Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for repair. The battles of the days and nights before can be forgotten with a cup of tea and some time with a friendly, glowing screen. Let’s see where that takes us.

• “Things I Ate In Skyrim”: “I found myself at a crossroads. I could follow the stony trail toward Riverwood, the game’s first village, or I could take the road less traveled. That’s when I noticed the lovely insect floating above my head. The butterfly lit upon a large rock, then took to the air. I looked up, plucked the creature out of the air, and checked my inventory. I’d already plucked its wings from its body—presumably to be mixed into a potion. Rather than waiting to find a use for this strange reagent, I ate the wings.”

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Sundays are attempting to recover from GameCity 6. I was only there for a day, and I’m almost dead. That said, I did sit through a full eight hours of Thrilling Wonder Stories the day before, which meant by my brain has way too much to process. So Sundays are for digesting massive input. Here, why not try it yourself?

• PC Gamer play Artemis, the starship bridge simulator thing: “Uhurich McCormick: I’m working the communications rig and am supposed to use the ship’s arrays to chat directly with the things hanging in space around us: to secure docking permissions, check the status of allied ships, things like that. I’d previously been wittering away happily with the station’s manufacturing teams to get some more photon torpedoes, but out in the inky blackness of the void, there’s no one to talk to. Aww. Wait, we’ve just scooted past something! Some red dots on the ship’s scanner. I call over to Graham and ask for his expert analysis on what they are. “Red dot things, over there!” he squeaks. Thanks, Graham. Are they hostile? Let’s find out.”

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Sundays! Sundays are for wondering what the week ahead may hold, but also for looking back at the previous week’s scribblings of the internet’s mad scribes, and plucking them apart for clues. IS there anything useful in there? What have they been saying? Read on for elucidation.

• Not really a PC-gaming link winning the Sunday Papers this week, but Ben Goldacre’s request that Susan Greenfield publish her claims about videogames destroying kids’ brains in a scientific paper is reasonable and important: “This week Baroness Susan Greenfield, professor of pharmacology at Oxford reportedly announced that computer games could cause dementia in children. This would be very concerning scientific information. But this comes from the opening of a new wing of an expensive boarding school, not an academic conference. Then a spokesperson told a gaming site that’s not what she means. Though they didn’t say what she does mean.”

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Sundays are for writing cryptic introductory paragraphs that lead into a list of videogame writings collected from across the internet. What could it possibly mean? Let’s see if we can decode the cypher.

• There’s a lot been said about Rage this week, here’s Dead End Thrills’ take on it. It’s interesting to see what megatextures mean for taking someone intent on taking screenshots – yes, there are some spectacular vistas, but just don’t look too closely: “It’s an old-school faker. The abrupt colour-grading that simulates HDR; the tiny flocks of birds against a flat and frozen sky; the vast shadowmaps imposing the stage’s authority on the actors: these aren’t ugly, just conspicuous. Then there’s sparse virtual texturing (aka the MegaTexture), an illusion so data-intensive that it would, some suggest, take something in the region of 80-130gb more data to give it the consistent detail you’d expect.”

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Sundays are for driving across the hills, and through the forests. Sundays are for getting home to a cup of a tea and a boiled egg, and realising there’s still a compilation of the week’s words to do. These are those.

• This week’s winner in the game of words is this dictionary development studio jargon that has been compiled by Gamasutra. I am sure some of them are fallacious, and I have never been used in anger, (while others are just silly), but I couldn’t help smile at “Gone All Kurtz”, “Save the Astronauts”, “Eating Your Own Dog Food” and “Pink Lightsaber”.

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Sundays are for nervously reading the Sunday Papers, and thinking about what might appear in them. Oh well, worse things happen at sea. Let’s have a look at all the things that can only happen in videogames.

• It’s a big one to start: Eurogamer ask the question “How Bad is PC Piracy Really?” The answer, perhaps unsurprisingly, is that no-one really knows. Here’s Capcom’s Christian Svensson: “We looked at quantifying what the real losses are,” says Christian Svensson of the PC Gaming Alliance and Capcom, “and it’s incredibly hard to do, because you end up having to do a set of cascading assumptions that you have no real ability to validate in any meaningful away.” More insightfully, there are a lot of good points made about how and why companies choose to use DRM, but I think it’s Guillaume Rambourg from GoG who sums my feels up best: “”Piracy is some kind of ghost enemy, and chasing a ghost enemy is a pure waste of time and resources. The only way really is to make the whole gaming experience easy, convenient and rewarding for the users – this is the only way to fight against piracy.”

