I didn’t really notice it at first, because even with my new grasp on all things digital I wasn’t connected very strongly with the world of games. I had an Instagram account I used to show details of my new work to the hundred or so people who were interested, mostly friends. I was not on Facebook because I loathed the interface—I’d become a digital snob in tandem with becoming digitally aware. Good grief but Facebook riled me, laid out like the want ads of a local paper and glaringly white, the algorithm stifling news from outside one’s bubble and pressing inappropriate sponsored content like a man on a street corner with a collection of flyers for his new-minted religion. I was exploring Twitter and finding it by turns enlightening and infuriating: a close encounter with wit and scholarship and the joy of living that could drop away beneath one’s feet into a sea of sheer pointless nastiness—though it had never happened to me, beyond a few low-level encounters with bored children sniping at an old man.