The thing that must be contended with in any discussion of Battlefield is this: Battlefield is very Battlefieldy.

We posit an artifact in today's strip, one of great power for the writer.

Here's the strip we did for Wednesday's Make-A-Strip panel, concerning Gabriel's legitimately weird gambling prowess. It seems like you couldn't really have gambling "prowess." It seems like a game with a very specific outcome and what he does in these places shouldn't be happening. If he gets anywhere near a computer, the machine ceases to be a computer at all; but when he gets near a table, pit bosses start to sweat from their necks and they don't know why. I used to think I was good at Blackjack, but after this year's devastating financial excavation, I realize that I'm only good at it when operating in his probability shredding nimbus.

I'm completely obsessed with Westworld. There are a lot of articles about Westworld, but I don't read them; I only talk to my friends about it. I know enough from the headlines out barking for their wares inside that HBO has essentially weaponized the thinkpiece as a modus of self-promotion. But how could you not write about it, is my question. We're constantly hearing about the eternal, whirling dangers of games aping cinema, or not being willing to accept that they exist in the continuum of storytelling and thus have much to learn from it, or being desirous of the cultural cache afforded other media, but here you have something quite odd: a show informed by games, but not in the gaudy, obvious way this tends to happen. A show informed by the fundamental ideas behind games, gamers, and gaming that - if you start getting into it - is a kind of game itself, by virtue of its folded mysteries.

Why am I awake at 2:43 in the morning, when I SHOULD be asleep? Ask fucking Firaxis, they'll tell you. They'll tell you that, in collaboration with Satan the Devil, they made an electronic prison for the mind. But I managed to escape long enough to deliver unto you a vision of incredible merchandise, all of which can be clicked to see larger versions:

I fly enough now that anything below five hours or so I don't even feel.

Halloween seems like the right day to push a game where you make monsters out of other monster parts and then use those monsters to fight another, weirder monster. I know these guys, but don't let that put you off: they're very reasonable, possibly even good people.

Civilization VI is out, which you might know already, because you have become fused with your computer over the last week or so and are reading this post as data shunted directly into your visual cortex.

I usually don't get to put up the Pin Quest, but Gabe is drawing like two weeks of comics to get ready for PAX Aus so I've got the tiller. I'm cranked, though, because this year is a bumper crop for Aus pins, alongside what might be the coolest show set yet, care of Camp Weedonwantcha's Katie Rice! Alright, let's get down to business.

It's a great time, as always; individual tickets for the event can be secured here, while full table sponsorships can be investigated here.

I don't know much about Titanfall 2 yet, other than the fact that it is clearly a romance. In my travels I often encounter subcultures or representatives of subcultures with unique avenues of titillation. I don't have the receptors for this, I literally feel nothing when I picture it, but I have to imagine that being enveloped inside a steel man is probably doin' something for somebody. I'm sure for them it's like, "God damn. Finally." And then they press and hold the Square or X button over and over and over.

I really like the Nintendo Switch commercial, which places me at odds with Mr. Gob Dobolina, who derives from it only shame and the sense, the unavoidable sense, that the meat in his chest keeping him alive has a shelf date, like all other meat.

If you have not heard already, Microsoft just announced a new device called the Surface Studio. It’s essentially a Surface computer for your desktop. From what I understand, you can go to any Microsoft store today and actually play with one. It’s a big beautiful screen on this slick armature that lets you adjust it from a normal monitor to something more like a drafting table for drawing on. I get questions about Surface devices and drawing all the time and I am sure this one will be no different. In fact I can already see tweets coming in asking what I think. So If you’re curious what I think about the Surface Studio, you are in luck, because I have been drawing on one for the last week.

There is a quote from George R. R. Martin on the cover of Dinosaur Knights, which is the second volume of what may or may not be called the Dinosaur Lords trilogy. Here is the quote:

The first time I saw Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes must have been a couple years ago, when Virtual Reality gear was even more rarified than it was now: the presentation involved a card table and what must have been an Oculus DK2. In the real world this configuration wasn't much to look at, but the real world is a woven fabric consisting primarily of lies we have agreed to believe. I spent a very long time there watching other people play it because I'm obsessed with asymmetry. And Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes is asymmetrical as fuck.

(My first iteration of this post was thoroughly dramatic on account of an open italics tag. Let's try this again.)