Been thinking a lot about Cyberpunk discourse and how my board game buying habits have changed over the last 18 month. One of my friends flies fighter jets for the Air Force and I keep coming back to a story he told me in college.

A thread that I promise will come back to games:

He was in the ROTC program at school. It's Officer Training while you're in school on a scholarship. Great program if you know you want to join the military like he did. Fighter Pilot had been his dream for his whole life.

Towards the end of your time in the program you apply for "slots" which are where you'll head after you graduate. A pilot slot sends you to pilot school, a medical slot to med school, and so on.

As you can imagine, some are very competitive. Pilots in particular.

The pilot program is extremely competitive. More applicants than seats in pilot school, more seats in school than in planes, more seats in planes in general than seats in fighter jets, and so on.

Getting to fly fighter jets is a lot of work and still a long shot.

Part of why it's a long shot is all the things that can disqualify you. Too tall? Too short? Bad eyes? Too many headaches? Bones too dense? All of these are reasons you may not go to the next step.

There are so many applicants for these seats that the Air Force does not look for reasons to select or promote people to these seats, they look for reasons to disqualify people.

This is now how I buy games.

There are so many games—so many good games—that I now look for reasons to disqualify games. Mechanisms yes, art yes, but more. Appropriative font choices? Gone. Lack of cultural sensitivity? Out. Designer was rude on main? No thanks.

Doesn't matter how big or how popular or how excited I may have been initially about a game...there are just SO MANY these days that I can afford to be *extremely* picky and still have too many games to choose from.

I encourage everyone to be very exacting about the games (and books/movies/media etc) you buy. Look for reasons to disqualify games. There will still be more than you can play and what you do end up with will be much more rewarding.