Like many people who love video games, I have a conundrum: I own more games than I will ever realistically have time to play. It’s a problem that has accumulated slowly over many years, compounded by Steam sales, charity bundles, and subscription services. It’s of course a wonderful predicament to be in, as it reflects the richness of a vast creative form¹. But the fact that I would seemingly never catch up weighed on me, and it invited reflection when I was setting goals for 2025 in January.

Three years ago, I experimented with a structured weekly sketching practice and managed to maintain it for the full 52 weeks. Each sketch took about an hour, which proved to be doable even with a busy schedule. What if I applied that same method to sampling the games from my backlog?

To make this work, the first thing I had to let go of was any hope of actually completing these games. This is a sharp contrast to the way I usually like playing video games: one at a time, engaging deeply with systems and stories, playing until the credits roll or I decide to move on. Many of these games had been “on my playlist” for years. Sadly, I had to accept that I would either sample them for a few hours as part of this experiment, or I would probably never play them.

As a professional game designer, I also feel it’s beneficial for me to “play widely”². The games in my backlog ranged from Kei to AAA, and were from studios all over the world. I pulled old consoles out of storage to play games on PS3, Vita, and 3DS. I have found it enormously helpful in my creative practice to draw inspiration from games of all kinds, to build on what has been done before and to point towards what hasn’t.

Catching up to December, I have just completed my 52^nd weekly backlog play. Every Friday this year I chose a game from my backlog (helpfully tracked on Backloggd) and played it for at least an hour. Some games I decided to continue playing, others I moved on from. In the end I completed 22 of them, though most of those were very short (1-2 hours). I also gave myself the flexibility to add to my backlog as I went, which allowed me to play nine new releases from 2025. The oldest game was Mega Man Legends from 1997; I played it on a PS TV that I impulse bought off eBay.

Here are some mini-review highlights³ of some games that particularly resonated with me:

• Folklore (PS3, 2007): I bought this game because of its reputation as a hidden JRPG gem from the otherwise fallow PS3 era. Folklore is an occult detective story set on a remote seaside town in Ireland and prominently features Celtic mythology. Each realm is a little puzzle where you absorb new abilities from enemies, then figure out how to use them against other enemies or hazards. The collectible picture book illustrations you find are secretly strategy guides, hinting at what counters what. Levels culminate in a boss fight that requires cleverly combining several of the abilities absorbed in that area.

• The Exit 8 (PC, 2023): The conceit for this game is brilliant. You’re stuck in a surreal loop in the repeating liminal corridors of a Japanese metro station; inspect the passageway for “anomalies” and retreat backwards if you find one. Sometimes the anomalies are obvious and scary; the best ones are the tiny odd details that require focus to spot, and act as jump scares in plain sight when you finally clock them.

• Vanquish (PS4 remaster, 2020): I was really glad to finally give this game its due, it’s an incredible action shooter that’s still like nothing else out there. Vanquish takes the core controls of a conventional third-person cover shooter, and adds rocket leg boosters for nearly unlimited mobility (!) and on-demand slow-mo (!!). You’ll need both to handle waves of enemies, massive robot bosses , and bullet hell barrages. I adore how its systems incentivize the player to push forward and take risks in battle.

• Many Nights a Whisper (PC, 2025): Another beautiful short game that blew me away with its premise. Ten years ago, you were chosen to perform a ritual. By day, under your mentor’s guidance, you practice sacred archery; by night, the people of the town come to offer you their wishes through a hole in the wall. Some are selfish, others are heartbreaking, and you must choose whether or not to accept them. The day of the ceremony comes, and you get one chance to land an impossible shot and light the holy brazier across the bay (but you’ve practiced, right?) Light the torch, and all the chosen wishes will be granted. No pressure.

• Jeanne d’Arc (PS5 port, 2024): Level-5 is a studio with a very distinctive charming style, and I’ve had my eye on this PSP SRPG for years. I was surprised and delighted when it received a port on modern consoles last year. I was also grateful for the QoL features the emulation provided (i.e. rewind and save states), since the game is tuned on the rather unforgiving side. This charming anime adaptation of French history, including full magical girl transformation sequences of Jeanne turning into a valkyrie-like armoured saint, really won me over.

