The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I have a question. Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work? Such that you can say: that guy "hates this type of stuff", that gal "loves this type of stuff"? Maybe that "stuff" is a whole genre, or just a mode of play, a style, a trope, a design choice, anything at all, but whatever it is, it's a defining aspect of that critic's work. Alright? Alright. Now here are some articles worth reading from across the past week.

Japanese game studios have been relatively shielded from the choppy seas of the recent games industry. For This Week In Videogames, Francisco Dominguez tried to find out why.

From the outside looking in, it's a harsh indictment of Western studio culture. Due to Japan's strong labour protections that severely restrict the use of layoffs, reckless cycles of overhiring followed by layoffs never became a regular occurrence domestically. Prominent

Good morning, videogames. Some weeks, no great writing about gaming comes to me organically and I need to make a special effort to go looking for it. I hope you appreciate the sacrifices I have made for you this week in reading and rejecting several dreadful reviews, previews and features to find even a handful I could bring myself to share. Thankfully, once the games are out of the way, I get to link to a great and somewhat horny article by a nonagenarian.

One of the pumping limpets clinging to the walls of bilge-filled cultural adulterant PC Gamer With Airs wrote a review of Roman Sands RE:Build that is worth putting your waders on for.

Each of those component games is a short masterpiece, executed with huge prowess at every level of the art, sound, design and writing. They might seem totally dissimilar, at first. One game is a hyperactive, time-looping hotel job simulator in which you tend to some cartoonishly awful older guests, shifting incrementally between times of day as you hurry between parts of a garish and phantasmagorical resort that is being menaced by an approaching sun. It's a place without memory, in

Good morning, videogames. I normally write this article on a Saturday night after my kid has gone to bed, but he was at a sleepover at a friend's house yesterday. This slight change in routine was enough to completely throw me off. I spent the night playing games and only remembered The Lie-In when I went to bed at 2am. Consider this tardy issue of The Lie-In as bleary-eyed and emotionally fragile as my 10-year-old normally is after staying up all night with four friends, yet still full of links worth reading.

There are a million little ways in which the social contract is eroded by social media mega-sites. Laura Michet writes about "self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth"; how a failure to signal that you've learned the rules, or that you know there are rules to learn, makes it harder to extend trust and respect.

In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with,

Good morning, videogames. I have a bumper crop of good articles to share this week so there's no time to spare. Let's get going.

Patrick Miller has been writing about and designing fighting games for years, and most recently worked on Riot's 2XKO. This past week, he wrote more about what he values in the games he plays, why he loves fighting games specifically, and why he doesn't care for games he describes as "opiates".

I say this as someone who has loved video games his whole life; if games serve a load-bearing function in someone's life, it's the life that needs fixing, not the games.

A man after Brendy's heart. Personally I don't want videogames to be opiates, but I'm okay with them being weed.

A similar argument from a different angle, Lincoln Carpenter wants MMOs to waste his time again. Me too.

WoW has become a relentlessly efficient machine, ensuring players waste the least possible time while being propelled through seasonal ranks and escalating difficulty tiers. In terms of providing their users with those quantifiable successes, it's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't

Good morning, videogames. Jonty and I have both been away this past week on separate work trips, leaving Brendy to operate the cranks, winches and pulleys of Jank alone. And didn't he do well? Jonty handled the summary in yesterday's Jank Mail, so I'll just add my thanks to Brendy's newborn for leaving his father with just enough mental capacity to play a multiplayer game. Astonishing. Let's round up some games writing from across the past week.

I remember when the "gamer bill of rights" was a serious proposition from a handful of developers and digital storefronts. Mothership asked a group of people to pitch ideas for what such a document might contain, tongue closer to cheek.

The right not to play a game

Just because "everyone" loves a game or it wins a bunch of awards or someone tells you that you "have" to play it does not mean you do in fact have to play it. You are no less of a "real gamer" just because you have not played a certain game. There are thousands of games that have been released over decades on a variety of platforms, which come with many

Good morning, videogames. Except it's not morning. I have finally failed to deliver this article on time, as I'm away from home at the moment doing other things. Forgive me. We'll add an extra tier to our new subscriber goals at which I will be flogged. In the meantime, a collection of links awaits you below.

The second collection of Metal Gear Solid re-releases is arriving next week, and Polygon's Giovanni Colantonio revisited the fourth game in the series to talk about what's aged well, and less well.

But the poorly aged stealth action is far from the most shocking thing about Metal Gear Solid 4. Instead, it’s how direct Kojima is about tackling political issues without mincing a single word.

I love brush-based level design. Brendon Chung loves it too, and his opinion matters more as the maker of 30 Flights Of Loving, Quadrilateral Cowboy and Skin Deep.

It’s intentionally and specifically not a general-purpose tool designed to do anything – and I think that’s great. It’s built from the ground up to focus on authoring geometry for 3D game levels, allow you to make it as easily

Good morning, videogames. I fell hard for a new game on Friday night and I am eager to get back to playing it. Thankfully my links are already all picked out, neatly folded, and arranged in a row below. There are some good ones this week.

For Chisel, Mikhail Klimentov grapples with the thousands of hours he's spent playing Valorant, and paints an unflinchingly honest portrait that will be relatable to those who have ever obsessed over a multiplayer game.

I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the

Good morning, videogames. Last week's Lie-In was written in advance to cover for my absence, and frankly it was rude for people to continue publishing articles while I was away. Now this week's Lie-In needs to somehow contain almost two weeks of links to writing about videogames. Terrible for me; a bumper crop for you.

Aftermath launched Hater Week, a batch of articles in which they got a lot off their chests. I love this idea. Here's Gita Jackson on why survival games are annoying.

A video game character does not need to eat, drink, or sleep. They do not need to take their meds every day. They don’t go to the bathroom, or get hair cuts, or trim their nails—all these tiny chores that take up time in my life that I never think about but must complete. So why, why, would I play a video game where doing all these chores is not only necessary, but the point.

Speaking of haters, academic and translator Emily Wilson discussed her distaste for Christopher Nolan's adaptation of The Odyssey. Wilson published a translation of the Odyssey in 2017 and knows her stuff, at