By Kieron Gillen on June 7th, 2009 at 12:43 pm.
Sundays are just like a normal work day. Scripts to write, showers to have, Sleater-Kinney to be howled. A normal work day, with one exception: today is the day which a list of noted (primarily) game-related reading from across the week is compiled for the RPS readership’s attention, with me trying to resist to any pop music that caught my eye too. Go List! Go!
- Here’s an intelligent young writer who I’ve got a lot of time for. Jim Rossignol runs an obscure little blog where he writes about philosophy and architecture - but in his latest post, he’s shown himself something of a commentator on games too. Good for him, I say. He’s writing about videogames as a device to explore the inner-space of humanity, taking in the Fermi paradox, JG Ballard and how potentially rewarding unreality could be. Go read.
- Kirsten Kearney is interviewing a series of five games journalists over at Ready Up!, each with a specific twist as it’s actually meant to be an educational thing for journlaists. First up is History, and the illustrious Gary Penn. It’s good stuff.
- Mr Bad Science Ben Goldacre turns his critical eye to the claims about online piracy.
- I found this interesting, especially conceptually, as I’m fresh from reading The Corner on holiday. GameRates writes about the similarities between war against gold farmers and the war against drugs. I’m not entirely convinced its as intractable. I suspect if there’s ever a solution, it’ll be a game design solution – because Gold-farming is fundamentally a failure of design.
- Here’s something a little less theory based: Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell writes about Bioshock 2′s multiplayer over at Eurogamer.
- We’ve written about the intriguing Horror-adventure Downfall before - but relatively new site the Slow Down has interviewed its creator, taking in all the problems of Indie Development and publishing, the tradition of 2D graphic adventures and its themes of abuse and insanity.
- The Sponge of Poison throws his mad PC games indie science down at Gamasutra. Viva! Viva! Revolution!
- Ooh, I think I’ll just give the title on this one: Plato’s New Console: Dialogue and Mimesis.
- Over at Resolution, Christos Reid writes on Simulating Cultural Identity, which starts with the big ol’ rhetoricals: “What is culture? Is it music, fashion, architecture? When does an environment become a separate culture to the one we live in currently?” then goes to have a good old prod at Bioshock and Mass Effect.
- Larrington pointed me at this: Gamasutra on the technical reasons why this generation of games are so fucking brown.
- A couple of games-irrelevant ones. The ever-brilliant David McNamee writes about Plan B’s close for the Guardian. I wrote for the music mag for its entire existence, and cared enough that I even looked after its game pages pro bono, doing some Outsider Game Art stuff which I had fun trying to write about games for an audience who didn’t care. Was also where Mat Kumar first took the stage, and Quintin did some splendid stuff there too. It’ll be missed. Hell! It even wrote about music too. Away from that, this Salon article about Jet Plane Repo men is a great high-concept for a videogame. Mercenaries as a caper game, basically. Someone make it, swift-like.
- I have been listening to Sleater Kinney all morning while writing the back matter for the new Phonogram, but there’s an incredible lack of actual original-recording Sleater Kinney music to link to online. In which case, I also dug out the hypersacharine Lucky Soul and their Lips are Unhappy Without You. Aw.
Failed.
Sleater Kinney? Good one guys.
report
Jim’s piece is very interesting, I recommend people read that one. Aliens and games, a must read!
Another Resolution piece for consideration is my hands on with Machinarium – http://resolution-magazine.co.uk/content/?p=1178
report
I miss Plan B.
report
Sleater Kinney – Horngasmically good.
report
I don’t believe Gamasutra. I think games are becoming brown and dark gray because those colors are the shit.
report
Speaking of Eurogamer, how’s your review of Darkfall Online coming along Kieron?
If you give it another 2/10 or 1/10 I will treat you to a nice cold beer.
report
S-K? Your taste in music isn’t all bad after all. :)
report
My brain has melted because of that Plato article…
report
Sleater Kinney – hmm. I’ll stick with The Aliens (Luna) for the moment.
But to echo Wirbelwind, I’m interested in hearing about your progress with Darkfall, are you allowed to say anything?
report
That repo man article was great.
report
I’ll just go ahead and throw in this link to Sleater-Kinney’s Jumpers. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT3Gl4haPNE Mmm, I love me some Sleater-Kinney.
report
Germany makes no sence these days they are the most liberal state on this earth yet their government will still tell them what they can or can’t watch or play.What a joke.
report
Isn’t drug-taking fundamentally a failure of design too?
report
Re: Plato
Why is it that as soon as something becomes philosophical, it also becomes illegible? Is it so hard to write down your thoughts clearly? Or might people not think you’re smart, then?
report
Germany’s totally upstaged the Sunday Papers.
report
I like Lucky Soul a lot, especially that song. It’s good music to listen to on the iPod at work. The Great Unwanted is a better album than Meet The Pipettes.
report
The Fermi’s Paradox stay-at-home solution makes sense when if society becomes machines or software and thinks millions of times faster, they’re not going to want to take the subjective millions of years it would take to get to the nearest star system.
