The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I fell hard for a new game on Friday night and I am eager to get back to playing it. Thankfully my links are already all picked out, neatly folded, and arranged in a row below. There are some good ones this week.

For Chisel, Mikhail Klimentov grapples with the thousands of hours he's spent playing Valorant, and paints an unflinchingly honest portrait that will be relatable to those who have ever obsessed over a multiplayer game.

I could feel myself reverting to boyhood, storming out of the proverbial playdate cursing my erstwhile friends after particularly infuriating games. I fell victim to those school-age anxieties – Do these guys even like me? – coming out the back of marathon double-digit-hour gaming sessions, at the end of which everyone is more or less nonverbal. I could feel my neural pathways atrophying with every inside joke repeated unthinkingly, landing to lesser and lesser effect as the night wore on. I grew hypersensitive to small and more than likely imagined changes in social gravity: who’s up, who’s down, who’s spending less time online, who can get people to come online just by getting into the Discord call and who can’t.

I've been playing Big Walk, a little, and am intrigued to play more. In the meantime I've been reading reviews, and I think Chris Schilling nailed it for Eurogamer.

Here is a place that's mostly loose and relaxed, with plenty of room to explore or just mooch around, chat amongst yourselves and take in the views. And then there are pockets of space with more focus and purpose to them, where you need to work together as a team to complete the challenges you'll find there.

Meanwhile, Joshua Rivera took on the unenviable task of reviewing a fighting game and laying out the context of Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls for the readership of The Guardian.

Marvel Tōkon is less an attempt to recreate a Marvel vs Capcom-esque phenomenon out of whole cloth, and more a thoughtful evolution of the developer’s previous riffs on the formula such as 2018’s BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle and Dragon Ball FighterZ, building on its low-floor, high-ceiling approach. Simplified inputs allow players to execute combos and finishers with a single button, which gives novices the confidence to keep playing and inspires them to study and improve – because when anyone can pull off a flashy ultimate skill or EX attack, strategy and mastery take on a premium. And Marvel Tōkon has great depths to plumb.

You need to fund the strange stuff and serve it to people to make things materially less stagnant, writes Bijan Stephen.

It's funny, because to me, here in the cultural sphere, that might look like more gatekeepers. Though that's actually not quite true: what it means is we need more people empowered to spend real money to enact their tastes. As in: the editor at a major house who's empowered to spend a nice chunk of change on a very weird book. Or the film distributor who can put a genuinely odd movie on millions of screens. Or the video game publisher who takes a chance to fund a small team with a good idea.

Maybe relatedly, Jill Mapes wrote The Latest Elegy for Music Journalism and Middle-Class Musicianhood for Hearing Things.

Anyone who funds music publications—or indie labels, or any endeavor in the arts space that’s unlikely to scale massively—must be doing it for the love and the belief that it needs to exist. Maybe that’s an old-world way of thinking about arts patronage, but the ultimate goal should not be never-ending growth. The point is to sustain creativity.

Definitely relatedly, subscribe to Jank.

For The Baffler, Brittany Dennison reviews a film and writes about performative reading and "poetcore".

Slumming it is no longer in vogue, and the poetic life is a purchasable lifestyle. As technocrats push generative AI as a democratizing creative tool—atrophying literacy and hollowing out culture—the wealthy treat a perceived fluency in the written word as a rarefied status symbol. It is an arms race of manufactured depth. But cultivating real taste takes time, and time is money. These people don’t read. Why bother, when you can look just as impressive simply by owning a rare first edition?

I am stuck here on the ceiling with Noah Colton.

Sleep well, videogames.