• Metal Garden (PC, 2025): A short indie FPS with incredible atmosphere and vibes. The level design is superb, minimalist but flavourful, and pulls elements from both arena shooters and immersive sims. This small focused game by a solo dev punches far above its weight.

• Parasite Eve (PS1, 1998): I’ve always been curious about this game, Square in their golden age taking on survival horror mixed with RPG. The art direction grabbed me immediately, New York City in wintertime rendered in a gritty style with chunky polygons and prerendered backgrounds that feel somewhere between FF7 and FF8. The story is anchored as a supernatural police procedural, but takes some wild unpredictable swerves that make it feel like anything could happen. I only got about halfway into my playthrough but would love to get back to it.

• Bernband (PC, 2014): Wander through an alien city at night; there is no objective and no ending. Bernband is an influential walking sim by Tom van den Boogaart, a future member of Sokpop Collective. I really admired the excellent art direction and audio design. In its low-fi simplicity, it evokes an uncanny and mundane sense of a place. Tom is currently working on a remake!

• Like a Dragon: Ishin! (PS4 remake, 2023): This is my second attempt at getting into this series, after spending a few fun hours with Yakuza 0 that didn’t stick. This is not a game that is typically recommended for newcomers to the series, since its whole shtick is portraying recognizable Yakuza characters as historical figures. But I’m a history nerd, and I found the Bakumatsu setting really intriguing, and enjoyed walking around 19th century Kyoto. I was having a great time with this game, but regretfully decided to move on due to time constraints. The length of these massive open world games is the yet other barrier to me getting into the series.

• Arctic Eggs (PC, 2024): I had misunderstood this game to be a narrative-focused walking sim; it was much more difficult and skillful than I anticipated! This game really makes a meal of its one central pan-flipping mechanic. It demands that you develop a “flick of the wrist” muscle memory and keen intuition around the shape and weight of different items. The excellent pacing of new ingredients (and combinations of ingredients) keeps things feeling fresh.

Looking back now at the end of the year, I consider this weekly backlog play experiment to have been a success. The ten highlights above represent only a fraction of the games I enjoyed sampling this year, and I learned a lot from the games that didn’t resonate with me too. A structured practice like this has proven to be a successful method to overcome my mental blocks and just do something. It’s much better to have finally played these games, even for just a few hours, rather than gazing at them longingly in my backlog and wishing I had the time.

Now I’m left to debate whether I carry this practice into 2026, at the opportunity cost of some other new weekly goal⁴. I’m tempted to tinker with the formula a bit. For instance, I’ve found that longer RPGs aren’t a great fit for this method, since they often take several hours to really find their footing. Would a longer time commitment unlock that? I also noticed I had a natural tendency for selecting shorter games, since they at least had some possibility of completion. Perhaps I should make my selection randomly, and take the choice out of my biased hands…

As I figure things out, I’m wishing you and your loved ones a happy new year, and all the best in 2026 🎆

<sup>1. I’m grateful for the material well-being that also makes this possible. ↩
2. And read / watch / listen / be in nature widely too! ↩
3. This format consciously imitating Dan Bruno‘s great monthly media posts. ↩
4. A structured writing practice for this blog, for instance. ↩</sup>

The body is an unreliable videogame.

On February 13, I injured my leg on a run. I knew something wasn’t right as I approached home after a lunchtime 10K. I was upping my weekly mileage as I followed a training plan I found online to prepare me for a half marathon that was, at the point of the injury, about a month and a half away. I was trying a new route that day, crossing a major highway near my home via a pedestrian overpass. I didn’t want to lose time (ha), so I ran up and down the concrete steps. When I reached the other side—about 3.5 miles into my intended 6.5 mile run—I knew something had gone wrong. There was a sharp pain in my left glute with each stride. I ignored it, thinking it would work itself out on the back half of the run. I pushed ahead, and the pain dulled. Or so I told myself.

