Why, This Is The Box, Nor Am I Out of It
Or am I? The column that used to be headed, in tones redolent with alarums by night, "Kenneth Hite's Out of the Box!" is now returned, like Napoleon from Elba, to the friendly confines of Indie Press Revolution.

For those who prefer to roam the wild steppes of Livejournal for all their Web-columnial needs, it is also syndicated on LJ at: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/outoftheboxipr/

This edition of "Out of the Box" will go forward in the popular blog format of today; each post will be about only one or two games or news items or controversies or what-have-you, while I reserve the long-form columns for topics like The State of the Industry, The Outie Awards, and The GenCon Report.

I have already been paid that most contemporary of compliments, a ten-page (and counting!) flamewar on RPG.net carried out by people who haven't read the new column yet. For the free advertising, I thank everyone involved. For those who have risen to the defense of my columnial integrity, I thank you rather moreso.

"Out of the Box," he said burying what lede there is, has always been a gleefully biased column of game reviews and industry news. Those gleeful biases are my own. They include, in no specific order, "Westerns should have more games about them," "Game designers matter, game companies rather less so," "Elegance is a virtue," and "Call of Cthulhu is the greatest RPG of all time." I have others, which I'm sure a Straussian close reading of my summa can bring out. hygelakthedread knows (and I suspect that waitingforgo suspects) how hard it can be to get me to write good reviews of games I actually like, sometimes. While the specifics of my business arrangements with IPR are up to IPR to reveal, I can say that I am being paid well enough to write good reviews of games I actually like. I am not being paid well enough to write good reviews of games I actually dislike. As there are many more game products I like in any given year than I have slots for game reviews, this has yet to prove problematic. (If it does, I'll write another Tribute to Dice or something.) I know this may not reassure everyone in the world, but I shall bear up somehow.