Ooh, this is brand new to me! Picked it up! Thanks!

"Voters' frustrations with the status quo are not the same as a desire for socialism," so always leave the door open for barbarism, too.

Yeah, I think at its best (like most criticism at its best) it does the Jonathan Gold thing: "The only question is why." Why put those blocks there?

At its worst it disappears into abstractions from first principles and prides itself on being disconnected from games as they're actually experienced.

But that's a *textural* difference, and this notion of gameplay-as-a-discrete-thing-fully-seprabale-from-aesthetics tends to work weirdly hard to ignore texture. In order to be mystified by the difference here, we have to pretend that, by default, we experience games purely and entirely as rulesets.

The parsimonious reading is that they mean the two things are *functionally* identical: that there's nothing you can *do* with the one as a player that you can't do with the other.

That's still somewhat incorrect, of course: You can move Mario differently while you've already failed for a start.

That does seem pretty open-and-shut.

But with one woman and eight malfunctioning Roombas.