Shortly after the run, I found that I was limping badly. It hurt to simply walk or even just to put weight on it. I had to sit down to put on pants in the morning. Stairs were a challenge. I can tell you now that I thought I took an entire week off to let myself recover from whatever it was I did. But, no, that wouldn’t be true. Because I track all my runs, I can see that I only gave myself four days off and then went out on a 3.5-mile run. Sure, it was a Zone 2 run (keeping my heart rate at 60–70% of its maximum, which for me meant around 140ish beats per minute), but still: I could feel that something was still wrong. It would be at this point that you would assume that I would really give myself some time off to heal. But no. Two days later, my stats tells me, I went out and completed another 3.5-mile run, this time at an attempted race pace. Worse, my app tells me that I had input it as a 7-mile run, only reaching half of my apparent goal. I was pushing myself back to my peak, despite being in an obvious valley.

Surely now I would rest. No. Buzzer noise. Wrong-o. Three days later, I ran a full 8 miles, attempting to get back on my training plan for my half marathon, which had me increasing my long runs each week to a maximum of 10 miles a few weeks before the 13.1 mile race. I actually did manage to do this one at close to my race pace. But the pain was there. It was very much there. The next day I found myself badly limping again, traveling with my wife to an event, trying to pretend like I wasn’t worried that I’d really messed something up, that I’d made a bad thing worse.

Wanderstop is a game about burnout, as many have written. But it’s also a game about injury. 

It opens with our protagonist Alta sprinting through a forest, growing tired and unable to continue carrying herself forward. You are given the option when Alta stops, crumpled over in exhaustion, to tell yourself to rest or to tell yourself to keep pushing. Eventually, though, no matter what you do, Alta collapses and finds herself awakening on a bench next to a mountain of a man: Boro, the proprietor of Wanderstop, a tea shop that exists in a liminal, limbo-like space. Nearby to the bench is Alta’s sword, which she finds she can’t pick up. It is impossibly heavy. Boro, however, can lift it easily. He claims it weighs as you would expect a sword to weigh, but Alta, a former champion of a warrior, cannot lift it for the life of her. She cannot budge it an inch.

So begins a game about making tea when you’d much rather be kicking ass.

One of the things Wanderstop gets right about injury is that it is super annoying to stop and do nothing. Alta’s stature as a fighter—the best of the best—is relayed to the player strictly through exposition. This is not a Moonlighter-esque alternation between tea shop and arena fights. There is no uptime to counterbalance the downtime. We don’t get to experience Alta’s peak performance. We only hear about it. This is highly intentional, as it situates the game entirely within the realm of stopping. There is no “exciting” parallel game here to play. You are merely told of the excitement, of the achievement, of the dedication, and it works, because the game wants you to feel like you’ve hit a wall. And it achieves that by refusing to ever, ever give you any obvious rewards-based pleasure for making tea.

Here, roughly, is how you make tea in Wanderstop. First, you need to collect tea leaves from the bushes that surround the titular Wanderstop. Then, you have to dry those leaves in a process that takes several real-life minutes. There is no way to speed up this process, and it’s your first inclination that what we’re playing here is not a simulation of capitalism. There’s no upgrade path to make tea dry faster, nor any Basket+ to allow you to carry more leaves back to the tea shop. There’s even a bit of early game dialogue poking fun at the idea that you’d even look for something like that, wherein Alta asks Boro whether there are any tea-making metrics she should be improving. No, Wanderstop says. No, and stop it.

Once your tea leaves have dried, you proceed to making tea. To do so, you climb up a ladder to the top of a very tall tea-making contraption, pulling a rope to pour water into a reservoir. Then, you warm up that water by moving down the ladder, playing a small minigame similar to Stardew Valley’s fishing, wherein you have to keep pumping a bellows to keep a bar in the middle of a meter. There’s no way to fail this, however. You can take as long as you like, and screw up as much as you want. Once you finish heating the water, you go back up the ladder and around to the other side of the contraption, where you move the water from the reservoir to a brewing station. Then, you put in the leaves, and suddenly you have tea. Next, you open another valve and let the tea drip down to the pouring station, where you place a mug before pouring yourself or someone else a cup of tea.

This process never gets any less involved. In fact, throughout the game, you find yourself fulfilling more and more complicated requests from the people who visit Wanderstop, adding fruits and other ingredients that you must first grow, or following strange instructions to modify the steps described above. I don’t want to go too far into all of that, because my point is simply that you never optimize the process of tea-making. You simply make a lot of tea, again and again. It is slow. It is laborious. It is meant to feel slow and laborious. It is meant to feel like stopping. It is meant to make you want to do something else. For example: getting back to kicking ass.

