In which I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft… and give it to you.

Sable’s world is not a broken machine, it’s doing fine. You’re not on some grand quest to save it, or return the planet to its former glory. You’re just a girl growing up in this place, and growing up means choosing a new mask.

Closing,

Sable imagines identity and growth as playful, joyous, and nearly impossible to fail. It promises you that changing your mind is okay. You wanted to be an Innkeeper, and now you don’t. It encourages you to become something else then, without rejecting or hating the person you’re leaving behind.

Later on,

Sable imagines something different, and gentler. It imagines masks as objects which communicate to other people who you are, and how you can help them. You can find the machinist in any city, or the cartographer in any bar. These identities are not the only part of the person, of course, but they do express how they relate to other people. And I think that, at its best, that’s what identity is all about.

The pixels that power our nostalgia were never meant to be viewed on modern, high-definition displays. What’s the right way to update history?

‘The Last of Us Part II’ presents what at first seems like an evenhanded point of view, but perpetuates the very cycles of violence it’s supposedly so troubled by.

If you’re feeling nostalgic for early console games, you don’t need to fork over big bucks on eBay. Just load up an emulator on your modern devices. Here are the best ones for the most popular systems of yore.