My daughter!

Excuse my lack of preamble, but she is without a doubt my most favorite part of 2022.

It’s very hard to describe the joy that courses through my entire mind, body, and soul every time I see her. I’ve wanted to be a father for as long as I can remember. But hours before she was due, I had this paralyzing fear that some damaged part of my brain would about-face and reject the pride of parenthood. Thankfully, I was very wrong. The second I heard her cry, my heart burst. It was one of the greatest moments of my life, and things only got better. I discovered an incredible force of nature. Instinct took over. I immediately knew exactly how to care for her; how to protect her. And not only her, but my wife who had just endured the incredibly invasive and major surgery of Caesarean section — common, yes, but it will lay out strongest person.

Caring for both my wife and daughter

For the three days we spent in the hospital, I was on constant watch for my family. The second my daughter cried for food, I was awake and ready. Every moment my wife asked for help out of bed or for a breakfast burrito, I was there. I yearned to support and care.

Prior to leaving for the hospital, I had packed my bag with books and video games, none of which I touched post-operation. I found the experience of “being there” riveting. It was the most present I’ve felt in a long time and I’ll cherish it for as long as I’m able.

Now, onto the “things”…

(Favorite) Games of the Year

1. Loco Looper — A crafty iOS puzzle game built with Metal, Swift, and SwiftUI. It lulls the player into a sense of calm with very simple 6x6 railroad crafting levels, but eventually turns into an incredibly challenging puzzler, always leaving one piece to frustrate one to their wits end. Continuing the theme of my daughter, I have extremely fond memories working through Loco Looper while rocking her to sleep every 2-3 hours for weeks at a time. Hail portrait single-handed mobile games!
2. Tunic — (I’m listening to the soundtrack as I write this. What a joy!) An homage to early 2D Zelda titles, printed game manuals (in foreign languages), and an unparalleled sense of discovery. I started this game on an M1 Mac and finished on Steam Deck — a joy on both. Do yourself a favor and turn on No Fail Mode. The combat doesn’t do its brilliant experience of discovery any favors.
3. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge — I won’t go on too much here. Read my review. All I can say is that TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge is a damn near perfect brawler with wonderful nods to both the original TMNT cartoon as well as the 8- and 16-bit era of TMNT video games.
4. Kirby and the Forgotten Land — I have not completed Kirby and the Forgotten Land, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less charming or impressive. For a Kirby game, I was not expecting something as rich and detailed as this. It demos poorly, so just move ahead with the purchase. You won’t regret it.
5. Elden Ring? — I didn’t play many games from 2022 in 2022, but I did pick up Elden Ring last week. In the 3–4 hours I’ve played, this game is incredible. I hate the lack of explanation about the controls, menus, items, builds, etc., and I’ve avoided any enemy more difficult than two swipes of a sword, but the world, fidelity, animation, and music are jaw dropping. This is my chill game of 2022. I’m sure that will change when I actually start playing in 2023.

Mastodon

For nearly 15 years, I was a heavy Twitter user. I made connections with many people I felt I had no business connecting with, found my tribe, and boosted my blog’s reach through some fortunate retweets and endorsements. And I tweeted a lot. But the act of tweeting began to feel more like an addiction and ephemeral than something of value. It was far from the feeling I get when I write a blog post, which was becoming fewer and fewer by the year. Once Elon Musk took ownership of Twitter, I bolted. I deleted all of my tweets, more or less bid adieu to the platform, and leaned into the Mastodon account I created in 2018. And it feels fantastic.

Since November 13, 2022, I’ve been monitoring my social media Screen Time:

I find these results shocking. Not only have I reduced my overall social media usage, but dropping Twitter was much easier than I thought it would be thanks to a wide adoption of Mastodon from many folks in the communities I take part in.

While my time engaging with Mastodon is on the rise, that’s not due to an algorithm. It genuinely feels like a healthier, friendlier social-network. And the decentralized nature means my content won’t just disappear.

In small part, I owe Musk thanks in prompting me to have a healthier relationship with social media. In large part, I owe Mastodon for being there when the rug of a centralized platform was pulled out from under its users. A brilliant technology at the right time.