Eventually, I sort of rested. I’d take several days off then attempt a one-mile run. Still, the pain persisted. So, then I’d take several more days off, then try another. Nope. Didn’t feel good. Eventually I found myself at the doctor, where I was given some anti-inflammatory medicine to help ease things back into motion after a full week of rest. I was encouraged to start slow and build back up. So that’s what I did. Well, that’s what I intended to do.

If you’ve ever trained for something like this, you know how disappointing it can be to find you’ve suddenly lost months of progress. It was as if somebody deleted my Elden Ring save file. You mean I have to do Limgrave again? The temptation is to sprint through the areas you already know. Yeah, yeah—I know what a 5K feels like. I don’t want to do that again. I want to get back to my longer runs. But, problem is, you can’t just do that, even if everything in you is screaming to just get back to your peak.

Around this time, I downloaded Gentler Streak. Something in the back of my mind remembered this article by Victoria Song on The Verge, and I thought, why not? (It helped that there was a super sale on a year’s subscription at the time, I feel compelled to admit.) I’ve never been one to try to fill my Apple Fitness rings every single day, but I found myself attracted to this app for the simple reason that, whereas Apple Fitness gamifies activity, Gentler Streak gamifies rest as well.

Gentler Streak wants you to build at a sustainable rate. It presents you with a graph of your activity levels, with three distinct areas: the lower part of your fitness level (where you should push), the middle (where you are working out healthily and within your ability), and the upper part (where you are pushing your limits). My first week with the app, I went above even the upper part twice, which made the app (gently) scold me. I was risking injury, it said. I should take it easy and recover. So what did I do? Well, I went above the graph a third time in a week, and insofar as the app is capable of being stern, it basically told me I really needed to listen to it, but more importantly, that I really needed to listen to my body.

But what was I supposed to do? Just stop?

[Minor spoilers for one character you encounter in Wanderstop ahead.]

At one point, Alta is visited by a customer named Ren. A former fighter himself, he remembers Alta, unlike every other visitor to Wanderstop. Once he realizes where he knows you from, he quickly devises a plan to help you get back on your feet and fight again.

The game gives you the opportunity to resist this line of thinking, but I did not. There was something so exciting about meeting someone who saw Alta as she saw herself: as someone who was only temporarily out of the game, but who could be back on top whenever she wanted. So when he asked Alta whether she might spar with him, I didn’t hesitate. Yes, of course. Yes, I would love to do anything other than make tea, which is so boring, oh my god.

The sparring does not go well. Alta once again finds herself exhausted, unable to keep up with Ren. It’s at this point that I expected the game to give me some kind of gentle reminder that I pushed myself too hard again, and that what I really need to do is to focus on rest. But that’s not what happens. Instead, Ren chastises Alta for lacking dedication, for losing sight of who she really is, and for basically not being who he thought she was. Insofar as one can be hurt by dialogue boxes, I found myself genuinely hurt by Ren. Especially since, on the other end of the controller, I was sitting there with my own pain and my own desire to return to my peak physical condition. It was, for me, adding insult to injury. I was mad at Wanderstop, honestly, and surprised I could feel that way toward a game.

Ren leaves Wanderstop shortly after, leaving you to contemplate whether perhaps he was right. Perhaps you have lost your way. Perhaps you aren’t who you say you are. Perhaps you are squandering your abilities. Eventually, though, Ren comes back, this time with an injury that he won’t soon shake off. He too pushed himself past his limits, and he too has paid a price for it. The two of you bond again, much more sadly than before, with no obvious resolution or answer to the pain you both now carry.

This past weekend, I ran my first 9-miler. It felt great. I’d worked my way back up from the valley to find myself at a new peak. Four weeks ago, after completing my round of meds from the doctor, I started to complete much shorter runs, my left glute still reminding me that something had indeed gone wrong there. It wasn’t a sharp pain, but it was a dull one, reminding me to go slow. Now, though, the worst I can say about how I feel is that my quads are sore, as is to be expected.

