The Lie-In

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 you need all those lives when you’ve already completed the whole game? Boy was I missing the point.

Sports are a better allegory for videogame fandom and industry than many adjacent artistic mediums, so I was pleased to see Nathan Brown apply the idea of the cricket tragic to videogames.

There’s this word commonly used in cricket circles that we for some reason do not use in games: tragic. A cricket tragic will spend a wet weekend snuffling out YouTube highlights of 40-year-old test matches. They will peruse old match scorecards, memorise the batting averages of a 1980s county team, tune into shonky single-camera livestreams of a one-day game in Dhaka or Paarl or Chester-le-Street. Their love of and devotion to the sport is unconditional; they recognise the inherent silliness of their condition, and have chosen to embrace it. When someone is called a ‘cricket tragic’, it is said with nothing but love.

"Let games die", writes Jank favourite Mike Cook. "This post is not entirely serious," he notes, but it's an interesting discussion of different ways of thinking about videogame preservation, partly inspired by Mike's time in the growing livecoding community.

'Let Code Die' is rooted in trust, a trust that if we have code that we like and we lose it, we can write it again - or write something better. What would it mean to trust ourselves as game developers, designers, critics and players in the same way? Games preservation might still exist, but it might look a little different, maybe something closer to oral tradition, or the preservation of chess. Preserving a game would mean remaking it, trying to recapture what you think is important about it, however imperfectly that might be.

Mike also has a book coming out! Next Level: Making Games That Make Themselves is about procedural generation, and it's available for pre-order ahead of its May 7th release date.

For GI.biz, Rob Fahey argues that Fortnite's decline proves the forever game is impossible, and wonders what happens next if this convinces others to stop chasing the concept.

If you're in an optimistic mood, you might hope that this realisation would prompt a broader rethink. If the forever game is a mirage, perhaps the industry can relearn how to build a portfolio of hits rather than chasing a single, all-consuming platform. Perhaps there's room again for games that grow slowly, that serve specific audiences, that succeed on their own terms rather than against an impossible benchmark.

Music this week is BURNMATERIAL by tsubi club, a song that sounds like either The Go! Team or a Girl Talk mashup, with more hyperpop energy than both. It'll blow out your speakers if you let it.

Consider supporting tsubi club on Bandcamp. The album is four days old, so you can be cooler than everyone else you know if you go buy it now.

Sleep well, videogames.