The Trojan War was a great story, but I’ve always thought the parts with Achilles were lame. I never liked the way the nigh-invincible demigod was ankle-cheesed out of contention by a camper with a bow and arrow. Also, Hector was my favorite character, and we all know how that turned out. Even though Achilles ultimately gave him the business, Hector still defeated tens of thousands of Greek soldiers without the crutch of River Styx-granted immortality. In other words, it was Hector’s very fragility—the fact that he could be defeated at any time—that made him more interesting than Achilles.  …

Unless you have been living under a stack of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty Collector’s Edition boxes for the past year and a half, you’ve probably heard that a six-foot-tall, pasty, third-grade-vocabularied sack of racist bile and vitriol, ensconced in an expensive suit and a greasy toupee, has a small but non-negligible chance of becoming the next president of the United States of America. Approximately six billion trillion words, across every publication this side of the asteroid belt, have been written on the potentially disastrous ramifications of this misanthropic cheese golem getting his hands on America’s Supreme Court, nuclear arsenal,…

On paper, ESL One Cologne had all the makings of a successful Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (2012) tournament. The in-game production was led by PGL, a company that Dota 2 fans liked so much they begged Valve to retain it for every event after the Manila Major. PGL succeeded at the Manila Major through a combination of innovation, nimble response to fan feedback, and an omnipresent sense of humor. But when the Romanian production company tried its hand at a Counter-Strike major, these factors either didn’t matter or never made an appearance. The grand finals of ESL One Cologne peaked at 850,000…