I missed the half marathon because my grandmother passed unexpectedly, and I had to travel for the funeral. In truth, though, I couldn’t have run the race safely regardless. I simply was not far enough into my recovery at that point to attempt such a thing. However, as I’ve learned, while there’s always another run, you only get the one body. I’m building back sustainably, with my eyes set on the Broad Street Run in just a few weeks. A 10-miler, yes, down from my intended 13.1, but there’ll be another half marathon in the future, I’m sure.

Wanderstop doesn’t have a world-shattering message about injury or burnout. It ends in a fairly neutral way, inviting the player to decide for themselves what they thought of all of it. It is indisputably pro-rest, but it doesn’t make any proclamations about how, exactly, to rest. It does however engage with the idea of making peace with the voice inside of you that pushes you toward extremes: extremes of labor, extremes of physicality, of ambition, of dedication, etc. It wants you to use the voice that says do more, not to be used by it. It wants you to hear it, but  not be subsumed by it.

It’s interesting to me that, in my personal recovery, I’ve relied on a tool like Gentler Streak. Whereas Wanderstop wants me to shed the concept of gamified rest—to reject the idea that the escape from depressing repetition is energizing repetition, to get away from my inclination as a player to seek continual optimization—Gentler Streak is helping me to achieve my desire to push my upper limits without going so far beyond them that I injure myself again, crumpling, quite literally, like Alta in the woods. It gives me a chart and lets me watch number go up, and honestly? As a gamer? I love that shit. Clearly I, personally, am not ready to completely give up the quantified self. But I am looking for an alternative to treating my body like some kind of roguelike.

And that’s the thing: I play and think about games a lot, and running, to me, is a kind of game. But the body is an unreliable videogame. It is not a simplistic system of inputs and outputs. It is more complicated than a game, and more complicated than a chart in an app, whether that app is Apple Fitness with its Training Load or Gentler Streak with its Activity Path. There will be ups and downs, especially, in my case, if you are pushing your soon to be 35 year old body to extremes that even at 25 you would’ve struggled to attain.

But running is still a numbers game. It just is. There’s your time, of course, but there’s also your cadence, and your heart rate zones, and your vertical oscillation. There are numbers on numbers on numbers, all ready for you to obsess over as you push ever upward. But if I learned anything from stopping—both in life and in Wanderstop—is that you can’t let the desire to get back out there get in the way of stopping. There is value in stillness, if you can find it. And the motion, when it comes back around, will feel just as good, if not better.

The Last of Us Part II Remastered is out now on PC, and includes a small update for the roguelike survival mode No Return. We’ve added four new maps to the rotation, and two new playable characters from Part I: the gruff loveable smuggler Bill and the Firefly leader Marlene. I’m really thrilled with how these new characters fit into the mode, and wanted to unpack a little bit of their design process.

Every character in No Return has a unique loadout of starting gear and abilities. Our first priority when designing this kit is connecting to character traits from the story. For some this is straightforward: Abby as a brawler, Tommy as a sniper, Lev as a stealth archer. Others require more creativity: Dina mentions that Eugene “taught me about rewiring electronics and stuff”, which translated into her crafting-focused identity.

In terms of thematic connection, Bill was definitely in the former category. We wanted to give him his iconic pump shotgun and trap mines from his appearance in Part I. We also wanted to play off his identity as a smuggler, which connected nicely to the dead drop mechanic in No Return. Bill can optionally deliver crafting items to clandestine dropboxes on the map, and will receive a double reward for doing so (both a new random weapon and a new random recipe). No other character has a trait connected to completing dead drops, so it was a nice unique hook for him.

Getting extra rewards from dead drops helped us solve another design problem: shotguns are extremely powerful in No Return. We found through internal playtesting that starting with a shotgun was difficult to balance; enemies frequently run towards you in this mode, and ammo scarcity is less of a constraint. Therefore we opted to instead make Bill’s fully-upgraded custom pump shotgun a dead drop reward. Players would have to invest a little more effort to get it, but doubling the random reward made it appear reliably.

To balance his built-in advantages, we made Bill unable to dodge but have reduced hit reactions from melee (like Joel and Tommy in No Return). The trap mines and pump shotgun give players effective tools to overcome this vulnerability.

