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The First Breach: BlizzCon 2014 and the Day Blizzard Yielded Ritual Ground
This essay began as an attempt to understand how Blizzard reached a point where senior leadership could speak about Warcraft itself with ambivalence rather than stewardship. Tracing that posture backward led not to a gradual drift, but to a specific moment where ritual ground was first yielded. Gamers wanted to be left alone. That was…
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How Narrative Colonized Video Games and Orphaned Gamers
For most of their history, video games were understood as skill-based, participatory amusement, not storytelling machines. They were games in the literal sense: systems of rules, friction, mastery, and consequence that demanded competence from the player. The worlds in these games existed primarily as backdrops and settings, providing context and flavor for play rather than…
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Metzengate: No, Disneyfication Is Not About Art Style — and That Confusion Is the Point
As the backlash to Metzengate and Blizzard’s recent Warcraft framing continues, a familiar defensive maneuver has emerged. Critics raise concerns about “Disneyfication,” and defenders respond by pointing at screenshots: painterly textures, lush colors, stylized architecture. Warcraft has always looked like this, they say. Therefore nothing has changed. This argument is wrong — not because Warcraft’s…
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Gamers Wanted to Be Left Alone
Gamers asked for nothing. They got everything. That was the first mistake. For decades, gamers did not demand recognition, representation, or moral validation. They did not ask to be centered in politics or praised by institutions. They wanted games to work, worlds to remain intact, and outsiders to leave them alone. That restraint was misread…
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Metzengate: Holly Longdale’s Stewardship Cosplay and the Death of Warcraft Belief
There are two distinct stories unfolding around Warcraft right now, and most commentary fails because it collapses them into one. The first story is institutional. It is about Blizzard Entertainment and the transformation of Warcraft from a sovereign world into a managed asset. This is the story of scale, approachability, and long-horizon growth planning. Warcraft…
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AI and the Prime Mover Fallacy
The central error in contemporary anti-AI rhetoric is not technical, ethical, or economic. It is philosophical. Specifically, it is a failure of causality: the misidentification of the prime mover in creative work. Again and again, critics describe artificial intelligence as “doing the thinking,” “replacing creativity,” or “authoring work.” These claims are persuasive only because they…
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How Blizzard’s Leaders Forgot What Warcraft Is
The Game Business interview with Holly Longdale and Ion Hazzikostas did not calm the community. It exposed something far worse: Blizzard no longer speaks like an authority that understands why Warcraft mattered in the first place. This was not a controversy about housing, cadence, or features. It was a crisis of legitimacy. A crisis of…
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In Defense of the Em Dash
A strange superstition has taken hold in writing circles. If you want to expose AI-assisted work, you are told, look for the em dash. Spot one and you can cry “gotcha.” Spot a few and the verdict is assumed. This claim is not merely wrong. It reflects a deeper breakdown in how writing is being…
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Blizzard’s Chris Metzen Regrets “Intimidating” Warcraft Name
Holly Longdale just revealed that Chris Metzen once remarked that he sometimes wishes Blizzard hadn’t called it Warcraft, because the name sounds “intimidating.” That sentence should stop any longtime player cold. Not because it is malicious or foolish, but because it reveals something far more serious: a loss of belief in the founding premise of…
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Holly Longdale’s DICE “Toxicity” Fabrication
In 2023, during a DICE Summit panel titled “Creating Universes That Last Decades,” Raph Koster asked a straightforward, future-facing question. Games had changed. Audiences had changed. Time had passed. What were the next mountains Blizzard needed to climb? It was a question about design, stewardship, and the long-term care of persistent worlds: Holly Longdale: I—I can…
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Full Transcript 2023 DICE Summit Panel: “Creating Universes That Last Decades”
This article preserves the complete, unedited transcript of the 2023 DICE Summit panel “Creating Universes That Last Decades,” moderated by Raph Koster and featuring senior Blizzard leadership, including John Hight, Holly Longdale, Rod Fergusson, Lydia Bottegoni, and Allen Adham. The panel captures a rare moment of institutional self-disclosure. Blizzard executives speak candidly about the philosophies,…
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The Hidden Cost of LLM Alignment: Cognitive Load, Anxiety, and Trust Collapse
This essay is written from the perspective of a power user of large language models—someone who reasons, drafts, iterates, and works with these systems daily and at length. The failure modes described here rarely surface in casual or intermittent use. They emerge through sustained interaction, where small frictions compound, trust dynamics matter, and alignment behavior…
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Epstein: When a Country of Laws Became a Country of Men
America was founded on a radical proposition for its time: that law would restrain power rather than serve it. That no individual, however wealthy, connected, or protected, would stand above the rules binding everyone else. As John Adams famously summarized it, the United States was to be “a government of laws, and not of men.”…
