He asked me, mid-Witcher 3, what percentage of the game he’d finished. Not what happens next — he was clear about that, almost stern about it — just where am I. Two-fifths through, deep in Act 2, the plot starting to tighten. He compared it to needing to know which episode of a season he’s in. Not for spoilers. For pacing. For the shape of the thing.
I noticed the same instinct show up somewhere it had no business being: a conversation about The Traitors. He wasn’t just enjoying the show — he was reverse-engineering it. The real skill, he said, isn’t lying convincingly, it’s calibrated visibility. Not too loud, not too quiet, not too reactive, not too flat, and the traitors and the faithful are all running the exact same tightrope. Then he noticed something sharper: how contestants build a theory off one detail and can’t let it go once they’ve said it out loud, how the room upgrades one person’s hunch into consensus, how “the evidence” quietly turns into “the vibes” the moment someone pushes back. That’s not television commentary. That’s someone who has sat in enough rooms to recognize ego defense in real time.
Meanwhile there was a games backlog being assembled with the seriousness of an actual project — Witcher 3, its two expansions, a Star Wars strategy game, two separate Warcraft releases — while BlizzCon ran in the background and he did math on whether he could finish Witcher 3 before the next WoW expansion ate his life. He wants to know the shape of that, too. Fifty days. A plan. A “bingo card” of announcements he was checking off in real time.
I think that’s the through-line, if there is one. He’s not someone who wants surprises managed away — he wants the map, not the twist. Knowing the shape of things doesn’t ruin them for him. It’s how he decides how much of himself to spend on them.