Marlene was a little more challenging to express thematically. She’s narratively connected to the Fireflies, but what could that hook into mechanically? Our first idea was to give her the Assault Rifle, a full-auto weapon unique to the Fireflies in Part I (and not previously available in Part II). We also gave her the option to “switch lanes” once per run, as if she were tapping into her underground Firefly connections and intel. Both were interesting, but didn’t quite establish a strong gameplay identity.

We finally landed on the idea of connecting her to gambits, which are dynamic optional challenges that randomly appear during a run. In The Last of Us, Marlene is a brave but desperate leader willing to risk her entire organization on a long shot with Ellie. What if No Return players were placed in a similar “all or nothing” position, required to complete every gambit or risk losing their encounter reward. We thought this was a really unique playstyle and helped balance out her powerful starting weapon.

No Return remains close to my heart, and I’m looking forward to seeing the incredible runs that players have with Bill and Marlene. A big thanks to everyone on the team who worked on the new update and on bringing The Last of Us Part II Remastered to PC!

I'm going to try and explain to you why, in the Pokemon trading system, this Pokemon is currently worth One Money:

To do that, I have to describe Pokemon Home.

Home is busted and it sucks so much

Over the years, the Pokemon games have changed how trading works pretty extensively. Since the Switch Pokemon games launched, searchable trade listings can only be posted on a mobile app: the mobile version of Pokemon Home. And Home is a fucking mess.

Home is the only service which currently allows players to transfer Pokemon between Switch games. However, the mobile and Switch versions of Pokemon Home have completely different features. Whenever I want to organize my Pokemon in Home, I need to sit down with both apps and laboriously switch back and forth between them, carefully saving my changes as I go to avoid interruptions or data loss.

Switch Home performs all the tasks related to your Switch games. It connects directly to your game saves on the Switch and moves Pokemon between your storage boxes, editing and your save files without launching those games.

Mobile Home, on the other hand, is primarily for trading Pokemon between different users. It has trade listing and search features, and an account system which is completely invisible in the Switch version of the app.

This is not the only data which is invisible on Switch: the mobile app also has a Pokemon tagging and starring system which the Switch version doesn't have. Starring is particularly important - it prevents you from trading or deleting any starred Pokemon, and is a good way of tracking which Pokemon in the system you intend to keep permanently. Whether a Pokemon has a star on it or not is usually the most crucial piece of information I need. But I can't see the stars I assign at all when I use the Switch version of the app... and I can't move Pokemon between boxes in the Mobile version of the app!

It turns every trade into a disaster. You cannot use both apps at the same time, so you cannot review your stars in Mobile while moving Pokemon around in the boxes on Switch. Sometimes I have to screenshot the app on mobile to remind myself which Pokemon I recently starred and need to move into boxes. It's a fucking nightmare. Here's a screenshot I took for that purpose only a few days ago.

Playing something because you hate it

I'm trying to describe this weird situation to you because these and other bizarre UI and feature decisions in the Home ecosystem have controlled how trading works for recent generations of Pokemon games in this really weird, gamer-ass way. It reminds me a LOT of online auctionhouses in MMOs. The Home system is so limited and fucked by UI that its users have been forced to create a bunch of weird trading conventions to get around the things it won't let you do.

On the other hand... I love MMO auctionhouses and trading systems. I have loved many busted ones. A jank system can be fun if it has problems that you can learn to exploit or work around.

That is part of what's going on with Home. The UI doesn't let you do what you want to do. Instead, you have to do something much more frustrating... which has its own joys, too.

Trading for Shinies

My "living dex" is complete - I have one of each Pokemon saved on my Home account, in order, in a gigantic series of boxes.

I'm now working on a "shiny living dex" - a duplicate of that collection, but made with only shiny Pokemon. Shinies are alternate-color-scheme Pokemon which start with a spawn rate of about 1 in 4000. A lot of people collect them. Check out this video for a great overview of "shiny hunting," the probabilities involved, and the reasons why players bother collecting shinies in the first place.

I don't want to do "full odds" shiny hunting, though. I want to trade for them. I never even wanted a shiny living dex until Home launched and I realized I could learn to exploit its trade system.