There’s also the “someone is killing everyone” hypothesis (there are a few references for these theories in fiction but they’re kinda plot spoilers if I say them, but suffice to say I can think of one example at least for the former and two for the latter)
It’s equally possible that the “life is super-rare for some very plausible statistical/physical reason” thing also works out, given that we understand star and planet formation quite poorly, and that it took us about 5 of the 13-ish billion years of the universe to evolve from a cloud of gas and dust into SF nerds.
report
I actually quit elike the explanation of why there are no aliens in the universe in a sci-fi book i read. Quantum relies heavily on the observer effect and the Alien would see quantum differently then us so They would not be part of the same universe.
Yes its quite hard to understand and it is quite geeky but I like it. It kind of makes sense
report
It’s probably worth pointing out that “someone is killing all the aliens” isn’t actually a solution to Fermi’s Paradox. Because, you know, if you’ve got intelligent life traveling around the universe all the time and killing off all the other aliens . . . then you’ve got intelligent life traveling about the universe that we still haven’t seen any sign of.
So, yeah. Not really a solution.
. . .
@Sonic Goo: The thing about serious philosophy is that it requires an absurd amount of rigor, because you have to qualify all of the most basic leaps of logic and observation that we tend to take for granted.
The reason it’s incomprehensible is that it’s essentially jargon for that whole process. Any sufficiently sophisticated field develops its own very specific vocabulary. This is because studies in the field tend to require terms for very specific concepts that aren’t very often used outside of the field.
(Case in point: MMO jargon. It’s nearly incomprehensible to people not versed in the genre – or often in the specific game – but I don’t think anyone in their right mind would accuse Joe MMO Forum Poster of padding his barely punctuated and entirely uncapitalized posts to make himself sound more intellectual.)
Serious studies in philosophy work the same way. Of course, there are people who are just bullshitting the jargon to sound like they know what they’re talking about, but that occurs in every field too and is a side effect of jargon existing at all. (See: dodgy car mechanics, tech support, lawyers, art, and so on.)
. . . so yeah. There IS a reason things have a habit of getting incomprehensible when people start talking about philosophy.
report
Which comes first: the articles to include in The Sunday Papers, the beginning blurb, or the thing to be avoided?
report
Hmm. My comment that was listed as awaiting moderation for half the day has been deleted.
It’s not so great that the world needed to see it, but it’d be good to know if it was by accident or on purpose.
report
Noc: That’s only true up to a point. The use of jargon does not, arguably, make for the most effective philosophy. The jargon vs no jargon tension runs all the way into the heaviest philosophy, and I think whether it obfuscates does actually come down to the clarity of the individual writer. Many great philosophers were terrible communicators.
report
Bilzor: The text almost always comes last. We collate the articles across the week. The thing to be avoided normally happens across the week, but occasionally is as late as the text.
KG
report
“Quantum relies heavily on the observer effect and the Alien would see quantum differently then us so They would not be part of the same universe.”
Hmm, where did you read that? Not sure that actually makes sense in terms of actual, real physics. Unless those aliens are nanometres in length. Although that would give us a simpler explanation for why we can’t see them…
But yeah, the universe is a strange place, so there are some crazy hypotheses out there. Boltzmann Brains are fun.
That said, you have to be quite careful about invoking quantum mechanics. It’s quite non-intuitive, and plenty of people into things like crystal healing or other stuff like that use “quantum” as filler bullshit to persuade people that what they do actually works.
report
“It’s probably worth pointing out that “someone is killing all the aliens” isn’t actually a solution to Fermi’s Paradox.”
The solution to this problem is: They’re hiding. Because they want to kill you.
report
In terms of jargon, it depends. Jargon is a useful tool to discuss things with people in your field (like Noc says), but popular writing should tend to avoid it or, possibly better, explain it.
report
“hypersacharine”
Dear god you weren’t kidding. By the time the chorus kicked in it was like someone was pouring concentrated skittle juice down my ear canal.
report
At the risk of being a tad self absorbed; did I get deleted for being bad somehow? That would be worthwhile knowing. (perhaps I ought to email, I guess)
report