"… but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture"

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While Gibson fuses the idea of "personal micro-culture" here to writing fiction, I've long considered not only all of my writing, fiction or non–, but also my postings into the ether of here as the digital representatives of the personal micro-culture that makes me well, me:

"And thus we are shaped as writers, I believe, not so much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction has provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture."

Recording (and refreshing my memory of) it in this space as a sort of statement of creative intent for the incoming year.

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Spent part of yesterday afternoon at one of my heavens-on-earth, The Toys That Time Forgot (where the new Dick Tracy procurement came from), and found that, in spite of deciding that I would resume comics collecting again, I chose not to do so there: loved looking through their well-organized back issues, but realized that my preferred way of obtaining comics (in this iteration) is by hunting through the chaos of an antique mall booth to find things I'd never look for if I were searching for specific series or creators.

GOTHAM KNIGHTS (WB Games Montréal, 2022)

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That I find continuities that aren't the main comics one to be more fascinating has been a constant throughout my lifelong love of Batman: the ARKHAM games; the RED RAIN vampire Batman; BATMAN: TAS; the Jiro Kuwata Bat-manga; the Flashpoint Thomas Wayne Batman; Paul Pope's YEAR ONE HUNDRED; Sean Gordon Murphy's WHITE KNIGHT / Murphyverse; the Affleck-Irons Snyderverse (I still wish we would get an Affleck-led film) version; Burton and Hamm's Batman'89-iverse; and now the Batman-less world of GOTHAM KNIGHTS: I want to know more about this Gotham, about how the characters became the characters they are here (the prequel comic series really isn't doing it for me, though), and what awaits them in the new world after the game (FWIW I already have a pitch ready for a RED HOOD series set in the GOTHAM KNIGHTS world – love Jason here).

I find this fascinating with GOTHAM KNIGHTS especially because the game itself – while *nowhere* near as bad as it was made out to be is, nonetheless, repetitive, glitchy, and more than occasionally frustrating in combat (don't give me an ASSASSIN'S CREED-style combat system without the ability to block and parry, I mean come on) – makes getting to that post-game world a chore as soon as the true antagonists are revealed (and immediately neuters any of the menace of the group I vastly prefer - which could have been left as the mains and STILL kept the overarching narrative intact) at the end of the second act: in other words, I vastly prefer the world of GOTHAM KNIGHTS to more than a third of the game itself.

(Let it be considered an inescapable truth that, in any continuity, the arrival of ninjas - with few exceptions - rarely makes anything more interesting.)

Another gripe, perhaps the most frustrating (though note that I’m only discussing single-player here): it's difficult at best to feel like part of a team when I'm the only one out there doing anything night after night, while the other three, inactive members of my team sit around and/or work out and/or have emotional "human side" cutscenes: It'd be great if I could call in for help from one of them when I'm stuck or if we were all on patrol and items on the map vanished as other Knights cleared them up, or if I could leap from character to character. GTAV did multiple single-player protagonists ten years ago and made it work insanely well. That it hasn't been done well since is shocking.

All that aside, I did enjoy myself for most of it, dug the characters (except Tim, really didn't get a feel for him) and 2/3 of the story. Worth playing and picking up during a sale, but not at full-price: it's a world waiting to be fully explored - that it offers so much promise is cause for praise, flaws of the main notwithstanding.