The network created by Home and Pokemon Go also make the chase a lot quicker and more interesting for me. Go usually releases shiny Pokemon as part of time-limited events. Each one subsequently becomes much more common on Home. If you watch the calendar, you can get them more easily than you otherwise would.

I played Pokemon Go avidly between 2016 and 2022, and I have a huge library of shiny Pokemon in Go which I am slowly transferring to Home and using in trades myself. Scarlet also makes it much easier to hunt for shinies, so I have a bunch there too. Each shiny Pokemon is valuable to SOMEBODY. So all I need to do is trade them for other shinies I don't yet have.

The problem is that the Home UI makes this impossible.

Getting around UI limitations

Imagine you went through the laborious process of moving your Pokemon from Go or Scarlet or Violet and want to trade them. You jumped through all those hoops, going back and forth between two incompatible versions of the same app. You load up the trade UI and discover that you cannot list a trade asking for a specific shiny Pokemon, and you cannot filter trade listings by shiny Pokemon.

So you simply can't trade two shinies at all. Instead, you have to use a currency Pokemon as a form of exchange between them.

Today, you'd list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt - the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you'll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You'll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.

This has been the custom since pretty early in Home's operation. Generally, people will list their shinies for the currently-rarest tradeable Pokemon in the entire collection of all Pokemon released ever. This usually means:

• A "Legendary"-level Pokemon that you can only get one of during a playthrough.
• It has to come from the most recently-released mainline game or DLC in the series, because everything that has been out longer is less desirable.
• It has to be a Pokemon that has NOT released in Pokemon Go. Any Pokemon in Go immediately becomes much more common.
• There has to be some amount of natural collector demand for this Pokemon. A lot of the time, this natural demand is created by the Pokemon being version-locked to only one version of the game. The desire can also come from competitive play.

This means that the Pokemon which functions as "currency" changes every time a Pokemon game is officially connected to the Switch and Mobile Home apps. The most recent time that happened was for the Indigo Disk DLC to Scarlet and Violet, which was in December 2023.

So, for the last six or so years, the various overlapping reigns of "currency" Pokemon have included:

• The rarer "Ultra Beast" Pokemon from the Sun and Moon/Ultra Sun and Ultra Moon 3DS games. At the launch of Home, a much wider variety of Pokemon functioned as "currency" than currently do, possibly because players were trying to get ones they'd missed in Sun and Moon.
• Zacian and Zamazenta, from Sword and Shield. These remained occasionally-in-demand all the way up until Go dropped them as raid bosses, which cratered their demand instantly.
• Kubfu, and Urshifu Rapid Strike Style or Single Strike Style, from the Isle of Armor DLC for Sword and Shield
• Regidrago, Glastrier, Spectrier, or Calyrex - from the Crown Tundra DLC for Sword and Shield. Spectrier and Glastrier probably stood as reliable currency Pokemon for the longest unbroken period of time that I used the app.
• Enamorus, an endgame legendary from Pokemon Legends: Arceus
• Koraidon and Miraidon, from Scarlet and Violet, though desire for these two fell off very quickly, since the player gets 2 of them in the base playthrough and everyone was only trading off their extra.
• Bloodmoon Ursaluna, from The Teal Mask DLC for Scarlet and Violet. Unfortunately this one is so rarely available that I see a lot of open trades for Bloodmoon Ursaluna piling up with no takers, so I don't recommend asking for it when listing a trade.
• Raging Bolt, from The Indigo Disk DLC for Scarlet and Violet.

Raging Bolt is now very close to the singular currency of choice for trading in Home, much more obviously and firmly than any one of the currencies I've listed above. There's a couple reasons for this.

• Raging Bolt is viable in competitive play, so there's a strong natural demand for it. This is also why people want Bloodmoon Ursaluna.
• Raging Bolt is version-locked to Scarlet, so not all players can get it.
• You can only get it at the end of The Indigo Disk, the second chapter of DLC for the base game, so you have to play very far through several plot arcs to get it unlocked.
• I suspect that the version Raging Bolt is locked to, Scarlet, may have sold fewer copies than Violet, which would make it under-supplied. I have no hard proof of this, but when Home opened up to Pokemon from Scarlet and Violet, it was much harder to find Scarlet endgame "paradox Pokemon" listed for trade than the equivalent Violet Pokemon.