If you’re unfamiliar with Mastodon or think it might be too complex, check out Brendon Bigley’s “How to Use Mastodon” explainer at his blog, Wavelengths.

Analogue Pocket Cores

I received my Analogue Pocket in 2021 and loved it then. But in 2022, its firmware was updated to unlock the FPGA technology inside to developers. Through this, multiple open-source “cores” have been released for the device including cores for NES, SNES, Genesis, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, amongst others.

These cores have changed my relationship with emulation and 8- and 16-bit retro gaming in general. Being able to hardware emulate my catalog of NES, SNES, and Genesis games and take them on the go is a childhood dream realized. In the early to mid ’90s, the best we could get was a Game Boy or Game Gear with slimmed down games, grayscale graphics, and/or poor battery life. Honestly, most of those experiences were great, but they paled in comparison Super Mario Bros. 3 on the NES, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on the SNES, or Sonic 2 on the Genesis. We just wanted to carry those experiences in our back pocket. And now we can. At a hardware level. The future.

Steam Deck

I’ve been missing out on PC gaming for some time. With the Steam Deck, I can finally enjoy classics like Half-Life 2, Halo, Mass Effect, etc., etc. On top of that, the ease of emulation through the Steam Deck is remarkable. While the emulation is not operating at a hardware level like the aforementioned Analogue Pocket, I am able to quickly load-up 3D favorites from PS2, PS3, GameCube, Wii, and many other consoles of yore. The Steam Deck is a wonderful companion to my Analogue Pocket, a great current-gen console (in handheld form!), and a hopeful glimpse into the future of handheld gaming.

Music

New Releases

• Band of Horses - “Things Are Great” — A return to form for pop/party rock indie mainstays.
• Momma - “Household Name” — ’90s era alternative wrapped up in a Gen-Z mindset.
• Dawes - “Misadventures of Doomscroller” - Throw Elvis Costello, The Greatful Dead, The Band, and a dash of Elton John into a blender.
• LIES - “Camera Chimera EP” — One half of American Football picks up where LP3 left off.
• The Mars Volta - “s/t” - Modern prog-rock legends return with a pivot into high-pop.
• mitch murder - “Selection 6” — Another collection of b-sides and rarties by the ’80s cheese synthwave mastermind.

Vinyls

• Further Seems Forever — “The Moon Is Down” 20th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set
• Thursday - “Full Collapse” 21st Anniversary Edition (3-10” Box Set)
• Sigur Rós - ( ) 20th anniversary edition - Signed Deluxe Box Set

Monique Judge, writing for The Verge:

If what is happening on Twitter hasn’t demonstrated it, our relationship with these social media platforms is tenuous at best. The thing we are using to build our popularity today could very well be destroyed and disappear from the internet tomorrow, and then what?

What happens to all the content you have created? Where will the archive of all your funny memes and jokes be? What is going to happen to all those selfies you felt cute in but didn’t delete later?

The answer is we don’t know because we don’t control Twitter (or Facebook or Instagram or Snapchat or TikTok). If one of these companies decided to shut down their service permanently, there would be nothing we could do about it.

Owning your content and controlling your platform is essential, and having a personal blog is a great way to do that.

This blog started out on the managed platform Wordpress.com. Wanting to own my own content, I spun up a new self-hosted Wordpress.org site called The State of Gaming (tsogaming.com) which would eventually become Zero Counts. In 2020, I migrated from Wordpress to Gatsby due to (amongst other things) a strong desire to get my content out of a database, into Markdown files, and stored in remote and local repositories, thus backed up via Time Machine, Drobo, Backblaze, iCloud, etc. Zero Counts and my career as a writer may not go anywhere, but it’s important for me to own, catalog, and control my work.

