The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for the romancing mini-game, finishing off Bioshock 2 and a series of non-Valentines-Day related events you should consider going to if you're in That There London, while compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related reading from across the week, while trying to resist linking to a couple of pop songs that caught my ear.

• Proust was a Game Designer. Mitu Khandaker has the clevers, regarding art as the forefront of science and similar
• Irrational's blog's getting increasingly excellent. Here's their guide to what could have been with Shock 2.
• And, perhaps similarly, here's Steve Gaynor of 2K Marin talking about Bioshock 2 secrets. As in, in-gags.
• While we're on Bioshock 2... here's Metacritic actually producing content instead of merely existing as all-powerful parasite. They're analysing the reviews. This is the sort of thing a lot of us do anyway, in terms of looking at where the communal thought-space is at, so it's fun to see something like this.
• This was the world's talking about Jim Sterling's anti-indie games - defined as, pretty much, pretentious - column, "Indie Games don't have to act like indie-games". David Jaffe loved it. Jenn Frank writes a defence for it over at Games Set Watch. Me? I had a couple of responses to Jim's cheery populism. Firstly, the line he draws is interesting. The Path is nonsense. Braid, however, is splendid. The same column could have been written by someone who found the Braid too pretentious. The line is obviously foggy. Something will always be too pretentious for someone, and they'll act offended it exists. Secondly, his only example of why the Path is so pretentious is that if you follow the instruction to stay on the path, you "lose" the game. "Stay on the path" is one of the most famously disobeyed commands in all literature. And it's dropped in a game that's clearly about Little Red Riding Hood. If we want to have games be smarter, we have to accept we may have to be smarter players. And if the level of cultural literacy games demand is actually less than "May have read a fairy tale once", we're totally fucked.
• Here's Margaret Robertson over at Wired, writing about how the parlour game Werewolf has just become something of a tech phenomenon.
• Here's Clint Hocking on Didactism in Game Design. From this I have learned that I can't spell "Didactism" unless I manually copy it out. And it's one of my favourite words. Man!
• Here's Tamsin Oxfrod at Techradar, interviewing four gaming legends. Carmack, Pajitnov, Meier and Bushnell.
• Oh, it's been a while since I've linked to some Tim Rogers. Jim seemed to quite like his latest column on whether games can make us happy. Can they? I'm sure that, eventually, Tim will tell us.
• Remember C: Medieval from earlier in the week? Well, here's some development stuff for it. Interesting.
• Mike Walbridge writes about on giving up on Games Journalism. Lots of people write about wanting to make it. Few people write deciding they don't. Worth reading if you're considering following.
• Dungeons & Dragons on the Microsoft Surface. Purr.
• We mentioned Knightmare last week. It was pointed out that Richard Cobbet had written a load about it. And here it is. Hurrah!
• Si Wharton points out a lovely day out: Gameslounge. I wish I lived nearer Bradford. Well, I don't. I more wish London was near Bradford. You know what I mean.
• I wake up to see my friend Budgie has retweeted this old essay on defending the icky indefensible by Neil Gaiman. Always worth bringing back up, I think.
• "We have a moral obligation to seed the universe with life."
• I'm not sure if I've ever linked K-punk before, so let's make amends there. Here he is talking about... oh, lots and lots of things. Culture, curatorship, etc. Well worth reading. he is clevers.
• Also clevers is Jim, who's starting work on his new book, picking up a key theme of This Gaming Life - boredom - and running with it. Looking forward to it already.
• The future and the past here. Gowns split, and here's one final song from them. Secondly, Janelle Monae's first track from her forthcoming album is out there, and pretty neat.

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