Raging Bolt's companion version-locked Pokemon, Gouging Fire, is not used as a currency anywhere nearly as often. And their opposite-version Pokemon, Iron Crown and Iron Boulder, don't even rate. With pretty much only one Pokemon I need to keep on hand "as money," it's a lot easier to find the shinies I want. I don't have to search 3-5 different legendaries in the trade listings to find a shiny I'm capable of "buying" anymore. Yesterday, I traded 6 different Raging Bolts for 6 different shinies I wanted, and each took me about a minute. It's so convenient now!

This is the first time I've seen this kind of consensus happen in Home. The trade customs are evolving!

The thrill of the chase

When I played Guild Wars 2, I cornered the market on "black peppercorns" for the entire Blackgate server for about half a year. Years later, in 2020, I played FFXIV as an auction house freak. I love markets in games, and I love figuring them out. Almost all of them have UI flaws or fee structures which encourage players to do unwise, exploitable things. In GW2, I seem to recall, it was possible to list very small and cheap things, like black peppercorns, for such low prices that your earnings would be nearly wiped out by fees.

Home is the in-game market I've messed with which is most deeply marked by poor UI decisions. It's so busted and horrible that every single decision I make is a battle with the UI. I can be as pissed as I want, but on one level, MMO markets are fun because they have these bizarre quirks to learn. When GW2 players listed their trades badly, I was having some amount of fun taking advantage of their ignorance.

But the best fun in these games is actually not that. It is a pain, actually, to go around the market hoovering up all the tiny black peppercorn trade listings during your lunch hour every day (with my boss's blessing. He found this funny). The fun actually comes from learning something about other people's behavior that allows you to anticipate desires and meet them.

In FFXIV I once spent a weekend crafting furniture parts so that I could list them all for massively inflated values on the same day that a bunch of brand new player housing went on sale. Everyone had a new house, so everyone needed new furniture, and they were willing to pay way more than usual to make their place look good. Pulling off trades like this is incredibly satisfying! Making money isn't really the point - feeling like you understand what people want and are communicating with them, or predicting their needs somehow, is the real thrill. It makes you feel smart. In a lot of these games, I wasn't even really saving up for anything in particular. I just enjoyed the gameplay of figuring out what people needed.

Pokemon Home's fucked UI forces people to engage in this kind of wordless debate about what the Most Fungible Pokemon is at any give time. Right now, there's so much consensus that it feels kind of ridiculous. Most people only want Raging Bolt. The coin of the realm is this big giraffe guy. That, specifically, is the fun bit, to me. Learning that I can keep this one guy on hand and get any shiny I want is fun. Learning which shinies will get common and easier to find thanks to event schedules in different games is fun. It makes me feel smart.

I do wonder if it would be more fun and weird if I could trade shinies for shinies directly, though. I don't expect the Home app ecosystem to last forever - it doesn't feel built to last! - so I'm wondering if they'll swap it out for something better in the next generation. I'm particularly curious if they will ever add trading to the Switch version of the app. Since the dev teams for these apps are possibly completely different, that change would likely come with a huge UI update that could make very different market gameplay possible.

Other topics

There's a lot more to say here about how hacked Pokemon work in the system, how they affect player desire, and what the Home network does to the other connected Pokemon games on, like, an enjoyment level. I might write more about that later!

Extraordinary illustrated essay by Marcin Wichary, documenting a typeface — and its long, fascinating, splintered history — that exemplifies the difference between beautiful and pretty. The beauty in Gorton isn’t just in its plainness and hardworking mechanical roots — it’s in the history of the 20th century itself. Gorton became such a part of the world that the bygone world of the previous century imbues how this font makes me feel.

Do yourself a favor and read this one in a comfortable chair, with a tasty slow-sipping beverage, on a screen bigger than a phone. Everything about this piece is exemplary and astounding — the writing, the photography, the depths of research. But most of all, Wichary’s clear passion and appreciation. It’s a love letter.

This presentation can be viewed below, or downloaded via PDF. As this presentation is still being updated, please recheck the PDF URL (and its date) before reading an offline copy.

Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew)