To: Luke
From: Owen
Re: It's the Holiday Season
Today was Maggie's last day. She returns to her graduate studies at UC San Diego full time, so it'll be lonely in the Tower from now on. Besides, she knew how to disable the perimeter defenses. Brian never gave me the passcode. So next weekend should be fun.
Seriously, Maggie added a great deal of intellectual heft to the site. When I was usually writing about T&A or frivolous stuff like The Top Six Fat Bastards in video games, Maggie was taking up questions of design and development; picking up news from China and the rest of Asia; and spotting some of the more thoughtfully rendered timewasters and flash games. She sought out concepts that took well more time to digest than many writers are willing to allow.
Although I've worked with Maggie since April, I only met her once, down at E3 in July when she was one of about 3.4 girls at the Kotaku party and was accosted by nearly every dude there. In the Tower chat room, she politely engaged my willful ignorance of her East Asian studies, ("So, the basic tenets of Confucianism ... do they all begin ... 'Confucius say ...'"?) and usually had a zinger of her own in return. ("What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything.")
I'll miss Maggie as a co-worker and a friend, and the weekends will definitely miss the thoughtful, scholarly tone of her work. Here are some of her highlights from her time at Kotaku:
How to Kung Fu Hustle (Maggie's first feature as a Kotaku writer.)
Jonathan Blow On Marketing, 'Lying' to Players, Passage (This started an epic e-mail pissing contest with Braid's Jonathan Blow)
In the Mood for Love: Cinema, Games, and Sex
Training Wheels: My First MMO