Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for telepathy and cake. But that’s not all there is to life. There is also the contemplation of electronic contraptions. And they are many.

• An important (for the desktop colonel) article on recent developments in the strategy genre: “Strategy no longer means what it once did. The prominence of League of Legends and DOTA 2 and the recent failure of games like Age of Empires Online and Fall of Nations has led to a shift in what publishers and developers think people want. MOBAs now dominate the online space, there’s no getting around that, and who can blame them? These games are easy to get into, have a huge and dedicated community. Why would you develop anything else?”

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Sundays are for listening for the distant horn blasts of the approaching army. But while you wait for death on the windswept battlements of the final wall protecting your kingdom, why not read some interesting game-related links?

• Polygon present the story of Octodad: “During college, I discovered that I really … wanted to work on games, but became increasingly insecure about the quality of my work. … My level of anxiety reached its peak right before I started working on [the first Octodad]. It was to the point where I wasn’t able to sleep at night because I was terrified of not being successful. … I was worried that I’d be revealed as a fraud, that I never should have been picked for this [DGE] team in the first place and I didn’t have anything meaningful to contribute.”

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Sundays are for fighting a harrowing trans-dimensional war with an army of psychic aliens. Later: a roast dinner. Ah, lovely.

• Mike Rose writes about Andy Schatz and Monaco: “It’s interesting, because it really made me sympathize with a guy like Peter Molyneux, who talks about his games in the way that he imagines they’ll be like when they’re done. If you’re talking about a game in development, it’s very difficult not to talk about them as you imagine them to be. You really should talk about them as they are, and not as you imagine them to be.”

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Sundays are for retreating to your fortress of solitude as the heroic armies of light make a mess of your empire of darkness. Ah, well, there’s always next week, Lord Evil.

• Polygon’s profile of the handsome Norwegian adventure-game tsar, Ragnar Tornquist, is worth a read: “It’s about really coming into yourself. About growing up and settling down and becoming who you are meant to be and accepting that. It’s about turning the page and realizing you’re not where you thought you’d be, but be okay with that or to fight against it, make a conscious decision to say, ‘This is not where I’m meant to be.’ It’s about characters who are at a point in their lives where things are changing and they need to change and they need to accept that change.”

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Sundays are for waking up from a night of fever dreams and ohgod. So. Weak. Lung plague for real, and I am dying. This is how it ends.

• Digital Foundry looks at what the next generation of consoles will mean for PC specs: “PlayStation 4 in particular offers a substantial challenge to the PC as the top-end gaming platform – a state of affairs that may surprise many. Sony’s new console has often been described as a mid-range gaming PC in terms of its overall technological make-up. Rip apart the various components and the claims have some merit, but with the benefits of a closed box design and a unified memory set-up, the new console has certain qualities that could even give high-end PC rigs a run for their money.”

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Sundays are for picking the shredded remains of the previous week from your teeth, and thinking about the battles that lie ahead. Never surrender, readers.

• Ah, damn. This was an essay I should have written, and knew I should have written, but didn’t because I am weak and old. I am so glad someone else seized it, because it’s obvious and important. Geoff Dyer’s book Zona, which is about The Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker (and also Chernobyl) had a vast and glaring omission. For all its cultural literacy, it entirely ignored the game. Perhaps with good reason, but still. The New York Review Of Books (of all places!) takes up this topic: “The Zone in the video games is a beautifully dangerous place, bigger and grimmer than Tarkovsky’s, but somehow still appropriate. There are plenty of long, tense walks through damp weather or empty, creaking tunnels. Packs of dogs wander the landscape, ruined farmhouses give shelter from the rain; here and there the ground ripples strangely. Stalkers gather around campfires, bandits take potshots at passersby, and a man lies wounded in a ditch, begging for help. Watching Stalker, one is occasionally brought up short by remembering that it was not filmed in Chernobyl, so perfect an analogue does that event seem for the film’s images of technology and nature, beauty and danger in strange alliance. The games, at their best, can seem like a sort of miracle: a dead man’s masterpiece, come home at last.” Not sure I agree with “subpar graphics”, but then I suppose that’s partly a matter of taste and hardware (and modding.)
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Sundays are for meditating on a mountaintop. By Monday you will be an enlightened warrior, ready to use your perspicacity to fox oafish opponents in medieval China.

• Firstly, I want all of you to visit Shut Up & Sit Down. No excuses! No, not even you Man Who Says He Can’t Play Boardgames Because Of Allergies. The site has been relaunched by former-RPSer Quintin ‘The Boy’ Smith, and bard-like RPS-contributor Brendan Caldwell. Have a read of this article for a taste of what they’re up to.

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Sundays are for wondering why you sent Jim a link to a story last night, prompting him to mail asking you to do the Sunday Papers tomorrow as Walker and he are on planes. Still – probably worth Jim owing you a favour, so you talk your parents’ barely functional PC into accessing the RPS WordPress back-end and see if you can collate a few of the finer pieces of games-related reading from across the week for the RPS readers’ entertainment and try not pay tribute to two awesome pop bands who took their final bow this week in a cheery attempt to annoy those terminally addicted to invigorating drone.

• This week Apple decided to pull Sweatshop from the Apple Store, as they viewed its educational approach towards the issue of sweatshops as somehow inappropriate. Designer Simon Parkin writes about his experiences over at The Guardian. Frankly, this sort of bullshit happens whenever you hand a curatorial role over to a fucking corporation. The main reason I’m always as pro-PC as I have been is because of that. You cannot trust a corporation with that kind of control of an artform.

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Sundays are for playing Planetside 2 all day, of course. But there’s also some time for peaceful activities, such as reading and screaming. Let’s try some of that.

• Does it matter that games like Asssassin’s Creed are historically inaccurate? “Ms. Dolmage appends a final thought as the afternoon winds down: “It’s interesting to think about what games like this, that claim to be historically accurate, mean for the authority of historians,” she says. “Mark and I both work … on groups that are typically not written about. As soon as you change the perspective of what you’re writing about, and whose perspective you’re writing from, history is going to change.””

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Sundays are for Mum.

• Link of the week is doubtless Anita Sarkeesian’s first Tropes vs Women video, the full transcript of which is here. I’ve linked the video below, if you want to watch that – and you should. Given the energy with which Ms Sarkeesian’s efforts have been attacked, I’ve no doubt the comments thread below will boil with unwarranted unpleasantness, but please remember that I hold the Bill & Ted rule to be a guiding principle of the internet, second only to the Roger Rabbit rule. Failing to understand these rules will radically reduce my charitableness.

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Sundays are for feeling the after-effects of too much black beer. As you languidly lounge, longing to recover, you discover a trapdoor in the internet. At first it seems dark, but soon you will see tiny grains of light.

• Keith Stuart on Far Cry 3: “Freedom within recognisable constraints is the perfect game state – it is textbook design. Far Cry 2 messed this up because everything was so big and soooo far apart, and the systems grinded against each other. Narrative and ludology constantly bickered and occasionally fought, and when the player stepped in and said ‘stop it guys, it’s not worth it’ something bad would usually happen. Far Cry 3 is a regimented democracy in which the aristocracy (the missions) live in benign separation from the proletariat (the open island) everyone knows their place. And there in the background, facilitating the interplay between the two, is the great fast travel system, which lets you gather resources for a mission without having to drive around for hours in a jeep. Exploration is always, always, on your terms.”

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