The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I am hosting a sleepover for three ten-year-olds and so there will be no lie-in for me today. As I write this now, on Saturday, it's not yet even clear whether there will be sleep for me. That doesn't mean we can't heroically gather some fine writing about videogames (and much more), though.

For PC Gamer, Rick Lane tells the story of the making of Unreal 2. I remember that it was initially enormously ambitious, but I did not know (or did not remember) that it effectively wanted to be Mass Effect.

Verdu wanted to create an all-new Unreal experience, one that leant harder into the cinematic sci-fi of the original. "I hatched a vision for a game that, rather than you just being constrained to one world, it would have this story device that allowed you to move between worlds, and that became a spaceship," he explains. "We were going to create a little simulation of a world on a ship, and it would have these characters that move around, that you have these interesting conversations with, and those characters were going to develop along with the story, and your relationship with them was going to develop."

Lucy James has left Gamespot and partnered with Geoff Keighly to launch a weekly newsletter highlighting upcoming PC games. It's called LookingFor.Game.

Crossfire looked like any other military shooter in its Game Fest reveal, albeit with more dialogue, but everyone who saw it behind the scenes swears it's more interesting than it appears. Morgan Park previewed it for PC Gamer.

None of these mechanics are wholly unique on their own, but it's the context they exist within that excites me. This isn't a battle royale, an extraction shooter, or an Arma scenario—it's a linear, authored campaign. We just don't get singleplayer shooters with characters and stories that you (ideally) care about and this level of simulation. The closest analog is Ubisoft's recent run of Ghost Recon, though to call those sims is a long stretch.

Jank has no adverts, but more broadly we are committed to creating a reading experience that does not annoy or distract you when you visit the site. That includes none of what John Gruber at Daring Fireball recently called a "dickover".

You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency.

I showed my son A New Hope and he was totally, deathly bored for the duration. I briefly considered persevering, theorising that he might find the sequels (or indeed prequels) more exciting. And then I thought: why? Why make him do homework to get into this overstuffed media franchise which I, also, mostly do not like now. That was last year and this review of The Mandalorian And Grogu by Walter Chaw makes me feel like I made the right choice.

This is why it disturbs me that, in ManGro, Bilbo Fett (alleged superstar Pedro Pascal)–a paid political assassin–is given an assignment via a futuristic playing card his Rebellion handler, Lt. Ward (Sigourney Weaver), hands him. “Commander Coin, our missing Ace of Spades,” she says. This is a callback to the 2003 Iraq War (i.e., the first days of the Forever War), where the US Department of Oxy-Morons created a deck of bounty cards identifying the top 52 most-wanted Iraqi leaders. Saddam Hussein was the Ace of Spades in that deck. His sons were the aces of Hearts and Clubs, with Diamonds reserved for Hussein’s secretary, Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti. We murdered them all. Why does the universe of Star Wars use the same kind of playing cards we use, I wonder, except to be able to make this reference in the franchise’s twelfth or thirteenth entry.

Someone, somewhere, linked in the Jank comments to Holly Gramazio's 2019 article on how not to play a game, and how watching, or making fan art, or simply learning about games are all interesting methods of engaging with the medium. I agree.

Playing a game isn’t the only way to relate to it. Leafing through a how-to-play manual, watching a stream of someone playing, attending a sports match – all these activities, categorised as “metagaming” by Patrick LeMieux and Stephanie Boluk’s book of that name, are perfectly fine ways to respond to a game. (Sometimes they’re much more interesting.)

For Games Industry.biz, Lewis Packwood looked at the data behind aging gamers, and the business opportunity in making games for those aged 55 and over. I will say that, from my perspective as a 40-year-old, the mainstream industry - that is, the AA and AAA space - do not make games for anyone other than hypothetical teenaged boys.

"Developers have been ignoring older gamers for the same reason it took them decades to discover women," he says. "The industry has spent 40 years chasing the same narrowly defined audience because it was the safest bet, until everyone was chasing it. Imagine if Hollywood only made movies for 18-year-old men. That's roughly the bet games have been making."

I am tired of AI doomerism, even if I agree with a lot of it, but David Wilson's personal explanation of the kind of "psuedo-productivity" LLMs enabled for him was a worthwhile read.

The output was unbridled garbage. Because the effort was removed, so was the commitment, and with the commitment the focus, and with the focus any meaningful product at all. Quality writing is not conversational English simply cast through a lens: conversational English is low-bit rate noise, quality writing attempts to capture high bit rate information with better formed concepts, and this should have been obvious before I began.

The book review is, like all professional reviews, constantly oscillating back and forth between "so back" and "so Joever" in the eyes of commentators. Articles declaring this decline or revival all follow the same pattern, from acknowledging the many previous false demises (but this time it's for real!), to drawing connections between the specific trends of reviewing music or restaurants or books to those of wider culture. It sounds like I'm being snarky, but I read every one of these articles and enjoy them. David A. Bell executes the formula perfectly for Liberties:

I will admit to checking my own Amazon reviews from time to time. One of them gives my book The First Total War just one lonely star. It reads, in its entirety: “to be frank a boring book.” Another one-star review, this time for my Napoleon: A Concise Biography, is worrisomely titled “a hopeless situation,” but turns out to be a complaint that Amazon overcharged the purchaser. I am happier with the reviewer who gives Napoleon a much-coveted five-star notice. “I enjoyed reading this book,” he writes. “Lots of history.” Well, yes.

New McMansionHell is a rare treat.

Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit, and that’s with ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which, by the way, also makes it appear entirely not of this world.

I haven't cared for any Death Cab For Cutie since Chris Walla left the band back in 2014, but the track Envy The Birds from their new album is growing on me.

Sleep well, videogames.