Good evening. You are listening to Three Moves Ahead, and I'm your host, Rob Zackney.

With me tonight is one of my rig of a panel, freelance writer and steel battalion jockey, Julian Murdoch.

Oh, you had to get that in early. I can't, I keep dying. I keep having to go back to the beginning. It's so sad. Since the theme for tonight's episode is anachronism, I figured that you with your giant, you know, dual-wielding Mech Warrior peripheral, you know, this is a perfect time to bring that up.

Okay. We'll get there. And also with us tonight, PC Gamer, editor-in-chief, Logan Decker has been good enough to join us. Logan, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Rob. How are you tonight? Doing pretty damn well. Fantastic. And you, Julian?

I'm just doing ducky.

Oh, ducky, no less. That's fantastic.

Well, I am very happy to be here with all you fine folks.

Our topic tonight concerns an interview 2K president Christoph Hartman gave to MCV last week,

in which he remarked that, quote,

strategy games are just not contemporary.

The statement is an over-generalization, surely, but it's worth considering why he made it and

whether or not he might have a point.

So, Logan, we talked a bit about this on Twitter last week.

What do you think Hartman is trying to say, and why do you think he felt obligated to

paint in such broad strokes?

Well, I thought it was fantastic spin. And I'm not being snarky. I mean it. It was a great

articulate way of explaining a business decision, you know, because, you know, you can't always

take what a developer says at face value any more than you can take what, for example, an artist says at face value.

Because the explanation is, in a sense, a part of the work itself.

You know what I mean?

It's a part of how they position you to view it.

And so I think when Hartman says,

...