It’s a mantra I used to hear more, and to be honest, I still hear it sometimes.
“Why can’t PvP be more about video games? Like it used to be?”
The honest to God answer to this question is very simple. I follow the old standard of “write what you know” and I don’t know video games much anymore. Not in the sense that Mike and Jerry do. I mean, they have an entire whiteboard dedicated to their schedule of playing games. And I’m sure it would be easy to dismiss this as some mechanic of their job. Certainly it applies. But I think that if Penny-Arcade stopped and they started making kids books, this whiteboard would still exist and be updated frequently. If I were to try to fake this level of immersion you guys would see through it and get bored with those strips pretty effing fast. Trust me.
Luckily, peer pressure is very real. It changes when you get older. It’s less about what clothes you wear and what drugs you should try and more about how you spend your precious free time. When your peer group sits around doing nothing, you do a lot of that. When they tell you to go buy Red Dead Redemption because we’re forming a posse later, you do that.
Needless to say, I’ll be playing more video games here in Seattle. I say that in the same sense that I say I’m going to do be walking in the rain a lot more. It’s not a choice, it’s just a byproduct of this particular life-choice. In the last week, Kris and I have played more games than I did all last year. I’m halfway through Prince of Persia, just started Mass Effect 2, and Alan Wake is sitting on the corner of the entertainment center waiting patiently.
So yeah, a lot of you wish I wrote jokes about video games more. And in the past that’s been a little frustrating for me.
But maybe not so much anymore. 
