Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for coming back from Poland full of admiration for their ability to throw down, getting disgusted at the idiocy of British Rail Staff, seeing how your Beta Ray Bill pages in issue 3 turned out and compiling a post of all the fine reading from across the week while trying to avoid linking to some piece of pop music you rediscovered in the last week.

• Average gamer is fat, depressed and 35. Yeah, a lot of people exploded at this one. I suspect we all will too.
• Comrade Ste sighed nostalgically as he realised it was 10 years since the wonder of Old Man Murray’s Drakan Theme week. It’s not actually 10 years yet, but such pedantry is only for the noxious. i.e. Walker.

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Sundays are for downloading Indie Strategy Games, sipping tea and compiling an enormous list of the fun and fascinating reading from across the week, while trying my jolly hardest to not link to some fine 80s indie miserablism which I found myself listening to this morning…

• RPS and assorted friends-of-RPS have been nominated for the GMAs. That is, the Games Media Awards 2009. I’ll hand you over to the justly nominated for specialist online writer, Simon Parkin to talk about it. While still clearly enormously silly, it’s… well, I was going to say “getting more credible”, but it’s still very silly. Just not as silly as before. We’re in the blog category, as opposed to last year, when we were in the website category. VG247 is in both, somehow. And Nowgamer -as much a website as Eurogamer or C&VG is – is in blogs. It’s gloriously mental. At least it’s a good excuse for a piss up, eh?

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Sundays are for sitting, drumming fingers, waiting for your new comic to be announced at WizardWorld Chicago and compiling a list of the (especially fruitful) interesting (main) videogame writing across the week and try and not link to -er – some poetry? That doesn’t sound very me. I blame womankind.

• Simon Parkin plays proper journalist over at Eurogamer, and does a beginners guide to the whole Timothy Langdell situation – fundamentally, Langdell aggressively pursuing anyone who uses the word “Edge” in videogames for infringement of trademark. Strong games journalism, to say the least. And, according to Simon’s twitter, Langdell is unsurprisingly threatening to sue. Go read.
• Gamasutra do a hefty interview with Rhianna Pratchett on games writing. Both about her and the craft generally, if you actually want to know how games writing works currently and who and what you should be blaming for its shortfalls, this is a great grounder.

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Sundays are inexplicable jet-lag, luxuriating in the glow of a 7-1 Blood Bowl victory and compiling a list of the finest (mostly) games-related writing from across the week in a handy list format, while trying to not include a link to some manner of pop music or another.

• Interview of the week, and no mistake. Sarinee “Home of the Underdogs Founder” Achavanuntakul breaks her silence and gives Rob Cummins her first extended interview in years. Extensive coverage of every issue around the Premier Abandonware site and community the Internet has ever seen – what developers said to her, what the industry did and the whole diaspora of sites that have emerged in her wake. Great stuff.
• Jordan Garski on the death of Matrix Online this week. What went wrong? Well, he says, I jacked out pretty quickly. For old time’s sake, here’s my on-release review. Also, this piece on the Escapist which has stuck in my mind years after reading it, about how its playerbase differed from the standard Fantasy MMO. And it sounds as if the end was pretty. It’s kind of a theme this year, isn’t it? The turning off of those games who failed in the 3rd wave of MMOs.

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Sundays are for sitting in a darkened hotel room with your comrades in arms still snoozing, trying to compile a list of the interesting reading from across this week – and since I’ve been away, that’s a relatively sleight one – for the RPS readership’s delectation while trying to avoid sliding in a link to some manner of pop song. And then throwing some clothes on and heading back to my table on the Image stand at Comic-Con. Yes.

• Reading through this gamasutra piece on the charts about consumer research into buying upcoming games, and I hit an particularly eyebrow-raising snippet: “Elsewhere, Left 4 Dead 2 now ranks fifth among all upcoming titles, with the ratio of awareness to purchase intent the most notable statistic: six out of ten gamers who have heard of the title say they plan to buy it. Only Alan Wake, God of War III and Modern Warfare 2 have higher ratios. “This data point is the best indicator of franchises that have a passionate and loyal fanbase, and Left 4 Dead 2 has accomplished this feat in a remarkably short period of time,” says Williams.”. In other words, that boycott isn’t exactly catching on.

