The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for getting mild sunburn. Which, to the ever-hypochondriac minds at RPS, is clearly terminal sunstroke. Expect delirium in this, my final post, on RPS. It's been great doing this for you, and I hope you'll think of me when I'm gone, occasionally. It doesn't even have to be fondly. So now, for the last time, I set forth to compile a list of interesting (mostly) videogame related reading from across the week and try to resist with all my failing strength linking to some pop-video or another.

• This PlayThisThing Greg Costikyan piece was cut and paste into my Sunday Papers Google document with the note "This is fucking dark". Entitled "Mothers, Don't Let Your Children Grow Up to Be Game Developers", it's Costikyan's response to Epic's Mike Capps defending 60-hour working weeks.
• Let's just quote the title on this one: "Too Human versus the enthusiast press: Video game journalists as mediators of commodity value". Rebecca Carlson of the University of Pittsburgh's piece for Transformative Works and Cultures, Vol 2 (2009). I love academia, me.
• More 360 malarkies, but relevant to anyone watching the indie scene. The Community Games - that is, basically, XBox Live Arcade without the quality control/microsoft interference - have had the first set of sales listed. They're really bloody terrible. While not actually revealed in the list, Mommy's Best Games, makers of the fun Weapon of Choice, talk about how even though they're one of the bigger games, they still sold well beneath expectations.
• On a more PC-indie side, Jason Konoske pointed me in the direction with this interview with Spiderweb's Jeff Vogel about indie RPG malarkies.
• Poisoned Sponge interviews Mr Love Eskil Steenberg about Love and the inside of his fascinating noggin. That's Eskil's. Not Poisoned Sponges, though I'm sure his nogin's interior is pretty fascinating too.
• Gahk. Just deleted about four links due to this stupid fucking laptop and my stupid fucking fingers and my stupid fucking me. Links shorter! Anyway, the Escapist write about the clever tricks developers use to make us feel as if we have more interactivity than we do. I think the word "illusion" is a misreading of both the form and interaction, but there's lots of good quotes here.
• Ellie Gibson interviews Peter Molyneux, somewhat irreverantly. Go Ellie!
• Actually, while we're talking Eurogamer, Oli Welsh interviews NetDevil about their forthcoming Lego Universe. Go Oli!
• Dan Ariely does a talk - i.e. video, so not actually inside The Sunday Papers' remit, but fuck it - on our buggy moral code, and why we find it okay to sometimes lie, cheat or be a dipshit.
• Everyone picked up on this one this week, but in case you didn't get it from anywhere else: Videogames are the new carrots, in terms of night-vision.
• We weren't too fond of Merchants of Brooklyn. The movie script, however? That's something else.
• A couple of splashes of the old Games-journalism-journalism. Firstly, Simon Parkin talks about the issue of subjectivity and facts and malarkies. And quotes me, because I'm always hot for quotes. Meanwhile, Civ-4/Spore's Soren Johnson argues that Metacritic has a purpose - specifically, to give publishers a metric for quality - and its position as kicking boy isn't really fair. I'm actually more fine with Metacritic than you may assume. Sure, I tend to describe them as professional parasites and take occasional pleasure writing something with one eye on screwing up their marking system. But - hey! - at the least it's an easy way to get a big ol' list of reviews for a game. I'm easy, me.
• I've been listening to... brain... failing. No... words. No... pop. Only... death.

Pyrrhic Success!