I genuinely appreciate the sentiment of Judge’s piece — I want to invest much more time blogging on Zero Counts in 2023 — but I struggle to understand how personal blogging crosses the chasms of connection, discoverability, and elevation. Perhaps surfing the web is a muscle I haven’t exercised for over a decade thanks to Big Algorithm, but I’m not exactly sure where to start with finding new blogs and outlets. Twitter was my primary source for new and interesting voices through retweets from my favorite writers and outlets. I think Mastodon has become my go-to community, but I don’t find myself connected to the zeitgeist, finding new content, or even engaging with my favorite creators on the network due to the lack of an algorithm. And that’s OK. It’s actually nice! I just hope I can find a way to find and consume the work old favorites as well as new and diverse voices.

I found Judge’s post via my RSS reader Reeder, so that’s a start.

The Besties Podcast discussing Marvel Snap during their Game of the Year bracket:

Justin McElroy: Recently, I’ve found the Locations that will pop up are so wild and random and significant that it sort of makes all your deck building and even the playing of the match irrelevant. I’m running into more and more areas like that. I had the planet “Ego” Location pop-up and that just plays all your cards for you. Like, you don’t even play anymore. And there’s a lot of Locations like that, where it’s so wild that it doesn’t matter what I’ve got in my deck — the match is already over.

Griffin McElroy: There was a recent Location that had you draw three cards then it destroyed the rest of your hand. I run a deck based around a handful of cards that if I don’t draw them, that’s it. If that was the first Location on the very first round of the game, I would say, “welp, I’m gonna lose, so bye.” And the game’s not particularly fun when someone bails out after a round or two. It completely gets rid of the whole Snapping-wager mechanic, which is so brilliant because it forces you to slow-play and bluff sometimes, which are mechanics that haven’t really been featured in a trading card game before. But it’s rendered completely void by these Locations that pretty much turn it into a roll of the dice.

Marvel Snap was a saving grace when rocking my infant daughter back to sleep after middle-of-the-night feedings. I could squeeze in five or so games due to its quick-start gameplay, small playfield, six round limit, and low stakes. It’s the perfect pick-up and play mobile experience. (Honestly, the 10s splash screen is the most tedious part.)

When the game first launched, I felt like I was able to run quick math to strategize the most opportune plays, which led to informed Snaps, the wagering mechanic Griffin mentions above. But as time went on, the Locations that alter the playfield with unique rules became so batshit insane that I felt like I could no longer track how a particular play would net out. I might increase Iron Man’s power 20-fold and obliterate my enemy’s cards or somehow sabotage myself by accidentally negating my cards’ powers, destroying my cards, or sending my cards to my enemy. Sometimes, a combination of all of the above would be triggered.

Hearing The Besties discuss the chaotic turn Marvel Snap’s design has taken initially had me drawing parallels to Mario Kart’s “anyone’s game” design. But the more I think about it, the more I believe Marvel Snap’s wild and seemingly unpredictable behavior highlights the balance and restraint designed into Mario Kart.

Ben Thompson:

Forty years of context may seem like overkill when it comes to examining the FTC’s attempt to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision, but I think it is essential for multiple reasons.

First, the video game market has proven to be extremely dynamic, particularly in terms of 3rd-party developers:

• Atari was vertically integrated
• Nintendo grew the market with strict control of 3rd-party developers
• Sony took over the market by catering to 3rd-party developers and differentiating on hardware
• Xbox’s best generation leaned into increased commodification and ease-of-development
• Sony retook the lead by leaning back into vertical integration

That is quite the round trip, and it’s worth pointing out that attempting to freeze the market in its current iteration at any point over the last forty years would have foreclosed future changes.

If I rely on Ben Thompson for one thing, it’s to distill core principles, milestones, and maneuvers from the complexities of business history into simple patterns and through lines. This piece is a shining example.

Thompson’s argument aside, “Consoles and Competition” serves as a succinct and beautiful history of the video game business.

Today, I stumbled upon the Rands in Repose 20th anniversary post. This struck a chord:

Sometime during 2022, this weblog turned twenty years old. No one noticed, including me. While I write for this place actively, other creative endeavors increasingly occupy my free time, including the aforementioned Slack community, the podcast, and the bikes. This means fewer articles per year, but the writing… never stops.

Sometime during 2022, this weblog turned ten years old. No one noticed, including me.

