The Sunday Papers

Sundays are just like a normal work day. Scripts to write, showers to have, Sleater-Kinney to be howled. A normal work day, with one exception: today is the day which a list of noted (primarily) game-related reading from across the week is compiled for the RPS readership's attention, with me trying to resist to any pop music that caught my eye too. Go List! Go!

• Here's an intelligent young writer who I've got a lot of time for. Jim Rossignol runs an obscure little blog where he writes about philosophy and architecture - but in his latest post, he's shown himself something of a commentator on games too. Good for him, I say. He's writing about videogames as a device to explore the inner-space of humanity, taking in the Fermi paradox, JG Ballard and how potentially rewarding unreality could be. Go read.
• Kirsten Kearney is interviewing a series of five games journalists over at Ready Up!, each with a specific twist as it's actually meant to be an educational thing for journlaists. First up is History, and the illustrious Gary Penn. It's good stuff.
• Mr Bad Science Ben Goldacre turns his critical eye to the claims about online piracy.
• I found this interesting, especially conceptually, as I'm fresh from reading The Corner on holiday. GameRates writes about the similarities between war against gold farmers and the war against drugs. I'm not entirely convinced its as intractable. I suspect if there's ever a solution, it'll be a game design solution - because Gold-farming is fundamentally a failure of design.
• Here's something a little less theory based: Tom "Tom Bramwell" Bramwell writes about Bioshock 2's multiplayer over at Eurogamer.
• We've written about the intriguing Horror-adventure Downfall before - but relatively new site the Slow Down has interviewed its creator, taking in all the problems of Indie Development and publishing, the tradition of 2D graphic adventures and its themes of abuse and insanity.
• The Sponge of Poison throws his mad PC games indie science down at Gamasutra. Viva! Viva! Revolution!
• Ooh, I think I'll just give the title on this one: Plato's New Console: Dialogue and Mimesis.
• Over at Resolution, Christos Reid writes on Simulating Cultural Identity, which starts with the big ol' rhetoricals: "What is culture? Is it music, fashion, architecture? When does an environment become a separate culture to the one we live in currently?" then goes to have a good old prod at Bioshock and Mass Effect.
• Larrington pointed me at this: Gamasutra on the technical reasons why this generation of games are so fucking brown.
• A couple of games-irrelevant ones. The ever-brilliant David McNamee writes about Plan B's close for the Guardian. I wrote for the music mag for its entire existence, and cared enough that I even looked after its game pages pro bono, doing some Outsider Game Art stuff which I had fun trying to write about games for an audience who didn't care. Was also where Mat Kumar first took the stage, and Quintin did some splendid stuff there too. It'll be missed. Hell! It even wrote about music too. Away from that, this Salon article about Jet Plane Repo men is a great high-concept for a videogame. Mercenaries as a caper game, basically. Someone make it, swift-like.
• I have been listening to Sleater Kinney all morning while writing the back matter for the new Phonogram, but there's an incredible lack of actual original-recording Sleater Kinney music to link to online. In which case, I also dug out the hypersacharine Lucky Soul and their Lips are Unhappy Without You. Aw.

Failed.