Sunday Reading Roundup | Rock Paper Shotgun

Sundays are for nursing a sore throat into nearly its third week of activity. I wish I wasn’t such a tiny widdle baby, but I strongly feel that no person has ever suffered as I now suffer. Let’s do some links.

Edge Magazine has launched an industry newsletter, called Knowledge. You can signup here. Edge has long been a stealth B2B product, so an explicitly B2B newsletter makes sense. This is also promising because it’s being written by Marie Dealessandri, former deputy editor of GI.biz.

Speaking of GI.biz, former boss man Chris Dring also launched his own new endeavour this past week. The Game Business is a media outlet with a newsletter, video podcasts, and events. It’s also being funded by Geoff Keighley, so those events will take place alongside The Game Awards. I worked with Chris for several years at Gamer Network/ReedPop and I’m certain that his deep knowledge and enthusiasm for the industry will make this new project a success.

It’s been a big month for newsletter launches and not all of them are B2B products, thank goodness. This past week also saw the launch of The Bathysphere, a “weekly deep dive into video games from Christian Donlan, Florence Smith Nicholls and Keith Stuart.” Promising no news and no hot takes, the first issue sets the tone with some words from Donlan about resting in games.

And then it has these beautiful, quietly strange moments when your little low-poly cyclist makes a certain turn and finds themselves on a rock edge overlooking a lake or a canyon, and they get off the bike and just sit. They just sit, leaning against a large boulder or a tree and watch the world go by. You can sit for as long as you want here, for no reason at all except for all the reasons a cyclist might stop somewhere beautiful in the real world. It quickly becomes quite odd, in my experience. With no forward momentum I’m left with…what? I’m left with myself and the environment. I feel pleasantly suspended. It’s like nothing else in the game – nothing else in most games.

Last week, former England football manager Gareth Southgate gave a lecture on the state of boyhood in the UK in which he argued that young men need better role models than they’re currently finding online. He specifically, albeit briefly, mentioned video games, saying that young men in search of direction “are falling into unhealthy alternatives like gaming, gambling and pornography.” This prompted a lot of knee-jerk defensiveness from people within the games industry, but taken in their totality, I personally found Southgate’s comments uncontroversial. For The Guardian, Keith Stuart expanded on what role video games have to play:

There has been some kickback in the gaming press to the idea that games have provided a less-than-ideal environment for boys, but even those of us who have played and enjoyed games all our lives need to face up to the fact that gaming forums, message boards, streaming platforms and social media groups are awash with disturbing hate speech and violent rhetoric.

Game Informer has returned from the grave with all of the staff who lost their jobs when it abruptly closed last year. I’m happy for them, although it’s a worry that it’s now owned by Gunzilla Games, a game developer that has gone all-in on cryptocurrency and NFTs.

For Remap Radio, Matthew Weise wrote about “The Half-Life Delusion”, arguing that while the original game was undoubtedly great, it had a destructive influence over video games and video game storytelling more generally. This is paywalled but, hey, it prompted me to cough up for a subscription so I could read the rest, which feels like an endorsement worth sharing:

For an industry with these obsessions, the release of Half-Life was an instant revelation, like it was the Bell X-1 and Gabe Newell was gaming’s Chuck Yeager, the duo that broke the sound barrier. Valve had “cracked the code”, had finally shown that a game could tell a story without a single cutscene, without ever “taking control away from the player”. This is when Half-Life’s legendary status was solidified, when its list of design choices commonly cited as groundbreaking—the “cutscene-less” narrative design, the coherent sense of spatial exploration, the use of “realistic” locations, the lack of inventory management to slow you down, the crisp strategy offered by its nail-biting close-quarters combat—was first articulated. It was a towering achievement.


It also fucked everything up.

Music this week is Unst Boat Song, performed and arranged by Danish String Quartet. Generally considered Shetland’s oldest surviving song, Unst Boat Song’s lyrics are written in Scots and Norn, a form of Norse-language that has been extinct since the mid-19th century. It seems to be a plea that fishermen remain safe on rough seas. “Strong winds blow from the west; They may bring trouble and damage the boat, men”, it begins, according to one translation. The version by Danish String Quartet omits the lyrics entirely, however, and it’s the soaring melody that has brought me back to it again and again this past week.