In an fit of self-preservation and soul searching, I doled out the history of Zero Counts below. It’s amazing to see what this blog has brought me. It was an effort to break into games journalism. Professionaly, that goal was never realized. But the blog exists, therefore my writings on the games industry also exist. So, in a way, the goal was realized from the start.

As I reflect, recognition might have been a more accurate goal. That sounds a bit shallow, but for an industry I’ve been wanting to break into since childhood, any semblence of affirmation from industy players or adjacent feels great. And by my own definition, I’d call myself successful. Through will and/or luck, my writing has been linked to by Daring Fireball, Stratechery, How Games are Changing the World, and Into the Aether. Some of my favorite writers, journalists, podcasters, and creators have become Twitter mutals. It’s a bit mystifying to me, and it wasn’t until I wrote out the history that I connected the dots.

An unintended side-effect of the blog has been professional success. Through Zero Counts, I’ve learned to write and edit better, kept my eye on the digital publishing landscape, and learned enough web dev to be dangerous. All of which have been applied to my career in tech. I’m doing things profressionally that I wouldn’t have dreamed of ten years ago, in large part because of blogging. Crazy.

Writing the history was cathartic for me. Maybe you’ll find some insipration in it too.

Thanks to anyone who’s ever read or shared a post. Retweeted, liked, or replied. Thanks to John Gruber, Ben Thompson, Zach Kahn, Brendon Bidgely, Stephen Hilger, Colin Campbell, Chris Plante, Pavan Rajam, and so many others. I’ve never received a penny for my thoughts on Zero Counts, but I’ll take a link or retweet any day.

Here’s to ten more years of writing, developing, and learning. 🥃

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Somewhere around April 13, 2012, I simultaneously fell in love with running, podcasts, and blogging. I had relocated for an intra-company internship away from friends and family. I would bide my time between work and sleep with jogging. I had grown tired of listening to music and decided to give podcasts a fair shake. The Nerdist Network of shows all featured cohesive artwork which enticed me to subscribe to a handful. I immediately locked into the (now defunct and delisted) Indoor Kids, a video game podcast hosted by (then small-time comedian) Kumail Nanjiani, his wife Emily Gordon, and a rotating cast of comedy and industry guests. I was smitten. Their mature conversations about video games came off as novel and inspired me to explore my own thoughts on games.

During the internship, I’d purchased an Xbox 360 and Skyrim to pass the time. I quickly realized I was chasing more side-quests than focusing on the main objective. I drew a corollary to my own life, wrote my first post ”Finding the Rails”, and sent a copy to Kumail and Emily. And Emily wrote back! This was a powerful moment. My writing felt validated and these podcasters felt real.

2012–2014

My post to Kumail and Emily wasn’t my first writing. I had been writing music reviews, video game reviews, and musings at TheStarrList since 2011. But after Emily’s response and with the extra alone time during my internship, I challenged myself to write more often. And I found writing through the lens of video games eased the process.

In an effort to increase readership, I cross-posted my writing on an IGN blog figuring there would be overlap between IGN readers and my gaming focused pieces. On January 29, 2013, I was highlighted in the Community Spotlight on IGN’s homepage — “One of the best up and coming bloggers on IGN, Kylestarr writes some of the best non-gaming blogs in our community.” Like Emily’s response before it, and as a long time fan of IGN, this accolade made my head spin and sent me into overdrive.

I began writing multiple posts a week, squeezing the most fleeting thoughts for tiny morsels of content. I started pushing myself to research. I wanted to contribute back to the video game industry I so enjoyed reading about. Genre/Gender Breakdowns for 2013 and 2014 found traction with IGN reporters. John Gruber’s Daring Fireball appeared on my radar prompting me to write link blog style. Polygon.com also became a steady read for me and inspired my writing, design, and content platform curiosity (i.e. Chorus). TheStarrList was growing beyond musings and into an industry and culturally focused blog. It needed to evolve.

