The Lie-In

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 entity - the creature. You could make an evil creature, a good creature, or anything in between."

Pokémon Champions released earlier this month, offering a new competitive platform for folks who want to battle 'mons without lessons about the importance of friendship getting in the way. Pokéxpert Kallie Plagge surveyed the game for The Verge, and considered the challenges of launching a Pokémon game for experts that also makes some concessions to approachability.

Champions streamlines this process even further, and I was able to whip up my first workable team in a matter of minutes, by far the most painless team-building experience I’ve had in my decade-plus in VGC. Part of that is because Champions takes previously obfuscated information, like how many stat points you’ve allocated when training a pokémon, and lays it out clearly. That’s a major improvement, and it benefits veterans as much as it does newcomers.

The graffiti written by survivors in Left 4 Dead and its sequel contains some killer lines, some of which are still regularly quoted and shared today. Aftermath's Nathan Grayson spoke to Valve writer Jay Pinkerton about how he wrote the graffiti, with the help of many other Valve staffers.

"My memory of the Left 4 Dead graffiti is that it was an early attempt at crowdsourcing," Pinkerton told Aftermath. "I remember we covered several walls of the office in butcher paper and laid out dozens of markers, pencils and pens, and we invited literally anyone who happened to be walking past to contribute. If they weren't feeling creative, we let them flip through a big script book of things we'd pre-written and let them pick one that felt right to them, and encouraged them to rewrite it in whatever style they liked. If people wanted to go off script, that was also fine.

You might have the sensation that everything is getting worse. Sometimes it's getting worse on purpose, which is also the name of a new newsletter which looks at industries that have been cut to the bone by the relentless pursuit of greater profit. I appreciated this entry on the particulars of how your backpack got worse on purpose.

Stitching density went down. More stitches per inch means stronger seams. Fewer stitches means faster production. When you're running millions of units through factories in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and Cambodia, shaving seconds off each seam saves serious money. It also creates failure points at every spot where the bag takes stress. Strap junctions. Zipper terminations. The bottom panel.

The Lie-In mostly focuses on new writing, but there is a wealth of great writing about videogames that is not new but which still deserves to be more widely read. Much of it is lost in the archives of websites that have no method for resurfacing old work and little incentive to do so. Sometimes that work isn't great, but is more interesting for having accumulated additional context in the decades since.

Here's an example. Joshuah Bearman, author of the Wired magazine article that would become the movie Argo, and contributor to This American Life and Rolling Stone, had a videogame column for the alt newspaper LA Weekly. Google for those columns today and you'll find places like Wired and Boing Boing linked to it, but all the links are broken, because at some point LA Weekly changed their URL structure or purged their archive, and their website's built-in search is terrible. LA Weekly also lost most of its editorial staff in 2024, so who knows for how much longer it will even exist.

Which is a longer than normal preamble towards saying: the history of writing about videogames is almost entirely forgotten, and as good as lost, locked behind an indifferent webpage or in an issue of a magazine stored in a drawer under a bed, and here's Bearman's column on Nintendogs from November 25th, 2005. He draws a line from ELIZA through HAL to Nintedogs as a canine Turing test, with references to games as meeting spaces, The Sims Online, Bijou Philips and a period-appropriate amount of lads mag-ishness. It's a time capsule, in other words, and would be interesting for that alone. I think it's also placing games in a broader personal and cultural context, in a way that has always been rare, and which every three years someone new decides they just invented for the first time.

It wasn’t long, of course, until the purity of Nintendogs was violated by the prurience of the human mind. In England, there quickly appeared a Web site called Nintendogging, where the singles market approach to urban dog parks was dutifully applied to the virtual world. (A typical post reads: Carpet Hound, 31.10.2005. Has two clean balls to play with. Enjoys a good lick and perks up at the sight of wet cats.) Just as I brought home some friends for Ding Dong, a new pug (BoBo) and golden retriever (Loki), I myself wondered whether they’d all try to hump each other. Amorous play, I am disappointed to report, is not part of Nintendogs’ behavioral vocabulary, although hoaxes did circulate online about a rumored “hot biscuit mod” along with doctored screen shots of the supposed virtual puppy love.

The YouTube algorithm blessed me last month with the Video Game Esoterica channel, which produces regular videos about arcade games and has a playlist about those that never got a home console port. I've been making my way through it and enjoying all the oddities from Namco, Sega and others.

Music this week is a lot of music. I normally try to select just a single track, even if it's an album that has been absorbing me, but what's below is an hour long. Login.jp film DJs performing in "cultural spaces and local stores around Japan to archive their unique vibes and atmosphere." This particular set, by the Grammy-nominated StarRo, is recorded on a rural train, cutting through snow-covered scenery as passengers board and alight. It's great to look at, better to listen to, and I've swallowed it whole five or six times since last Sunday.

Sleep well, videogames.