for them just happens to take the form of a beautiful woman or demon lady, who imprisons them and forces them to do what she desires. That part doesn’t sound so bad to me!!!! But different strokes etc. My point is that they have to spend their time productively, and only in doing so are they allowed to feel “satisfied” by their work. But left to their own devices, all these pretty girls love making art not because it’s a productive thing to do to advance their career and impress their boss or whatever, but because it’s fun.

      This is something that City Girl seems to understand intuitively through experience about the creative process. Catgirl is a game about making stuff you want because you want to, and chilling out about it completely. You don’t need to be making the most interesting artistic piece in the world all the time, and the things you create don’t have to be the most sardonically witty or intelligent things in the world. It’s not that deep, and it doesn’t have to be. You can just make something because it makes you feel good. You should never feel like you have to make art as some sort of solemn responsibility you should feel guilty about not always fulfilling. You make art for the same reason you kiss boys or go to the beach and eat ice cream or do a little dance or play Warioware: because in some ways, whether it’s meant to or not, it just feels good to do. It’s satisfying to make something, but only when it truly comes from your own desire.

      this sephiroth looking chick probably knows what shes talking about!

      It’s okay to give in to that desire. It’s actually the only way to make something genuinely interesting. Good writers are perverts. The act of creating something, pretty much anything, is the act of actualizing some desire within you, and the more you lean into that desire, the more authentic to yourself and your creative vision the finished thing becomes, whatever it may be. You make something because it excites you! The moment it no longer excites you and you do it just because you feel you must is the moment you start making something passionless and plain. That aside, you don’t even need to be doing it because you’re hoping for a complete and beautiful finished product. I don’t do this because I’m dead set on making the Worlds Greatest Blog (Lmao) so much as I do this for the sake of a process which I find pleasurable. Sitting and playing all these games, paying closer attention to them than I might without the writing that comes with it, it’s satisfying in a certain hard to place way. It activates something in me to care in this way. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise!

      David Lynch said that there’s a myth about creativity, this myth that good art comes from this place of suffering and sadness. David Lynch argues that we have to believe that all the great artists made this art not because they were suffering, but because they loved to make something. In his book Catching the Big Fish, Lynch says:

      “Right here people might bring up Vincent van Gogh as a painter who did great work in spite of — or because of — his suffering. I like to think that van Gogh would have been even more prolific and even greater if he wasn’t so restricted by the things tormenting him. I don’t think it was pain that made him so great — I think his painting brought him whatever happiness he had.”

      I’ve heard him say before that we’re all supposed to be running around like little puppy dogs, happily wagging our tails together. What’s the point if we aren’t happy? The moral of the story is to do things you enjoy, whether its an artistic practice or a silly little blog or something else entirely. If it sucks, hit da bricks! The Worm, I realize, is a sickness. It exists mostly to make girls like me feel bad about themselves when they haven’t hit some imaginary standard, a standard also created by The Worm. I hate this Worm called guilt. And its buddy shame too! I knock em both upside the head!!!! Rattle em around!!!! Etc!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Like all things that make me personally feel bad, The Worm should be sought out and destroyed. So I hope you’re destroying your Worms. Make your games and your music. Make your paintings and your movies and whatnot. and make damn sure that you’re enjoying doing it!

      thanks for reading

      PS: in lieu of a long credits sequence in Catgirl, the game instead ends with a link to buy the Catgirl OST. i mentioned and linked it before, but it is really good, so i’m mentioning and linking it again here. yippee!