TVTropes is a malicious force in storytelling, but it occasionally puts a name to something it's useful to name. I like "Flanderization", which is a fun word to say, and the process by which a character, often in a sitcom, becomes a parody of themselves. Named after The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, who warps across seasons from a relatively normal, albeit improbably perfect figure of envy for slothful oaf Homer, into an absurd Christian fundamentalist whose niceness is a pathological disorder.
I find this word useful because I think the same process happens to videogames. Brendy's "self-playing games" can be understood as being at the extreme end of the process: parodies of the entire medium of videogames, mimicking the structure of upgrades and progress in order to deliver dopamine without the fullness of complexity of their original genres.
But Knytt, originally released in 2006, represents an earlier stage of much the same process. Knytt is Flanderized Mario.
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"There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me."
Hello reader who is also a reader, and welcome back to What's On Your Bookshelf? - Jank's bi-weekly chat with a mint-condition, laminated collection of rapidly appreciating game-makers about books.
Every so often, the paper books vs e-readers discourse will spontaneously reheat itself like a malfunctioning MRE. A thorny topic, surely, but consider that if a stray teardrop of sriracha falls on a Kindle page of Zola's Nana, it will then appear on every subsequent page until you wipe it off, creating the effect of an infinite, transient sauce globule echoing through spacetime. Conversely, a hardback copy of Puzo's The Godfather you dribbled marinara on will permanently be your sauce-stained copy of The Godfather, though only on a single, lonely page.
I'd like to think this tells us something important about the nature of something else important, although what exactly, I could not say. Perhaps this week's guest might know? It's only Yuts from Norco and Silenus developers Geography Of Robots! Cheers Yuts - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
I'm about a quarter of the way into Money by Martin Amis. I read Amis’s collection of book reviews years ago, and have intended to check out his fiction ever since. There's a scene of the shambolic protagonist getting destroyed in a game of tennis that converted me.
The other book on my desk is for research related to our new game, which takes place along Louisiana's coast. Last Days of Last Island by Bill Dixon, about the 1856 hurricane that wiped out a seasonal resort town down here. Dixon does a great job constructing his research into a continuous narrative.
The tech is better than it's ever been, but VR game design hasn't progressed
When was the last time you heard about a new VR game? If you've seen anyone mention virtual reality in the past few years, aside from the occasional headset review, it's likely been a eulogy for the medium. Strapping screens to your face was always destined to attain the relative popularity of a force feedback steering wheel or HOTAC flight stick, as far as I'm concerned. And so it has.
The challenge is that so many of the obstacles to wider adoption have nothing to do with the quality of the tech. Gunman Contracts might be the perfect illustration of that.
Released into Early Access earlier this month, Gunman promises to turn its players into a John Wick equivalent; a balletic assassin who shoots bad guys with a gun in one hand and catches their dropped weapon mid-air with the other. The reality is more Mr. Bean.
Total Warhammer 3's gorgeous map is going through hell
Somewhere in Nordland's forests, atop a rocky outcrop shaped like a crude arrowhead, a grey wolf howls at the sky. Countless hours in Total Warhammer 3, and it's my first time seeing her. I like to think she's saying goodbye to the moon.
She borks in lunatic prestalgia among dozens of bespoke dioramic sites dotted around the Empire of Man's territories. A mill here. A sports arena there. Cartographic peans to the industry and culture of the thousands of conscripts I'll gift dented cuirasses and spears over the length of my campaign, before marching them off to melt under gouts of sour-green warpfire loosed by cackling rats. In Nordland's port settlements - Dietershafen, Salzenmund - I picture dockworkers hauling and cursing, forced to pull double shifts after half the crew were ground to imitation crab meat by mammoth-riding raiders. Click the ports, and four building chains bear the heroic task of abstracting every non-military facet of the Empire's culture - farms, taverns, tailors, roads.
I don't bring these up to call the simulation gaunt. It's precisely the breadth and richness of Total Warhammer's adaption that invites me to dream of more, I think. The maddening brilliance of grand designs is how they plant seeds for endless grander fantasies. Why shouldn't a game world with this much on offer also contain everything, actually? Why can't I zoom in an extra layer - visit the taverns, hang with the soldiers I'm recruiting? Where are the complex strings of branching story events that let me hunt Skaven in Altdorf's sewers? Lazy devs, please fix (my washing machine, my brain, my life).
Instead, I'm thinking about the wolf and the granaries and the docks because it's taken me facing the end of the world - courtesy of three new apocalyptic end-game scenarios that devastate the planet's surface - to finally stop and smell the roses.
Not for Blood Bowl, apparently! That's its own universe.
This is Warhammer, of course, where even the roses reek. Just outside my capital city of Middenheim, there's a patch of swampland I've never noticed before. It's so small that it's difficult to move an army any amount and still remain inside of it. In the rare circumstance that Middenheim is ever under siege by two armies at once from this one specific angle, the attrition from the swamp might be enough to slightly weaken the reinforcing force in the one or two turns it takes to build battering rams. It is, in other words, meaningless. Unless…
The trouble I usually have with 4Xeses is the fiddling. Shuffling units around, optimising the workers, replacing outmoded armies, making sure everything is building something useful. It's why a war kicking off is usually the point at which I give up.
