The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for... God, this is a Long one. Anyway, Sundays are for heading to the evil South, having lunch, coming back and compiling a hefty list of splendid reading about games and similar things while trying to resist linking to one of the may things which were filling my late-night music listening last night, at least until I started playing AAAaaa("Snip"-Ed) at 3:30am.

• Graham Smith has the misfortune to share a house with John Walker and an Office with PC Gamer's Tim Edwards. He has no peace. Occasionally, he finds the strength to write something as he huddles and weeps. In the week that Spelunky went 1.0, his old piece on Spelunky's Rick-Dangerous-where-the-random-danger-is-good caught my eye. Also, his piece on the now-forgotten Lotus 3, which - through the eyes of hindsight - seems to be Spelunky: The Racer. Someone should dig into that, I think.
• Leigh Alexander takes her platform at Kotaku to argue creativity is dead due to our love of shooting shit. I'm paraphrasing cruelly. You should go read and see her full piece, including lots of quotes from anyone you'd like to hear chiming in on this. I particularly feel for Tim Schafer's point about cycles of inspiration and recapitulation. Here's some metacommentary on her reasons for writing it over at her blog. Her in-advance anti-defensiveness-defensiveness is a bit shitty, however.
• Soren "Civilization 4" Johnson reprints one of his Game Developer columns on the problem of cheating. Specifically, the cheating which is essential and the not-cheating that feels like cheating. The key idea is that feeling cheated is one of the worst things in gaming.
• Phill Cameron has a look and a think at one of Bay 12 Games' earlier pieces, before they became the Dwarf Fortress Kings. It's WW1 Medic.
• Over at the Reticule, Chris Evans interviews the developers of beautiful-looking Indie Insanely Twisted Planet. He also talks to some of the Indie Experimental Games people about Indie Experimental Games. He talks to a lot of people, that Chris.
• Bitmob do what we always love. That is, graphs. This time, charting the effect of metacritic scores on game sales. Go Graphs!
• Yet more Graphs in this piece over at Gamsutra Larrington pointed at me. This time it's about difficulty. The main difficulty is the graphs, which appear to be showing THE END OF THE WORLD. Oh noes!
• Mode 7 Games' Paul Taylor talks about Indie Marketing over at Gamasutra. And also shows a little of Frozen Synapse, their new game which I'm excited to see more of. Totally the sort of thing I can see RPS going mental over.
• Meanwhile, general pop-culture blog The Daily Scoundrel Launches. Lewis is involved, and here's JD's piece on a Sim 3 Gordon Brown diary.
• Point/Counterpoint: Richard Terrell says "Bioshock is anti-feminist!" "Bioshock is not anti-feminist", says Alex Raymond. "Bioshock is shit!" says Dracko, in the comments thread, again.
• Fucking Developers.
• Tim Langell steps down from the IDGA. Here's his leaving note. Hmm.
• Chaos Smurf has a little think about Health Systems.
• We talked a little about this in the podcast, but here's those Augmented Reality in a contact lens malarkey.
• My favourite of Warren Ellis' columns for Wired for a while. This time, he's encouraging everyone to bully children to watch Thunderbirds to breed a generation of future engineers. We totally should. Thunderbirds, on the quiet, is one of my pieces of shorthand for the S.W.O.R.D. book I'm doing for Marvel. Which involves me explaining to Steve what I mean by "This one is totally our Thunderbird 2". You can't get the help.
• Actually, while we're talking Warren, they've put up a preview of his forthcoming Avatar Book SUPERGOD. Splendid riff of Quatermass, amongst other, agreeably nasty stuff.
• Jess Nevins on the tragedy of the sadly missed Zeppelin Pulps. We will never see the likes of Pontious Pilot again.
• You've probably seen this, but the Ant & Dec headline horror was a thing of beauty. Can he? I think we all want to know. You go, Ant. Just take it an inch at a time.
• Derek Sivers retells Kurt Vonnegut talking about drama.
• I spent a good long while purring at this Walt Simonson post over at Scans Daily. Purr.
• Picked this piece on how Generation Y are actually incapable of reading emotional cues from Tom Ewing, who dryly noted that the problem with kids is that, apparently, they read too much.
• Channel 4 showed the documentary version of The Shock Doctrine this week. Still free on the Four On Demand, if you didn't see it.
• God, while we're talking politics, Sarah Jaffe writes on Global Comment about the current Health Care Debate over in the colonies, specifically examining it from a freelancers perspective. She quotes me, but you can't have everything. Of course, Sarah also interviewed Ethan Gilsdorf who's travelled the world interviewing people for his book Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. Which, from the interview, is a hell of a lot more intriguing than that unfortunate title.
• Sympathy, Sleater Kinney. This scares the living shit out of me.

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