The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. Wall Week has ended, bringing to a close what began as a dumb joke and then wandered, article by article, into something surprisingly sincere. I feel that this is very Jank, as much as anything can be said to be "very Jank" when this website has existed for only six months. Thanks to all who signed up to support what we're building here. Now let's find some other good writing from across the rest of the internet.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced released this past week. For PC Gamer, Morgan Park played both it and the original back-to-back to produce a review that digs into the granular differences between them, and the question marks over remaking a game that's not that old and holds up quite well.

Ubisoft spent a generation transforming Assassin's Creed from a stealth-action power fantasy into a loot-driven RPG with spammy combat, and only now is it trying to make amends. Resynced feels like Ubisoft teaching itself how to make a proper Assassin's Creed again, and graded on that curve, it's quite good.

For Unwinnable, Jay Castello looks back at ten years of writing about videogames and how the space has changed in that time. Jay is too polite to name names, so who can say which website is being described below. It sure conjures a lot of complicated feelings for me, though.

Although it’s true that games media was male-dominated at the time, the first of those sites used to have enough women working for it that three of them had the same name. They now have eight people on staff and all of their bios use he/him pronouns.

Michael Brough, developer of 868-BACK (and many others), offers advice on how to write about indie games. There's plenty I disagree with here, but the crux of it - that too often positive writing about indie games is couched in negative framing - rings true.

Look, "niche" is not a property of a game. It's a recess in a wall to put decoration in. (Some games do have niches in them.) I guess you're using it in some metaphorical way to mean that the group of people playing the game is small enough to fit into a niche? This is not very interesting, and it is not even a fact about the game. You're telling us about the game because you like it! What do you like about it? That's way more interesting.

"Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows," Charles Pulliam-Moore writes for The Verge. Business people might tell you that it's competition from TikTok, and this article gives that theory some credence, but also offers several alternate theories, such as: the shows are crap.

Some of Netflix’s problems are rooted in its internal practices, like the way it tends to cancel shows right as they start becoming more expensive to produce. It also doesn’t help that, on the whole, the wait between seasons of series has been gradually getting longer, which makes it easier for people to lose interest.

Is taste less personal than it used to be? Rachel Aroesti goes long for The Guardian on the impact of algorithmic recommendations on fashion and culture, while interviewing the, uh, "style rebels fighting back". I'm guessing that was a copy editor trying to make too-online social media people sound exciting, but the article is mostly good all the same.

In his book, Chayka predicts a splintering of the internet into smaller independent platforms as this decade’s response to the distortion of algorithmic feeds. Two years on, he thinks “decentralisation is definitely here in the form of newsletter culture and Patreon-style crowdfunding models”.

Where did all the UK game events go? For GI.biz, Lewis Packwood interviews organisers from the likes of EGX, WASD, London Games Week and more to find the answers. I worked with several of those people and worked on several of the events mentioned, and the key point you take away should be: putting on successful events is really, really difficult.

The overwhelming expense of putting on an event is venue hire, which has rapidly increased in recent years, to a level that Game Republic co-director Jamie Sefton describes as "astronomical". "The reason why we didn't have a GaMaYo [Game Makers Yorkshire] for so long in Leeds was because we couldn't find a venue in Leeds city centre that was good – say, 10-15 minutes from the station – but that wasn't going to cripple us financially," he says.

This is great.

Music this week is グッドバイ ("Goodbye"), a seven-minute breakdown by Japanese math-rock outfit Toe. Listen to those drums! The album edit is below, but follow it by watching them do it live.

Sleep well, videogames.