The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-29)

B8 EZ BD THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022

ILLUSTRATIONS BY DOLA SUN FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Lawrence Downes is the co-author, with Linda

Ronstadt, of “Feels Like Home: A Song for the

Sonoran Borderlands,” to be published in October.

Supreme Court hearings Homemade sourdough

spring cleaning

course, not all long games are bloated. You

won’t find anyone saying that “Elden Ring,” a

45-hour fantasy epic that just may be the game

of the year, has dull, superfluous content. But

others — like “Valhalla” and “Far Cry 6” — have

the listless bulk of beached whales.

Blame the trend in part on the demands of

the “attention economy.” According to the U.S.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2020 the average

American spent 5.5 hours per day on leisure.

Gaming studios are vying with companies like

Disney and Netflix for a piece of this pie.

Netflix once told investors that “Fortnite,” the

popular battle royal, is a bigger competitor

— open-world single-player adventures — can

take four times longer to beat than the

originals released a decade or more ago. To

accomplish every task in Ubisoft’s “Assassin’s

Creed Valhalla” (admittedly a bigger endeavor

than simply beating the game), the average

player has to commit some 135 hours.

Many gamers are noting that the extra

length comes at a cost: bloat. To extend game

play, developers seem to be tacking on tasks

that are worse than nonessential: They’re

boring. Pointless, menial objectives in a game

distract from the main storyline and dilute the

impact of more fun, engrossing missions. Of

V

ideo game developers today have goals

that go well beyond selling copies of

their titles: They want to maximize the

time players spend in these carefully con-

structed virtual worlds. The reasons range

from the purely mercenary — the more hours

played, the more likely a player is to pay for

cosmetic features within a game — to the more

benign, such as wanting to make players feel

they are getting the most bang for their

gaming buck.

But the upshot is that games are getting

long. I reported in March that the latest

entries in some of gaming’s biggest franchises

BY TEDDY AMENABAR

Bloated video games

Twitter: @TeddyAmen

Teddy Amenabar is an audience editor at The Post

and a contributing writer to Launcher, a section of

The Post that covers video games and esports.

than HBO because teens would rather play the

game than binge-watch a show. You can be

sure that “Fortnite’s” developers want to keep

those eyeballs on their game.

As these games continue to expand, players

should get more comfortable with walking

away from the games we buy. I know I have.

Beating a game simply isn’t worth it when too

much of the journey is a slog.

BY BARBARA MCQUADE

K

etanji Brown Jackson arrived at her

Senate confirmation hearing with a

résumé as impressive as they come.

After the vicious hits she took from the

Judiciary Committee, she must have felt like a

piñata when she left.

Supreme Court confirmation hearings have

become an opportunity for politicians to

grandstand for the folks back home on the 6

o’clock news or social media. Senators asked

Jackson such probing questions as whether

we should “catch and imprison more murder-

ers or fewer murderers,” how she ranks her

religious faith on a scale of 1 to 10 and whether

she thought babies were racist.

The Constitution empowers the president

to appoint federal judges with the “advice and

consent” of the Senate. The Senate’s role is

intended to prevent a president’s unqualified

or nakedly political nominee from reaching

the court. Justice Sidney Powell, anyone? But

the Constitution has no requirement to ques-

tion the nominees, a tradition that began only

in 1925. Today, the media provides gavel-to-

gavel coverage of the hearings. The result is a

theater of the absurd that degrades the nomi-

nee and erodes public esteem for the court and

the Senate. Worse yet, the canned answers

nominees now routinely recite do not reveal

Twitter: @barbmcquade

Barbara McQuade is a law professor at the

University of Michigan Law School and a former

U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.

their views on important issues likely to come

before the court. Recent candidates testified

that Roe v. Wade was “settled precedent,” yet

the recently leaked draft opinion erasing

federal abortion rights indicates that they see

stare decisis as no obstacle to overturning it.

There must be a better way.

We should replace the current free-for-all

with questioning by a single lawyer represent-

ing each party, similar to the process used

when now-Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was

questioned at his hearing about allegations of

sexual assault, although in that instance one

lawyer served all senators. Senators could

submit questions to their party’s chosen law-

yer, and the committee chair and ranking

member could decide whether each question

should be asked. An experienced interrogator

would know how to ask probing follow-up

questions rather than accepting rehearsed

lines at face value. And without an opportu-

nity for a video to post on Twitter, senators’

questions might actually focus on what mat-

ters: the nominee’s qualifications.

BY LAWRENCE DOWNES

S

ourdough and I are through. I held up my

jar of starter, deflated and bruised from

too long in the fridge. I’m sorry, I said, I

won’t be kneading you anymore. Then I

scraped it empty, for one last batch of waffles.

We were great pandemic pals, back when

time was stretchy and slow dough seemed

worth the wait. I skipped the first great

sourdough wave of 2020. That March, flour

sales hit the roof. In April, Vice likened flour to

another addictive white powder. By May,

ransacked grocery shelves were gluten-free.

The mania followed the usual arc, up to the

New York Times op-ed in December that

signaled imminent staleness. The early adopt-

ers moved on, leaving the field to laggards like

me, a sourdough long-hauler up until a week

ago.

Sourdough and I fell flat at first. But with

counseling, the chemistry clicked. We bubbled

on strong, loaf after loaf. It was lots of fun,

then too much. If I stepped away too long, the

starter stopped. It failed to thrive. It smelled of

alcohol: the gray odor of neglect.

Sourdough is artisanal, meticulous, rusti-

cally delicious. That’s fine, if you have the

breadwidth. But it’s a heavy commitment — so

much bread in the belly, so much starter in the

trash. To me it’s Yukon food, fit for a snowed-in

cabin with a virus howling at the door. But

now the icicles are dripping, and I crave

less-complex carbohydrates. I want tortillas.

Tortillas are humble and easy. Flour, water,

salt and fat. Roll and stretch. Fry and flip.

Stack and serve. In Tucson, they strew cheese

on a thin flour tortilla and broil it flat. It sends

grease down the chin and stirs the soul to joy.

In Sonora, Mexico, tortillas are big as bicycle

wheels, delicate as fine pastry. You can almost

read through them, folded like the newspaper

next to your eggs, beans and coffee. Holy

moley, they’re magical.

Lalo Guerrero, the great Chicano musician,

reworked “O Sole Mio” as a Mexican’s lament.

“There’s no tortillas,” he sang. “There’s only

bread.” He took the words out of my mouth.