The Sunday Papers

Sunday. Articles collated. Attempt to not link to pop music. Inevitable failure. Go.

• Tom Chick has a constant stream of fun stuff over at Fidgit. I especially enjoyed his take on that most blighted of internet journalist forms - the list article. In his case, nailing ten actually novel and inspiring instances of Science-fiction in videogames. Because there's more to videogame fiction than just taking the choice bits of Aliens.
• Welcome to the Black Legion? Nope. Gerard Way of My Chemical Romance explains why he played Imperial Guard Oddly, pretty close to mine. Bless him. [Via Tom Armitage]
• "Oh, it's just another DIKU". "You wot?", thinks you, never dreaming of saying such words in case you're mocked by big bearded Americans. Raph Koster writes a short, elegant potted-history of the MUD-codebase-which-begat-the-MMO-world. Was always more of a MUSH guy myself. That is, pretentious. Don't know about MUSHes? Well, Kaila Hale-Stern on io9 wrote about her time on PernMUSH as a Dragonrider, which would introduce the concept. I didn't play as a Dragonrider. I played as... oh, that's another story, yeah?
• Enough of the roots of the MMO. What about the present? Hellforge write extensively about the great MMO crash of 2008. For me, I really want to see the maths on something like - say - Age of Conan. Not just as a continuing venture, but what it earned from the initial launch too.
• Steven Poole plays the Nailing game. Jim says it totally isn't the best game. I note that it's different from the Nailing game I used to play in my early twenties and Quinns plays on a nightly basis wherever he finds himself. Run, ladies. He's bad.
• The Guardian gamesblog on the re-emergence of bedroom coding. Primarily works as an interview with the Buccaneer: Pursuit of Infamy guys. Which I've still yet to play. Man!
• Point/Counterpoint in a single article. Tom "Tom Bramwell" Bramwell writes about the issue of article selection and the pursuit of hits on the Eurogamer Editorial Blog.
• The Reticule on The Hitler Problem. Which is the sort of article which gets linked on its title alone. It's about the problems with setting games in the 20th century - specifically, theorising what you'd have to do with a Total War 20th century.
• Due to my PC not working - Help me, Alec Meer! You are my only hope! - I've been stuck in the front room with CDs. And listening to a load of Santogold. Man!

Failed.