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INTERLUDE

As fate would have it, it was also around this time that I found myself joining the podcasts industry. After my internship, I’d struggled for more than a year to find the next step in my career journey. However, the inspiration I’d had from The Indoor Kids never left. I’d launched my own podcast focused on my friends’ journeys into their dream jobs. Creating a podcast was harder than I thought it ought to be. I happened upon a job listening as a podcast content producer and landed the gig on my background in customer service, my experience launching a podcast, and my misgivings about the barrier to entry. This will serve me in the future…

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2014–2020

In a desire to own my content, I took blogging beyond the writing itself and decided to learn the basics of web development. While TheStarrList lived on Wordpress.com, I wanted push beyond its templated limits. With Wordpress.org, I was able to customize the HTML, CSS, and PHP. This allowed me to format my link blogs in a way I found intuitive and attractive.

Seeing as my content was moving in an industry and culture focused direction, I felt a rebrand was also in order. I chose “The State of Gaming”. “State” was play on “government”, meant to focus on aspects outside of the games themselves — culture, social, education, health, business… government. This was the lens that Kumail and Emily used for Indoor Kids and inspired me to write in the first place.

With this new format, I felt like I was making active contributions to video game journalism. In doing so, I began analyzing video game companies’ business tactics. In ”Hail Mario”, I took a stab at understanding Nintendo’s Mario Kart 8 release strategy. To my shock, the post was picked up by Daring Fireball. Views on this post shot through the roof. It was also with the Daring Fireball link that I began to meet new acquaintances on Twitter. Folks like Zach Kahn (then at Vox Media), Into the Aether’s Brendon Bigley, Stratechery’s Ben Thompson. There was a sense that connecting with the media world could become a reality.

But with all of this, I immediately hated the name and look of “The State of Gaming”. I needed something fresh, personal, and unique. Not a month later, I rebranded again.

Zero Counts

I still have no idea what “Daring Fireball” means, but it seems personal and is certainly unique. I landed on Zero Counts as a homage to a phrase my step-brother and I would use to describe video games that used x0 to signify “zero lives left”. In the early days of gaming, and probably still today, there was a discrepancy between “x1”, meaning you’re on your last life, and “x0”. Finding out a game allowed one more chance at victory when you reached x0 was pure elation. “Zero counts!” we would exclaim.

As for the design, I used blue, white, and black as an homage to Mega Man. My first memory was of Mega Man 2, so it felt appropriate. Personal.

Relaunching The State of Gaming as Zero Counts felt like a sea change in the blog. I would become less prolific, but more comfortable.

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INTERLUDE

Work also began to heat up. My passion for online journalism and web development that Zero Counts enabled helped find me on the launch team of a major news aggregation service. This allowed me to peek behind the curtain of web development and CMSes as well as traveling the globe assisting various partners and heroes. Meeting folks like Polygon’s then Editor-in-chief Chris Grant (thanks Zach!), Rene Ritchie, Steven Aquino, and Federico Viticci was a dream come true.

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2020–Today

The last big change to Zero Counts came slowly. After a few years of working on the news aggregation service, I jumped to managing a team of content producers, editors, and web developers. Professionally, I not only grew my skills in people management, but furthered my web development skills. I applied things I’d learned from Zero Counts like SEO, CI/CD platforms, and front-end dev to my day-to-day.

It was in this role that I came across GatsbyJS. I won’t rehash my ”From Wordpress to Gatsby” post, but the short of it is that I learned a bit of React and transitioned this blog to a static-site. It was a huge performance win and allows me to manage the content via GitHub from any of my devices, free of a CMS.

All this is to say that while my blogging has cooled down, Zero Counts itself has been a transformative vehicle. It’s a hobby that has acted as a platform for my career. I was inspired to create it from a podcast. I then took a job in the podcast industry. I became intrigued by digital publications, began to understand web development, moved into self-hosting, and eventually took a job in the online news media space. I’ve taken my experience running this blog into my current role where I can speak to web standards and best practices. When I was writing more often, I became a better writer and editor. I’ve met a good handful of idols and created some lasting friendships. And while I’ve always had a desire to work professionally in the video games industry, Zero Counts has helped me learn more about it — highlighting its strengths and calling out its shortcomings. It’s made me feel like I’ve made meaningful contributions to the space.