I say I wish I could just quit, but I know that that's unfair to RS 3 Gold everyone else, especially those counting on me to support their efforts and who've supported me so far. But I feel like a little boy again. Outmatched. Not smart enough. Struggling with an unachievable desire to do well in front of people I admire.I was so overwhelmed. Worse: I was overwhelmed in a way that seemed to undermine my own argument. In the the most sympathetic version of his position, Frank Lantz writes the sort of interactivity in Runescape games as diverse as football and crossword puzzles might be important, deep, profound, worthwhile, meaningful, magical, [and] sacred in a way that we fail to consider. And there I was, observing Subterfuge create a beautiful anxiety in me. An anxiety parallel to the one I'd been barely managing during the formalism debate. Lots of works, across different media, have made me anxious: but none like this. That long, tracking shot at the end of True Detective's fourth episode made me clench up. The climax of DeLillo's novel Cosmopolis felt like it unfolded and compressed time all at once, and I flipped back and forth through those final pages over and over. But these were just symptoms of anxiety that I received, sitting comfortably. Subterfuge didn't just inject me with fear, it enticed me to perform my neuroses over and over for a week: checking timelines, sending messages, lying to allies. Pressing buttons.I'm cautious to deploy this sort of life is a game rhetoric. The two do not match up perfectly, especially when you think through the stakes of play. For instance: I am now done with that first match of Subterfuge, but as I run out of grad school funding in the coming months, I'll be playing the political game of academia indefinitely. I don't have to worry about the blue Runescape player's driller count anymore, but even now I have to weigh whether or not this piece will ruin my chances for employment at this or that institution.Yet I want to hold onto the Subterfuge/Formalism Debate parallel not only because, together, they caused in me a singular anxiety, but because in both cases I realized that I'd failed to listen to my own arguments. I'd spent so much time demanding that we understand form as more than core mechanics, but here I was feeling limited by the explicit win conditions offered to me by Subterfuge. It was only once I was under attack from my former allies to the south that I realized I could make my own win condition.