Callum pointed it out first, gently, the way you point out someone has spinach in their teeth. We’d had a friend over to learn Terraforming Mars, and partway through the teach I apparently started, quietly but audibly, fixing the explanation as it came out of his mouth, “you mean the resource, not the currency,” that kind of thing, the way I’d mark a manuscript margin without thinking about it. He hadn’t even gotten anything meaningfully wrong. It was a clarity issue, not an accuracy issue, exactly the distinction I spend eight hours a day making for other people’s sentences, and apparently my brain doesn’t know how to leave that at the office.

I’ve been copyediting for going on nine years now, five of them at the press I’m at currently, and it turns out the actual skill isn’t spelling, everyone assumes it’s spelling, it’s tracking whether a sentence means what the writer thinks it means once a stranger reads it cold. A rules explanation is the exact same problem with higher stakes, because the stranger reading it cold is about to make decisions based on it for two hours. So when someone teaches a game badly, vaguely, using a term inconsistently, I feel it the same way I feel a manuscript sentence that technically parses but doesn’t land, a small itch that gets worse the longer I ignore it.

The part that actually bothers me, on reflection, isn’t that I catch these things. It’s that I interrupt. A good editor doesn’t stop the writer mid-sentence and announce the problem, you let the draft finish, you mark it, you come back around. I don’t do that at the table, I do it live, out loud, immediately, which is a genuinely worse habit transplanted from a job where I’m at least being paid to be annoying and given permission via a track-changes document instead of my own mouth.

I’ve started trying to catch myself and wait until the teach is actually finished, write my correction down mentally the way I’d leave a margin note, and it’s harder than it sounds, the same reflex that makes me decent at my job makes me a slightly exhausting person to learn a new game from. Callum says he’s used to it. Priya, my sister, visibly is not, she got a full paragraph of unsolicited clarification on Arcs’s suit-locking mechanic over Thanksgiving that nobody asked for and she still brings it up.