The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. Sometimes, especially in the quiet weeks, I'll include articles in The Lie-In that aren't exemplary works of prose, but which I still hope have some broader worthwhile point or which might generate an interesting discussion. All the same, let's see if I can manage to avoid accidentally linking to something AI-generated this week, eh?

Abram Buehner laments people playing Tomodachi Life for the benefit of the algorithm rather than for their friends. I'm not sure I believe there's any wrong way to play Nintendo's madlibs 'em up, but this is about a subculture that otherwise hasn't come across my social media feed.

That didn’t go over well. The breathless replies argued that to put your real friends into the game was to cross a social boundary, to subject them to the vulgar, wild sandbox of Living the Dream. Of course, I’m paraphrasing, since the actual replies were more along the lines of “I’m not putting my IRL friends into the yaoi simulator lmao.” To believe this is to assume Tomodachi Life must be a site of depravity, and that your loved ones are undoubtedly sucked

Good morning, videogames. I read less than normal this past week, which I will pin on my being busy, but I still have several worthy articles for you. And then I reached deep into the recesses of my memory to hoist out something old and forgotten, alongside a little sermon. Read on.

I wrote something recently - here, I guess? - about loving Gamespy's pre-release developer diaries for the original Black & White, which were written by the team themselves. For Eurogamer, Lewis Gordon interviewed some of those original developers about the creation of the game's creature AI. I would not trust Molyneux's self-mythology, and yet I delight in reading anything about this particular game. A conundrum.

The creature, which set Evans on a trajectory from the Lionhead office in Guildford to the rarefied corridors of Google DeepMind in London, began as just a few simple scribblings by Molyneux on a piece of A4 paper. "I thought, let's do a game with an AI agent in it," says Molyneux, toking intermittently on a vape from the office of his current studio, 22Cans. "We wanted to explore the idea of morality, and focus that morality through this

Good morning, videogames. The Brighton marathon is taking place today. I'm not running in it, but I will be doing something much harder: crossing the road while it takes place. Before I'm trampled to death by thousands of angry people in shorts, let's consider some of the best writing about games from across the week.

For Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen asked a flock of developers how pausing works in their games.

“In most of the Vlambeer games and Minit / Disc Room,” said developer Jan Willem Nijman, “I take a screenshot (with the UI disabled), then either jump to a completely different empty room or deactivate everything... with that screenshot as the background, [and] on unpause jump back [to the game]. Sometimes there’s a 1-frame delay because that screenshot needs the UI disabled.”

Ashley Day wrote about the experience of going back to Super Mario 64, 30 years later, to finally get those 50 bonus stars.

I’ve known for years that your reward for doing so is to meet Yoshi on the roof of the castle and receive 100 extra lives from him, but I always thought that was a bit pointless. After all, why would

Good morning, videogames. If you're reading this, then you've survived both the clocks going forward and April Fool's day, two events designed explicitly to kill the exhausted and the middle-aged. Your reward is this long weekend of rest, relaxation and reading about some of the best writing about videogames from the past week.

It was nice of PC Gamer to write some fan fiction about us, with Jeremy Peel producing an ode to eurojank, both the "wonky yet wonderful projects of yesteryear, and their modern successors".

In the same way, ‘eurojank’ is an insult well-meant. On the face of it the term appears to condemn a whole continent's games as laughably buggy and low-budget. But speaking as a proud European, who has had the privilege to spend their working life flying to Frankfurt and Ghent and Uppsala to meet studios punching above their weight, I can tell you that eurojank—a term thrown around often in PC gaming circles in the early 2010s—is a byword for ambition.

Games like Balatro, Luck Be A Landlord and Raccoin don't literally let you bet your money away, but they and many other games have

Good morning, videogames. As I write this, on Saturday evening, my son has just fallen asleep as I read him the closing chapters of The Hobbit. I don't take this personally. It's the first time either of us has read the book, and I think he's enjoying it, but there is perhaps nothing greater than lulling your child to sleep with a story. As you read this roundup of some good writing about videogames on Sunday morning, may you also drift off for another peaceful slumber.

Aftermath have been publishing up a storm with the delightfully named Woke Week, a "week of stories celebrating Woke 2". There were more interesting articles than I've yet had time to read, so I'm going to pick three. You should start with Gita Jackson's take on what Woke 2 means to her.

In this first version of wokeness, I wasn’t nearly as skeptical of figureheads and corporations co-signing social movements as I needed to be. I had this unshakeable belief that justice would emerge in the end, that people would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do. I trusted companies,

Good morning, videogames. What a week it has been for blog posts. There have been good blogs, bad blogs, new blogs, and much discussion thereof across the internet. It's enough that you could begin to trick yourself into thinking that games media is healing, although I suspect this is in reality a consequence of its recent fragmentation. In any case, I am pleased to be able to link to so many independent writer-owned sites, of one kind or another, in the below roundup of good writing about videogames.

Duncan Fyfe wrote about lore for Remap by looking at the Elder Scrolls series, and talking to its fans and many of its writers about the often haphazard, contradictary way its world has been constructed, for better and worse.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world

Good morning, videogames. My elbows hurt, as they often do in the mornings of late. This has now crossed the rubicon from "oh I slept weird again" to "oh this is some sort of new repetitive strain injury, isn't it." Let's look on the bright side: I now know the word "cubital" and it's a delight to say aloud. Try it. I run my cuticles along by cubital in my cubicle at work. Let's look for other new words by perusing some fine writing about videogames (and beyond) from across the week.

Almost every paragraph of Sam Henri Gold's post about the MacBook Neo is deliciously quotable. I had no interest in the device itself, but this is about what it feels like to be young and finding yourself through a computer.

Yes, you will hit the limits of this machine. 8GB of RAM and a phone chip will see to that. But the limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits — memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and

Good morning, videogames. I've been frantically laying track in front of a moving train for too long, and today is the day that changes. Today is the day I plan ahead, get things in order, and build myself a less hectic week. That or I spend too long in bed reading and then spend the rest of the day playing videogames. Hm.

Nicole Carpenter spoke to the creators of Hidden Folks for The Verge and considered the microgenre of "searching" games (their term) that have followed in its wake, including the gorgeous Lost And Found Co. which released this week.

What makes a good hidden object game, both de Jongh and Lee agree, is playtesting. You can have a great art style, clever sounds, and a nice story, but if the game doesn’t work well, it won’t click with players. “It took us years, and it was just trial and error,” Lee said. “Someone who makes a level has a very hard time understanding how difficult or easy it might be for someone else. You just have to keep workshopping and testing.” Playtesting is what made Hidden Folks so satisfying to play. De Jongh said it’s