The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for crawling out of bed far too late, because I was up until dawn playing around with Ren.py after being at the World of Love Jam yesterday and being introduced to making nonsense with it, and then hurriedly compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related reading from across the week (and trying so so hard not to include a list to some pop music), so I can finish off an actual script before Delightful Fiancée returns from a hen-night (not hers) on the other side of the country. Go!

• Always fun to see Stuart Campbell pick a fight with the entire universe. Here's him writing about the love that dare not speak its name. As in, a love of Dragon's Lair. He argues that its demonization is a little rich when so hailed games - Half-life 2, etc - do pretty much the same thing.
• Matthew Sakey despairs that Human Centipede gets away with it and games don't. While I don't disagree with anything, I have a more positive spin. A culture form is actually at its most relevant when it still has the ability to shock. The acceptance Sakey is missing is actually a bad thing. It's a sign that the medium is pretty much dead.
• Via Simon Parkin, N+1 on Video games as Art. Smart on the philosophy and aesthetics, less smart on the medium. "There is no game, at least not yet, in which you accomplish the mission only to learn you’ve been torturing an innocent man, or get passed over for promotion," they say. "Dude!" says I.
• Talking about Parkin, here's him on Red Dead Redemption co-op stuff. Being a console thing, look for the stuff which applies across to us.
• OneGate does a very long, very smart piece on Deus Ex. In case you're not totally Deus Exed out by now.
• Frozen Synapse turned up a lot when I asked for subjects to talk about at World of Love. Now, the speech will go online sooner or later, so I won't say what I did with then, but the Mode 7 games guys did a couple of features on the subject of PR. The first was just about E3. The second is in direct response to accusations of being a bit nob at PR.
• Following on from last week's dice discussion, here's Louis Zocchi explaining all manner of DICE SCIENCE. Turned up in the comment thread, and I - and others - swiftly found ourselves fascinated by a man telling me about the mystery of dice casting for twenty minutes.
• McSweeny's has this lovely rant from Comic Sans. Nothing like baiting typography nerds.
• Frank Sidebottom RIP. Let's give Rob Florence the eulogy.
• A Grammar is a terribly smart blog. This isn't terribly smart, but made me smile.
• Picked this up via Warren Ellis. Zoe Keating's new album Into The Trees is lovely.

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