The Queue: The Dread Pirate Anna will most likely kill you in the morning

This is The Queue, the daily column where you ask us questions, and we’ll see if you’re even around tomorrow to need an answer. No offense, of course.

Look, I’m not telling you the pen name under which I write [redacted]. Stop asking.

Johanna Faries’ resume is really strong, to the extent that I like her hiring in a corporate sense. She’s been leading Call of Duty for a long time, which does give me pause, considering how microtransaction-heavy that game has become over time. I don’t follow the Acti- of the ActiBlizz closely enough to know how her particular leadership has shaped that company, but I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, at least in the short term. We’re going to see a lot of changes in the UX of Blizzard’s games, and many of them will not land squarely at her feet.

For me, the thing that gives me the most pause on her hiring is the glass cliff phenomenon. I’m mostly concerned that they know they’re about to engage in some shady nonsense, and she’s the fall guy — or, quite explicitly, the fall woman. see: Ellen Pao and Reddit. And it seems like I’m not the only one to look at this particular issue this way, since somebody else already added Johanna Faires to the glass cliff wikipedia page under a bullet point about Jen O’Neal’s tenure at Blizzard. So, yikes.

Given her resume it’s not like she’s being yanked out of obscurity purely to be a sacrificial lamb — and yet.

If you had to eat a pair of crappy boots nobody wants every so often you’d probably be a little tough to deal with, too.

I honestly have no recollection of when I picked it up, but I recently started playing Starbound. It feels like a cross between Terraria and No Man’s Sky, where you have to collect different resources, sometimes delving all the way to the heart of a planet, but you have to also hop between planets on your cool rocket ship in order to discover new creatures and biomes and crops and resources and people (who may even want to join your crew). You can build a base in a picturesque corner of a far-flung galaxy, or your own personal space station, or just kit out your ship — or all of the above.

It’s a phenomenal game, and I’m lowkey obsessed… and the entire subreddit, beyond “hey look at my cool base” is wall-to-wall complaints that there hasn’t been an update in at least five years. So I definitely slept on this one for far too long, and yet I don’t fully regret that I have.

Meanwhile, congratulations on 7 Days to Die for passing the ten year mark on Steam while still simultaneously being in Early Access, which is contrary to what those words mean.