The main ways to prevent this are delegation, and restricting the player's capacity to intervene. Stellar Monarch 2 combines both in a curious arrangement of massive scale and limited scope. It is a monarch simulator, after a fashion, wherein you're responsible for specific duties, but the rest are someone else's job. The empire won't grind to a halt without you, but it absolutely will not act on those things that require your instruction, like which planets to claim or what to research. Conquering and building three planets is a matter of clicking a few times to authorise it, then waiting. Fleets are regularly built and retired, applying research bonuses, and optionally redesigned in composition. The most complex bit of the game, but rarely needed.
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You're reading Sin's column about the games of yesteryear. Not old enough to be retro, not shiny enough to be new. This is the hinterland of PC gaming. And the first of our subscriber goals!
No one can account for their time on Earth quite like a player of videogames. It's hard not to, as software and hardware conspire together to tally up your time gaming and taunt you with it at every turn. Steam helpfully logs how many hours you've spent on a game right below the Play button, Nintendo Switch users can see their hour counts in their player profiles, and just about every platform will send you a year-end email tabulating how many days your combined hours of gaming add up to. No one — not my partner, not my employer, not my very anxious dog — keeps tabs on my time quite like the videogames I play.
Decades of this quantification has cultivated an unusual relationship between the player and time. Countless souls, intrigued by a game, will habitually check HowLongToBeat.com to see what a new game they're interested in might ask of them. It does not matter that, statistically, almost no players finish games. The ritual persists: a given videogame's estimated completion time is weighed against the player's feather of Anubis, and depending on some arcane calculus based on genre, cost, prestige, marketing, and prior commitments (both to other games as well as people), a game is deemed worthy in its demands or preposterous.
I find this behaviour absurd. Bonkers. Strange. A terrible relationship to have with an art form or leisure pursuit. I object because I have identified it in myself, and recoil in horror. How unfortunate that there are some games for which the first thing you hear about them is how long they are! Dragon Quest VII, for example, is "the one that's a hundred hours long," necessitating an abridged remake. Assassin's Creed games have a similar reputation, as if those not in the habit of playing them ought not to start unless they have some sort of lengthy medical leave planned. And then there are the truly outrageous feats like this month's Trails in the Sky 2nd Chapter, a remake of the second game in Falcom's 13-parts-and-counting soap opera, one of the most staggering time-sinks in the medium.
"I've heard it's similar to Disco Elysium. But Miéville’s must be better, because he has two"
Hell is ascendant. The nightmare moon hangs askew in the rust-blighted sky, low enough to reach down and steal a bite of your waffle cone. Again!
To your left, a battle-worn clowder of gangrenous strays mew the theme to The Godfather, miring your senses in discordant trills : Meooow Mow-mow mooow mow mow-mow.
From beyond the veil, exactly 58 tiny voices scrape at your fragile subconscious, each trying to tell you about a different roguelike card-battler released in the last four hours. Every one of them is 'must play', they insist. (whispery voice) Must play. Must play. Must Play.
Quick. Get inside. It's safe here. We have gathered all the videogames and burned them alive. Only books remain.
Welcome.
Welcome to the inaugural Jank-dition of What's On Your Bookshelf - our regular chat with a selection of excellent game-humans about books! Kicking things off, it's none other than Esoteric Ebb's Christoffer Bodegård! Cheers Chris - mind if we have a nose at your bookshelf?
What are you currently reading?
Liberal Fascisms! One of many essay collections of Žižek, his latest I believe. Once I got out of the slump of extreme-hardcore-crunch, writing thousands of words a day all throughout 2025 and up to Ebb's launch, I needed a cleanser. Or at least a solid hook to start reading again. I find Slavoj Žižek's pop-culture zeitgeist lens incredibly entertaining, and his work gives me the exact same dopamine rush I get from watching overtly political YouTubers rant about current day topics, except I get to actually stop and look up/learn about new sources/concepts/words every other page or so.
I'm also working my way through the Tales of Dunk and Egg! For one reason: I very much enjoyed the dread of watching Game of Thrones slowly collapse into complete sadness - starting with season 4 - since I read ahead to Dance after season 2 dropped. After watching AKOTSK with the boys (which was an experience), I decided to jump onto that same ship once more. I mean, I really hope the following seasons hold up. But now I'm invested, so bring on the pain!
What's On Your Bookshelf has returned thanks to new supporters of Jank helping us to reach one of our subscriber goals! Thanks to everyone who signed up over the past month.
They finally invented Ayn Rand's Battlefield. Wardogs is the sort of huge multiplayer team battler you are familiar with, except now you have a bank balance. You earn a wad of cash with every kill, revive, heal, drop-off, or bit of construction work. Destroy a sandbag for a meagre $14. Blow up a vehicle to pocket a cool $300. Kill a person - that's $2,250. You then use that cash to buy weapons, armour, ammo, and vehicles. The profit motive drives everything.
"You have to spend money to make money," says a gruff NPC vendor, expounding the game's philosophy. Well, fuck you, shop with a mouth. We will not spend a single dollar. Instead, the Jank writers have instigated the ultimate test of tightfistedness. Which of us can make the most money in Wardogs without spending anything? Let's find out.
The rules
Our goal for this challenge is to earn as much cash as possible. We must spend $0. We are allowed five lives, and we are going in cold. That means we have not played the game before, except to do the tutorial. Less Wardogging, more Rawdogging, if you will.
This will not be easy. Even a hammer to build sandbags, or a wrench to fix vehicles can cost 50 warbucks. Reliable firearms are much dearer. Spawning a fighter jet is out of the question. Every player starts with $10,000 when they buy the game. We're not allowed to use any of it. Let's see how we get on.
