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 into an irony-poisoned vortex of MadLibs provocation if they’re invited.

For Aftermath, Gita Jackson wrote about the recent rise of the word "unc" in online spaces and its obscured origins in African American Vernacular English.

Black people who play video games talk about the games in the terms that they are familiar with, then other, non-black people who play games pick up these terms and run with them. Suddenly, these slang terms become “gamer slang” rather than African American Vernacular English, and these false etymologies get reinforced through incurious reporting.

Irene Koh is an artist and comics author and Angel Arcade is their new comic about their experiences in their local Guilty Gear community. Mothership spoke to Koh about the work.

Also at Mothership, Ian Walker looks at what Romeo Is A Dead Man has to say about fascism via one particular boss fight.

The big bad of Romeo is a Dead Man’s second chapter, for example, is Christian Phantasm, a former plantation-owning southerner who supported the Confederacy’s violent attempt to prevent the abolishment of slavery during the American Civil War. Phantasm’s charismatic drawl and genteel mannerisms stand in stark contrast not only to the neon aesthetics of the 1980s-inspired mall level preceding his boss fight but also the crimes against humanity he proudly flaunts after Romeo kicks his ass.

Jake Steinberg argues against the use of "video-gamey" when talking about videogames.

“Video-gamey,” then, is not analysis. It is identification. It’s safe. Nobody has ever been wrong about a video game being a video game. It reports back the obvious and leaves the work untouched.

Titanium Court, the winner of this year's IGF Grand Prize, was released this past week. We'll have a review soon. In the meantime, it's worth listening to Chris PLante's interview with its designer on Post Games.

Ted Litchfield finally completed Fallout: New Vegas after 323 hours and countless restarts. He argues that the aging RPG "doesn't need mods as much as you think it does", and that it's easy to lose the spirit of the game among the hundreds of available tweaks.

It's no longer a discrete game, but an open-ended wish fulfillment platform, one whose definition and structure can liquefy in the face of so many 4K texture packs and combat overhauls. You may have seen this sentiment expressed before, maybe a meme about it, or even felt it yourself: "I spent three hours figuring out my Morrowind modlist, made a character, and never got out of Seyda Neen."

For The Guardian, Keith Stuart wrote about the making of classic British platformer Chuckie Egg.

Like most games of this era, its origins were modest. A&F Software was not some global corporation. It was run by two friends, Doug Anderson and Mike Fitzgerald, out of their computer shop in Denton, Greater Manchester. Upstairs they had a room filled with tape recorders where they would duplicate copies of their games, most of which were created by a small team of programmers working out of a backroom. Chuckie Egg was created by the shop’s 15-year-old Saturday employee, Nigel Alderton.

At The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto wrote that Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want. Inarguably.

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.

Apropos of nothing, the name of a person whose Livejournal I used to read popped into my head this past week, and so I looked them up on the Web Archive. I won't link it, but I skimread some of their old posts as they moved from LJ to Wordpress to Tumblr, and then stopped blogging entirely. Near the end, on the last version of the site, they called it their "last, desperate attempt to pretend that internet is its own lonely, murmery planet at the end of a very loud galaxy." And I thought: oh, that's what Jank is.

I haven't listened to a lot of new music this week, or at least not any that I feel like recommending. I have been listening to a lot of music I was listening to 15-20 years ago, like Elliot Smith and early Metronomy, but here's something from halfway back: Kanasshii Uresshii by Japanese guitar pop band Frederic. I'm a sucker for big claps.

Sleep well, videogames.