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Sundays are for jet-lag, 110 degrees Vegas heat, and crouching on an old friend’s apartment whilst being harried by her dog. Also compiling a list of the notable games writing from across the week while trying not to lob in a link to one of the most glorious noble follies of Eighties pop music.

• Game Set Watch sidles up to another one of our writers, gets them drunk and then takes them home to have their wicked way with them. This time it’s our man in Canada, comrade Quinns, starting a new column – BATTLE KLAXON! – which seems to be about whatever is in the inside of his funny little noggin. This time it’s how Warhawk is an overlooked pleasure. And it’s certainly overlooked. I can’t find it on the PC release schedule anywhere. Man!

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The Sunday Papers surprises me. Sometimes it can be Thursday and my document is nearly empty. I think it’s going to be a small one. And then, Sunday hits, and I’ve all the writing in the world. So, as is Sunday’s wont, I compile a particularly bumper selection of the fine games writing across the week, while trying not to link to some pop-band who’ve managed to surprise me totally in the same period.

• Loyola Professor David Myers has been playing City of Heroes as part of his research. Which strikes me as a good thing to do. However, he’s been playing his Alt Twixt as… well, only obeying the rules of the game rather than the social rules. This lead to becoming one of the most hated players and recieving death-threats. He’s written a paper on it, and a book is forthcoming, but this article has an over-view of the events plus a link to one of his papers. Myers comes across somewhat naive, frankly. Gaming social groups act like social groups? Yeah, so what? And why shouldn’t they. Myers, from their perspective, was acting like a sociopath with no interest in societal mores.

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Sundays are for tea and compiling a list of interesting videogame readings from across the week for the RPS-audience’s delectation, while trying to not break into an improvised tribute to a real titan who passed this week or link to a pop song. Must… try…

• I get to the RPS-Sunday Papers document and I find three – count ‘em! – stories from Gamasutra. That’s a good week, so let’s make ‘em top story. Firstly, the history of the original videogame(tm) Space War. Secondly, on the design of the RPS-lusted-after APB. Thirdly, on them examining the point where accessibility goes too far, specifically around the automatic walkthrough system. Which is worth thinking about. After all, you don’t have to use it if you don’t want to. I think that’s the naive argument. Much like quick-save and in-game teleportion, if it’s there, you’re going to use it.

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Sundays are pain and a list of reading about games without a pop song. But mainly pain.

• I was going to do a full post on this, but never got around to it. Let’s get it out here now. Ron Gilbert replays the first Monkey Island and gives a director’s commentary on the experience: “Most people know you can hit the period key to skip a single line of dialog, but I’m surprised when I run into people that don’t know why I chose the period key. It seems obvious to me: a period ends a sentence.” I admit, i didn’t know that. Man!
• You want to hear me waffle? Well, Kirsten at Ready-Up makes me talk about creativity in games journalism and reveal my secret origin. KG: YEAR ONE. I had fun with this, as I suspect you’ll be able to tell by the way my answers get increasingly hysterical.

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Sundays are for sitting and compiling a list of interesting gaming reading from across the week, and finding myself remembering that the chatter by games journalists about a fall in standards is just ludicrous. We’d have been lucky to get pieces as splendid and varied as the ones gathered here in a whole year in the early nineties, let alone in a single fucking week. Wouldn’t it be good if someone would admit that games writing has never, ever been better than it is right here, right now? Wouldn’t it? WOULDN’T IT? AS IF A FUCKING TYPO IN A GAMESPOT PREVIEW MATTERS AT ALL IN THE LARGER SCALE OF CUNTING THINGS AND… oh, I better not include a link to a pop song.

• I suspect I shouldn’t have kept this for the Sunday Papers. Roburky has been writing an alternately hilarious and genuinely heart-breaking diary of playing as a homeless single-parent family in the Sims 3. If you haven’t picked up on it from any of the places its been linked to, you should go catch up now. It’s almost certainly going to end up the premier piece of popular games reportage of the year.

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