Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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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Sundays are for waking up, and then going back to sleep again. And waking up, and going back to sleep again. And waking up and Oh My God it’s time for tea! And possibly The Sunday Papers.

• An interview with Teleglitch’s creators: “We originally had a fully-destructible world and the resolution was actually even smaller, but somehow it transformed to Teleglitch. Somewhere along the way I got inspired by roguelikes, permadeath and ultra-replayability and without much consideration implemented procedural levels. A random level generator is also much more fun to code than a mid-level saving system. Those black shadows are clearly inspired from Nox, I really loved how you never knew what will happen behind the next door. The combination system was inspired by Notrium, a really awesome game about surviving in an alien world.”

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Sundays are for waking up tired because you spent so much of the day before playing Planetside 2. Why isn’t everyone in the world playing that awesome game? It’s a mystery no man can understand. While we ponder such strangenesses, we can also look for clues in the writings of the internet. Behold.

• Over at the Guardian, Keith Stuart asks: Is frustration an essential part of game design? “From here I thought, well, is frustration part of game design or a failure of game design? Certainly, frustration has been there from the beginning. Eurogamer writer Christian Donlan once interviewed Eugene Jarvis, the creator of early and immensely difficult arcade titles like Defender and Robotron – he claimed that he would visit arcades and inspect the coin-op cabinets of his titles, feeling immense pride if they had clearly been kicked or punched.”

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Sundays are for being pleased that it is raining so that you can stay inside and browse a collection of fine videogames. Perhaps, when you have a few minutes, you might read a few articles of games writing, too.

• Jon Shafer’s design blog has been filling up with At The Gates stuff in the past week, but before that he wrote this: “A moniker often used for empire builders is “4X”, for exploration, expansion, exploitation and extermination. Unfortunately, once you get halfway through a game the first two Xs – by far the most enjoyable for many players – are pretty much wrapped up. Unless you really enjoy watching meters fill up or have a particular love for the less-than-perfect combat systems these games tend to feature there’s really not much left to see. And so we quit and start over.”

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Sundays are for cowering by the fire as the bitter winter cold creeps in. Perhaps we’ll have a laptop close at hand – and not freeze to death retrieving it from some distant bedroom – so that we can read what’s been discussed in the world of games.

• Simon Parkin’s article on the relationship between games and gun manufacturers is fascinating: “It is hard to qualify to what extent rifle sales have increased as a result of being in games,” says Ralph Vaughn, the man who negotiates deals with game developers for Barrett. “But video games expose our brand to a young audience who are considered possible future owners.”

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Sundays might seem like they are for rest, but it’s a trick. It’s actually the busiest day of the week, as you attempt to cram in all those things you wanted to do but didn’t have the time. Perhaps, if you are extremely fortunate, you will be able to find time to browse some articles about videogames, too.

• The Verge on the death of amusement arcades: “Though probably overstated at the time, pinball’s relationship to organized crime certainly existed. The end of Prohibition didn’t bring an end to the mob, but it did require the diversification of portfolios, adding the distribution of vending machines, cigarette machines, jukeboxes, and pinball to the “amusements” of booze and prostitution. LaGuardia’s mission gave voice to sentiments which hearkened back to the moral outrage of the Prohibition era, too, most of which had nothing to do with organized crime. Pinball, a “pointless game,” was attractive to children, and this worried parents and “concerned citizens.”"

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Sundays are for rising from the dead. I have returned from the bleak wilderness of zero connectivity to light the blazing beacon of light reading on Mount Internet. Soon beacons will appear all across the skyline of the digital world, and writing about games will be read by thousands. It is a beautiful new era.

• Over at Edge Online Steven Poole noted that the UK’s premier sesquipedalian, Will Self, had written an essay on videogames, and that – while flawed and inexpert re the medium – made some interesting points, such as why nazi zombies might not be good game fodder, and why being hunted might be a good theme for a game. (And it really is.) Thus: “Self’s essay muses on the theme of predation, endorsing the argument of Paul Trout that “our earliest mythologies” are based “in the experience not of being hunters, but of being hunted” by jawed megafauna such as the sabre-toothed tiger. He finds this a refreshing counter to the modern shooter that tells its customers they are alpha predators. But videogames have long played precisely on a tense alternation between being predated upon and doing the predating. (As Self could have noticed even in Pac-Man.) If we were only prey in games, they would be too depressing a phantasmagorical allegory of real life, since most of us are fundamentally prey to the rapacious dance of global capital, to crypto-psychopathic bosses, to barbarous bureaucracy.”

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Jim remains in his internetless purgatory for crimes too terrible to mention, so today I’m putting together a quick selection of gaming articles from elsewhere. Starting with…

• Just before Christmas, PC Gamer’s Phil Savage took a look at the studies cited by those condemning videogames for the horror that took place at the Sandy Hook school. And found them to be slightly wanting. He also spoke to the author of one of the often cited studies, and heard a very different story. It’s a really great piece of work, exposing those who have been misleading with inaccurate reports of their own data, and speaking to those in authority to hear the truth. Frankly, I’m just delighted that someone else in the industry is writing stuff like this, and hope to see Savage doing similarly smart and careful work in response to other controversies.

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