The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I'm a few hours late posting this today because, frankly, I was too tired last night to face putting it together. I am doing it now, on Sunday, squeezed between familial appointments. You may be doing similarly as you read this, a collection of fine writing about videogames from across the past week.

Over at Ars Technica, Kyle Orland spoke to some of the players who bought into and lost money on Legacy, Molyneux and 22cans' short-lived web3 game.

In addition to Molyneux’s usual game design bluster, though, was a newfound enthusiasm for the idea of making money from simply playing a game. “And because it’s a blockchain game, you earn,” Molyneux said at Galaverse, leaning on the last word for emphasis. “For a game designer, imagine how exciting it is to know that a game design that you’ve been working on, people will be earning money with it!”

MindsEye developers Build A Rocket Boy said that the game's DLC would contain real "evidence" of sabotage committed against them and their game. For Polygon, Giovanni Colantonio went looking.

Like MindsEye itself, all of this is painfully stupid. Blacklisted is a petty diss track that hardly delivers any substantial bars; imagine if Kendrick Lamar spent the entirety of “Not Like Us” complaining about Drake’s shoes. It reeks of desperation, coming across as Build a Rocket Boy trying to turn controversy into a juicy tabloid story that will sell copies of the game.

Brain drain is killing videogames, argues Elijah Gonzalez for The AV Club.

The effects of brain drain are hard to measure because it leads to an invisible kind of harm, but it may partially explain why the big-budget gaming space feels so static at the moment. When the ground is constantly shifting, auteurs are less likely to find their footing; to name an extreme example, imagine how much less weird and interesting the space would be if Hideo Kojima got laid off and called it quits before making Metal Gear or Snatcher.

Days after the above was published, AV Cub Games - formerly Endless Mode, formerly Paste Games - let all its staff go. Is brain drain also, therefore, killing games journalism? At a recent lecture for NYU Game Center, Chris Plante surveyed the past, present and future of the field. That includes a spreadsheet cataloguing some 300+ currently extant games media outlets, across web, print, and audio.

I am yet to play Pragmata, to my considerable disappointment. I am an actual dad and I am failing to grasp this opportunity to turn fatherhood into Jank content. Or maybe I should be relieved, given all the critical things folks have had to say about the relationship at Pragmata's core. For Mothership, Maddy Myers dials in on Diana specifically, "the 3D-printed girl".

Most critics have pointed to the portrayal of Hugh, the surrogate dad character, as a standout, because Hugh starts out kind and remains so, rather than needing a surrogate daughter figure (or, in Kratos of God of War’s case, a son) to make him realize he shouldn’t be an asshole. This is true to the extent that Hugh can be described as having a personality at all. By dint of his smiling blandness, he is a refreshing change from The Last of Us’ Joel, Kratos, or Bioshock’s Booker deWitt.

For Kotaku, Moises Taveras argues that sometimes being bad at a game is most of the fun, also drawing on Pragmata as one example.

I think sucking ass at Pragmata actively made the game more fun for me. It certainly made things more tense and interesting. While I’ve seen others confidently tout how they were able to quickly master Pragmata’s ideal rhythm—that is, a dance that involves using Hugh’s thrusters to dart around arenas while keeping his aim trained on nearby enemies, maximizing usage of the matrix and the debuffs one can deploy, and, of course, taking out enemies—I struggled.

For The Verge, Joshua Rivera writes that Saros demonstrates Housemarque are approaching triple-A games from a more interesting perspective than anyone else, by not being primarily concerned with realism or simulation. (Saros isn't on PC, yet.)

Visual fidelity is video game shorthand for progress: how meticulously rendered a mountain is, how dynamically the snow behaves, how a player character raises their hands to touch a wall when the player approaches it just so. This pursuit can become absurd, as illustrated by Rockstar Games’ compulsion to animate horse testicles responding to ambient temperature in 2018’s Red Dead Redemption 2. It also has very little to do with anything a player, well, does. This is where Housemarque diverges from its peers.

I've linked to Fansplaining before, when it was a podcast that did an excellent job of explaining modern online fandom. Now it's an independent, reader-supported website offering one long-read piece of analysis, criticism or reporting each week. Check it out!

Videogame developer Joe Wintergreen on AI art.

i hate all this shit, but i also want to grab by the shoulders every one of these little idiot dweebs who says “i can’t make art without this” and go yes you can, you always could, idiot, you’ve got the same gear as the rest of us. you’re one of god’s shitty little creatures

Music this week isn't really music at all, because I've watched this music video three times and barely registered the song that's playing during it. I think it's fine? But I'm too busy being engrossed by its story and central performance.

Sleep well, videogames.