The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for recovering from a wedding. Which means that Saturday afternoons are for getting shaved, dressed and compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related reading from across the week, while trying to avoid linking to some noisy pop I've been spinning. Go!

• The Escapist picks up the thorny issue of inclusion in their latest issue. The most obviously eye-catching piece was Chuck Wendig's The Pasty White Person Is King, which - amongst other things - considers how inadequate most games character creators are in terms of creating ethnic diversity. As in, basically, you end up with a white person in body paint.
• Alexander Moore was lead Designer on Aliens Vs Predator and is now at Bizarre Creations. He's started writing a series of posts on how games are made, aimed to be digested by pretty much everyone. You can follow them here.
• Zack Booth explores the idea of videogames and person. As in, all other narrative media, no matter whether they use the "I" or not are third-person. All videogames, even if they make the player the other, are first person. Go read.
• The Awl understands that sometimes extreme sarcasm is about the only reasonable response.
• Five Players had another fun week. Here's Mike looking at Space Hulk, PC and console ownership and throwing a playful but true class-spin on it. And here's Emily, who interviews Stuart Campbell and gets him to play some of his more fun cantankerous riffs.
• The Player get out their slide-rule again and does some meta-metacritic mathematical games with user ratings.
• Laura Michet of Second Person Shooter has been playing Starcraft. As in, Starcraft 1. As in, Starcraft 1's single player. She ends up thinking about what the real narrative in Starcraft is...
• When things go wrong with MMO payment systems, we tend to hear a lot about it. But this blog post thanking Mythic for everything they did when their payment system went haywire did make me smile. Credit is due.
• Gaming Daily realise that an After-Action-Report is also a nifty device to explain a game to someone. Have a nose at their X-COM one.
• If you remember Danny Ledonne was working on a documentary about his own Super Columbine Massacre RPG? Well, if you want a chance to see it, Chris mails me to point out it's at Austin's Fantastic Fest this month.
• The Guardian's interview with Terry Pratchett is well worth reading.
• The LA Times on scientists thinking about what we're doing when we're not thinking. As in, daydreaming. Key points: working out what it's actually for.
• Amy Wallace writes on what it's like to be sued for covering the anti-vaccine immunization movement in not entirely glowing terms, and why she'd do it all over again and hopes other people do too.
• Laurenn McCubbin is a Las Vegas-based Artist friend of mine. Here's her being interviewed about - amongst other things - her recent work about Sex work in Las Vegas.
• Alec opened me up into Best Coast this week, which has lead to me obsessing over their naive-Noise-pop thing. The Album's on Spotify, but you can start with Boyfriend.

Failed.