The Sunday Papers | Rock Paper Shotgun

Sundays are for playing some video games, I think? Seems unlikely but let’s find out.

Jonathan Nash died. That name might not mean anything to you, but Nash was a writer for the much-beloved British games mag Amiga Power in the ’90s, and he was influential on the generation of games writers that followed – including several founders of this website. RPS co-founder Kieron Gillen wrote about what made J Nash unique in his newsletter:

Nash was, in the simplest terms, a big ol’ weirdo. He was world-leading expert in being Jonathan Nash, and no-one was even close. No-one wrote like him, and god knows enough people tried. You wrote a mail to Nash, and you got a Nash essay back. You felt a bit humbled, and had to up your game to respond. It didn’t seem to turn off. J Nash wrote like J Nash, every single time his fingers got near a keyboard.

Liz Pelly’s Mood Machine is a new book covering the history and present of music streaming service Spotify. Elizabeth Lopatto covered the book for The Verge and extrapolates on what the book has to say about Spotify’s efforts to turn all music listening into an ambient experience.

It was a short hop from there to one of the most compelling — and damning — parts of the book: ghost artists, also sometimes called fake artists. To feed its playlists, Spotify began commissioning “perfect fit content” (PFC) music that matched those playlists but was cheaper for Spotify. “By 2023, according to a review of charts and messages shared on the company Slack, over 100 official playlists were made almost entirely of PFC,” Pelly writes. From there, the even lower-rent option of AI-generated music started looking good.

Video game reviews are often accused of being mean or overly critical, but these days I think they’re most often milquetoast when compared to the reviews of other fields. Here’s LitHub on the most scathing book reviews of 2024.

“Malcolm Gladwell could have written a fresh book. Instead, he created a brand extension of his 2000 hit, The Tipping Point. The result, Revenge of the Tipping Point, is a genre bender: self-help without the practical advice, storytelling without the literariness, nonfiction without the vital truths, entertainment without the pleasure, a thriller without actual revelation and a business book without the actionable insights. But it will be big! … He has chosen to be a farm stand that serves salty, fatty, sugary pseudo-thinking.”

Michael “Kayin” O’Reilly, the creator of masocore platformer I Wanna Be The Guy, wrote about the term “quality-of-life” in game design. O’Reilly argues that the term is overused and that such changes need to be considered more carefully in terms of how they impact a game as a whole.

We often treat Quality-of-Life changes like freebies. Changes that are only an improvement. Changes that don’t change the actual game (the definition of ‘actual’ will vary wildly depending on who you ask). Changes that just make things nicer, more enjoyable, smoother. Changes that simply add up over time to make something a better game. Less menuing, automating repetitive tasks, smoothing out randomness… generally just adding consistency where the controls, UI, or meta-systems are fighting you. They just make things better, right?

I’ve made an effort over the past year to seek out music local to me in Brighton, England, and it’s been rewarding. It has helped that the Brighton music scene is booming right now. Bandcamp’s daily blog interviewed some of the key players and profiled some of the up-and-coming acts. I find this inspiring.

Referring to Brighton’s under-the-radar status, he says, “I hope it can become nationally known in a couple years’ time, like Bristol or London’s Speedy Wunderground scene.” He goes on to mention The Windmill, the legendary London venue synonymous with the label Speedy Wunderground and incubator of buzzy UK acts such as Black Midi and Black Country, New Road: “It feels unique because it’s got such a community around the venue—people filming it, committed sound engineers making good mixes and putting them online. Green Door is the closest thing we have, somewhere people go as a community. You might go there not knowing who’s playing and just trust the curation.”

I can also bounce from this to something more game related. Just yesterday Bandcamp Daily published an introduction to Amiga Hardcore, a microgenre of music produced on Amiga home computers from the ’80s and ’90s.

“For me, working on the Amiga is like coming back to ‘my instrument,’” says influential German hardcore producer Patric Catani. “It’s built so stable, with its super resistant mechanical keyboard and the very dynamic sound output converters. I still love the way I can just forget about the machine itself and just go with the musical flow—unlike on Macbooks or PCs, where there’s constant updates and waiting around until the new patches are installed which break your setup again.”

Music this week is Heartbreaks + Setbacks by Thundercat. It feels as if Thundercat is best known these days as a colourful guest bassist who pops up on tracks by other people, like Mac Miller and Gorillaz, but his own original work is great, too. I’ve also kept returning to Award Tour by A Tribe Called Quest this week.