Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for recovering. Whatever the week dealt, you can sit back with a cup of hot drugs and have a rest. Ah, that’s the stuff. Time to collect ourselves, and also, perhaps, collect some writings about the state of videogames in the 21st century. That’s the right century, right? Sheesh.

• Eurogamer look back at a game that is fairly regularly reminisced, Grim Fandango: “The story of Manny Calavera – a grim reaper brilliantly reimagined as a travel agent – uncovering a web of corruption in the Land of the Dead is part Mexican folklore and part film noir. Given how well Grim Fandango blends the latter with a traditional adventure game template makes it a wonder why this hasn’t been done more, since both genres are predicated on crafty problem-solving, deception and wry humour.”

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Sundays are for waking up the heart of ancient Oxford, having sucked the knowledge out of thirty PhD students the night before, and leaving them useless husks as you grow only more powerful. Also, it is for compiling internet lists of useful reading material on the important topic of computer games! Hooray!

• Over on Eurogamer Mr Cobbett asks why the games industry is afraid of failure: “It says something about modern games that BioShock Infinite has been able to make headlines by adding a special “1999 Mode” where your in-game decisions will actually matter…. Where normally you’ll be able to jack-of-all-trades your way through most situations, here – supposedly – everything will be a trade-off. n short, it’s being set up as a mode that’s not afraid to let you fail – and that’s practically unheard of these days.”

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Sundays are for magnetically aligning ferrous particles and awaiting the release of the new Pye Corner Audio transmission on Monday. Perhaps we can find something to do in the meantime, eh?

• Killscreen continue to produce some worthy reviews. Mr Zacny just about nails Need For Speed: The Run, like this: “The mission is scripted to make most of this lengthy race utterly pointless. You cannot pull ahead, and you cannot fall behind. I tested my theory by driving across the bridge like Miss Daisy was napping in the back seat. I calmly sidestepped the oncoming cars while the overwrought soundtrack gave itself a heart attack. Nor did I push too hard through the subway tunnels. No matter what you do, Jack and the wise guy will end up side-by-side in Brooklyn, and Jack will be forced to escape into the subway. And no matter how quickly or slowly you go through the subway tunnels, Jack will always come flying off the tracks to land a few car-lengths behind his opponent. Nothing you do makes a difference.”

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Sundays! Sundays are for grand victory on the field of battle! The smell of smoke and blood in your nostrils, the knowledge of having trampled the bones of your nemesis. Yes, Sundays are for the champions who write their own history. But are these some of those? Let’s find out…

• This piece by MMO designer Raph Koster fascinated me. It asks “Is immersion a core game virtue?” and then decides that “Immersion is not a core game virtue.” Regardless of how nebulous a concept “immersion” actually is, I find it totally unconvincing, as it seems to be a piece of writing about Raph’s perception of where games are as a medium, and I am not sure that I agree. “Immersion does not make a lot of sense in a mobile, interruptible world. It comes from spending hours at something. An the fact is that as games go mainstream, they are played in small bites far more often than they are played in long solo sessions. The market adapts — this reaches more people, so the budgets divert, the publishers’ attention diverts, the developers’ creative attention diverts.” But personally I only see what Raph is talking about here as diversification, not an overall change. The kind of games (and resulting imaginative engagements) Raph is talking about are not gone, there’s just a lot of other noise, too. I think he’s making a mistake of following trends in the market and seeing that as the whole picture.

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Sundays are for planning the year ahead. It will contain victories. It will also, likely, contain videogames and many thoughts about them. So let’s make like we meant to go on and find victory in fine words about videogames.

• Cobbett’s weekly Crapshoot remains one of the best sources of the worst of PC gaming. This week was something I’d never heard of, a Myst pisstake, Pyst: “Probably the weirdest part of the whole thing – other than that it sold well enough for a sequel to be on the cards – is the song that plays at the end. Goodman sings it, and it’s called “I’m Pyst”, but what the hell it’s meant to have to do with anything, I have absolutely no idea. It’s only King Mattrus singing in theory, nothing about it involves Myst in any way shape or form, and… well… listen if you dare.”

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Sundays are, if you so inclined, already Christmas day. And why not have Wintermas a week early? You’re (probably) a grown up? There’s literally nothing stopping you. I’m going to have another Christmas in April, too, just for the hell of it. Fuck calendars, I say. No one tells me when to decorate my house with tinsel!