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Sundays are for a breath of fresh air. They are also for sitting in a cold room somewhere in The West and meticulously combing through the internet for clues. Let’s see whether we can find any.

• BitGamer’s Craig Lager has taken some time to investigate microtransactions. This is definitely an important topic: “There’s little point in diving into Korean MMORPGs that explicitly follow the ‘pay to win’ business model, as those games will be deliberately imbalanced to favour regularly paying customers. Western developers, however, claim to avoid falling into this ‘pay to win’ genre; which begs the question of whether they’re telling the truth or just selling empty promises. Thus, these are the games we’re going to analyse – flip the page to see the seven games we’ve chosen to look at.”

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Sundays for Jim are for holidaying. You can easily imagine Jim’s holiday destinations. Him, backpack over-shoulder, wandering a desolate wasteland, poking at decaying iron superstructures or even sitting my a drying pool tainted with radioactive waste. He’s having the time of his life, wandering nonlinearly in a place where any sane being would just want out of. Meanwhile, I sit and arrange a reading list of (mainly) fine game-related readings that crossed my path across the week and try not to do the fucking obvious and link to a new Los Campesinos! record or something.

• You’ll be aware of the Gizmodo Ugh!-I-was-tricked-into-a-date-with-a-Magic-Player furore recently. I just rolled my eyes, thinking it basic click-bait and knew that other people – like the always-good Sarah Jaffe – point out the obvious. So Geordie Tait’s extended piece To My Someday Daughter was fascinating. While the conceit may be a note mawkish – I’ll admit, it almost lots me with the first couple of paragraphs before getting to the first of the very many things it’s about – it’s an interesting analysis of a culture’s response and geek culture in general. Take time to read this one.

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Sunday is for sitting somewhere in the Somerset countryside, reading a giant book of philosophy. If that’s gets boring there’s always a tenuous data signal out here for reading the many philosophies of the internet. Here’s a few of those.

• So, thanks to commenter Kad, I am leading with a podcast this week. It’s an “Irrational Interviews” piece, which sounds like it should consist in entirely random and unpleasant questioning, but is actually Ken Levine vs the doctors of Bioware. “We were having lunch one day after having made some medical education software,” recalls Ray, “then we realized what we’re really passionate about is video games. Why don’t we just make some video games? Take everything we own, and everything we make as doctors on weekends, to fund the company. …That was the extent of the conversation.” And so on.

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They Sunday Papers! Here they are again, this is what Sundays are for. I’ve been detonating dynamite in the murky depths of the internet and collecting what floats to the surface. Let’s take a look at my sack full of stunned links.

• Well I don’t usually put video links as the lead article on the SP, but GDC have posted Thomas Grip’s Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success By Breaking All The Rules, a talk about the making of Amnesia. Everyone who is even vaguely interested in how games are made, and why they are made in the way that they are made, should watch this. (Oh and you should buy Amnesia, if you haven’t already.)

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Sundays are for hoping that everything is going to turn out okay. I mean, it probably will, but sometimes signs aren’t all that promising. Ah well, perhaps there’s some optimism to be found in the endless pages of that internet thing. It certainly has a lot to say for itself.

• Ben Kuchera tries to defend DXHR’s boss battles. He’s wrong, of course, but it’s fun to watch him try: “The world of Human Revolution is violent, and you play the head of security for a very large and controversial corporation. You find yourself going against powerful enemies who would very much like you dead, and while you may be able to slide around most scenes of violence, the way the first boss battle is set up makes it hard to justify a stealthy approach. Imagine the scene in The Phantom Menace when Obi Wan Kenobi and Qui-Gon Jinn finally face Darth Maul directly. There will be no conversation. There will be no sneaking into a heating duct. They can not go around the Sith Lord, they must go through him. No matter how often a Jedi practices his meditation, there may come a time when the lightsaber has to be his method of communication with an enemy.”

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