The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I have spent much of my spare time this week spring cleaning, and I'm not done yet. Before we begin another day of scrubbing, lets stay in bed a little longer and enjoy some fine words about games.

For Teen Vogue, Nicole Carpenter asked, why are thin bodies the default in games? It's for the expected reasons, but Carpenter speaks to actors, animators and motion capture experts to explain the challenges and all the ways it's wholly achievable.

Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.

I have yet to start 007: First Light, which means I am yet to read any reviews of it, because I want to remain clean until I have my own opinions. If I could pick one person to review it however, it would be Matthew Castle, and he did just that for The Guardian. I have at least read the first paragraph, and it's a good one.

Given that we’ve not had a great James Bond video game in decades – or any Bond film at all in five years – there’s a lot of pressure on 007 First Light to reinvigorate a British cinematic hero. But developer IO Interactive has been auditioning for this role for some time. It’s there in the globetrotting nature of its Hitman assassination games, starring a besuited hero who knows how to turn a soiree to his deadly purpose; then there’s the developer’s evident eye for corporate opulence and brutalist architecture. Even their in-house game engine, Glacier, sounds like a secret codename cooked up in a Bond villain’s lair. All it would take is a slight shift in Hitman’s moral compass – more old boys club, fewer old boys clubbed – to turn IO’s familiar series into a Bond game with minimal fuss.

Rolling Stone interviewed Woodkid about working on the Death Stranding 2 soundtrack last year, but I only saw it this week when Derek Yu shared it on Bluesky. I am sharing it for just the same quote. Do I entirely believe this? No, but it sounds good.

Is there something essential that you learned from him over the course of development?

There’s a key moment where we had a discussion, probably halfway [through] when we were doing the game, where he came to me and he said, “We have a problem.” Then he said, “I’m going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.” And he changed stuff in the script and the way some crucial stuff [happens] in the game because he thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions. And he said, “If everyone likes it, it means it’s mainstream. It means it’s conventional. It means it’s already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don’t want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn’t like when they first encountered it, because that’s where you really end up loving something. And that was really a lesson for me; not doing stuff to please people, but to make them shift a little bit and move them.

At PC Gamer, Rich Stanton wrote about his experiences parenting a child who is playing Roblox, and calls for "drastic government intervention".

"Parents are doing everything they can to protect their children on Roblox, but it's not a fair fight," said Ashwin Verghese of Fairplay. "The platform is designed to take advantage of kids' developmental needs and prey on their vulnerabilities."

It's rare that you get to witness real videogame industry beef in public, but this interview with Sega's Mike Fischer is full of it.

Naka just went fucking ballistic on me, yelling at me, saying I wanted to make porno games. Literally, I’ve never seen someone foam at the mouth, but he had literally like foamy spit at the corners of his mouth. “How many games have you made? How many hits have you delivered? Who are you to come here and tell us?” And I’m like, “Dude, I’m just here to tell you where the hockey puck is going. These are the trends in the U.S. We are diverging in the games we make and the games that the market wants” and did not go wrong. Yeah, Naka-san was a challenge. That’s when he made Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, if you recall that.

I enjoyed Florence Smith Nicholls' short piece for Bathysphere on screenshots from the era when you had to literally take a photograph of the screen, and what is gained by seeing games played in their full context.

In the beginning, the screenshot really was just a shot of a screen - while many early screenshots were taken by specialists for marketing purposes, players themselves would find ways to document their own gaming activity. A really interesting example of archival work into this practice is The Popular Memory Archive that collects 1980s games ephemera from Australia and New Zealand, including photographs. What’s particularly interesting to me about the images in the archive is you don’t just see what people were playing, but the context in which that play was happening. Take this photo below of a grandfather and granddaughter playing Tennis on the Atari 2600.

Music this week is If You Don't Want My Love by Jalen Ngonda. Two minutes and twenty-six seconds that sounds like it was recorded in 1973 but in reality was released in 2023. Ngonda's second album comes out next month and a few tracks are already available on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.