• Dan throws some water in the well-marketed flames of The Old Republic launch: “Whether SWTOR is any good or not is academic at this stage. It’s a supertanker that can’t turn fast, a holiday resort built in boom times. With its brand and the hype, it’s likely to succeed; but it’s almost certainly the last of its kind.” That will seem true, I think, until a company figure out what we will pay a subscription for again. Could that company be Blizzard? It’ll be interesting to see…

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Sundays are for waking up early to see what the previous night’s hype ceremony has disgorged into the guts of the internet. Then, later, you turn to other things. Words on those games. What might there be amongst the debris? Let’s scavenge.

• It’s difficult not to be impressed by Totilo’s profile of Tim Sweeney, a programming legend who is about to be added to the Hall of Fame of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. Totilo talks about what Sweeney the man he is, and explains a bit about why the mind behind Epic’s tech is so important: “These days, if a company wants to show off how impressive their new computer, phone or console is, the easiest path is to get the latest Unreal Engine on it. They want Sweeney or one of his colleagues on stage showing how well it runs and how easily people can make games with it. “He enabled us to make fun games that I call ‘system justifiers,’” Bleszinski explained. “He made an engine that made it easy for developers to make good-looking things fast, which then let you get a great-looking game on an iPad 2 or through a 3D card and show your wife that ‘this is why I got this.’”"

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Sundays! They can be for all kinds of stuff. Singing, dancing, rejoicing. But it’s possible you’re having a quieter time. You’re sat down somewhere with a glowing screen, and you’re filtering through information. So much of it… Here comes some now.

• Read of the week, for me at least, was the Frozen Synapse post-mortem: “Commercially, our targets were: Focus completely on digital; achieve Steam distribution; sell over 100k copies within a year from release without a significant marketing spend; create a game that would be popular with core PC gamers; we wanted to make something that would really appeal to readers of RockPaperShotgun!” Well, that’s always a good idea.

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Sundays. Sundays are for dreaming of another world. Or perhaps Another World, depending on what sort of dreams you have. It is also for skimming across a week of internet links and wondering how all this could happen – why doesn’t everyone just sit down and have a rest? Eh? It makes little sense to me.

• I wanted to link to this post by Jeff Vogel (which I got to from this follow up), but actually it’s worth checking out a lot of the stuff on his blog. Vogel makes turn-based RPGs in a fairly traditional way, and makes a living from that, and as such his insights on what it means to be indie have a depth that other, less experienced indies perhaps do not: “The 10000 Hour Rule is about crushing dreams. It’s about understanding that there are limits to what you can do in the all-too-short period of time we spend on this Earth. It’s about giving people who have achieved mastery the respect they deserve. It’s about, before taking on a new task, honestly evaluating whether we can afford to give what it takes to complete it. And it’s about forgiving yourself for not being able to play the guitar like Hendrix.”

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Sundays are for wondering if you will ever sleep again, while cradling a steaming cup of hot drugs. Perhaps, in those grey autumn hours before the sun has managed to struggle out of its own slumberings, you will start going through the week’s writings about games. It’s been a good week for that, at least.

• Chris Dahlen’s piece on imaginary games journalist Rachael Webster is quite the thing: “This was the one big hiccup in the project: nowhere on the site did we advertise that Rachael wasn’t a live girl. Alternate reality games are a special illusion that only works if the audience discovers the trick. The worlds they build aren’t stuck in a television screen, or cheap and obvious like the backdrops at a miniature golf course. They’re pervasive, delivering their fiction straight to your everyday world—to your email, your phone, even to spaces in the real world. They’re fiction without borders, and they can make the player feel as if, to use the most common expression, they’ve “fallen down the rabbit hole.””

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Sunday mornings are for realising that it’s going to be a slow week of typing because you bought a new keyboard and it’s just ever so slightly different to the old one, which means one extra bad key hit per sentence. Sigh. At least it glows in the dark.

• Brandon Sheffield’s Game Changers article appears to be a sort of predictably zeitgeisty filler material in the subjects that he picks, but having read it I think it’s actually a genuinely important overview of where we are right now, looking who is changing the industry, and why. On the Humble bundle project: “One of the project’s additional successes comes from its ability to retain that indie feeling while growing massively. As the bundles have gotten more successful, they attracted the attention of investors. Sequoia Capital provided venture funding of $4.7 million to the bundle’s future growth, which is a decidedly un-humble amount of money.” These are the companies worth paying attention to. Humble alone is interesting enough because it is generating significant wealth for indies who might otherwise have struggled to break even. That success is indicative of where the “indie” revolution has got to, now: people have worked out exactly how to get the games to the players, and the money to their bank accounts. And that’s worth being aware of.

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