The Sunday Papers | Rock Paper Shotgun

Sundays are for resting, supposedly, but it can also be for mopping the floors, washing the bedding, and catching up on work because you simply have too much to do.

Remember the Electronic Wireless Show? Two of its hosts, Alice Bell and Nate Crowley, have started a new podcast “about video games (mostly)”. It’s called Total Playtime and an introductory episode 0 and a Patreon are live now. The third host is Jon Hicks, with whom you may be less familiar, but he used to be my boss and thus may be considered the 5th Beatle of RPS. Anyway, go give it a listen.

Sam Horti (sometimes of this parish) popped up in the New York Times this week, talking to Inkle’s Jon Ingold about video game writing. This one has generated a lot of discussion.

Jon Ingold finds most video game writing empty at best, turgid at worst.

Ingold, an author of celebrated narrative-driven games including 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault, acknowledged that his writing tastes were “fussy” and was reluctant to single out studios. But he was comfortable calling the text-heavy Disco Elysium, one of the century’s most acclaimed role-playing games, “massively overwritten and really tedious.”

I linked to a Felipe Pepe article last week and buried within it was this link to another. How a 25-year-old German MMO became a Pokémon fangame.

Like any MMO, there are many other stories of iconic events across the game’s long history — the Sword of Fury that no one knows how to obtain, the mysterious door that only Lv 999 characters can cross, the Serpentine Tower puzzle people are still trying to solve, in-game weddings, guild wars, hacks, etc. A particularly bizarre one is Tibiaball: since the game allows players to push objects around, they began using the feature to play soccer tournaments… using the massive corpse of a bear.

Bertie Purchese at Eurogamer wrote about the Switch 2 reveal, and the fear that Nintendo are no longer the makers of weird tech they once were. I ctrl+F’d this for “Labo 2” but didn’t find a mention.

Two things worry me. One is that this might be the final form of Nintendo games machines now forever more. Perhaps, as with the rectangular smartphone, we’ve reached the endpoint in form-factor, from a design point of view. I doubt Nintendo will ever go back to making a stationary console to sit under a television, so until foldable screen technology becomes cheap and reliable enough to factor into a design, this general Switch design might be as good as it gets.

Jay Castello, sometimes of this parish, made a YouTube video about “the curse of player agency” upon Starfield.

I keep linking to pieces here about work and purpose, and I will not stop. This week: journalist Alexis Madrigal on having a “life project”:

You might say it doesn’t have to be; we are multifaceted, etc. But I have noticed that my favorite creative people—whether it’s Rebecca Solnit or Ada Limón, Ta-Nehisi Coates or Miranda July, Mimi Tempestt or Richard Powers, Jenny Odell or Valerie June, Ross Gay or George Saunders—are engaged in a life project, each work a piece of some whole. Their books or poems or Instagram posts gather force from this larger system of thought, action, and intensity. And in any case: doesn’t it seem useful to search out the guidewires and mycorrhizal networks underlying your creative life?

That’s it. Short one this week, because I haven’t had time to read anything among all the playing and the writing of things.

Music this week is gothic scuzz-pop from south London, Goat Girl’s Ride Around. Then relax yourself with a classic, Coolie High by Camp Lo.