The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. My father turns 80 years-old today, opening the brief four-month window in which he is precisely twice my age. If another 40-year-old wants to merge with me to also become an 80-year-old, we can then create the world's first 160-year-old. Otherwise we can just read (watch, and listen to) some fine words about videogames.

Game arts festivals are disappearing worldwide, typified by Freeplay, the oldest art games non-profit, which recently announced that they were a year away from closing down. Robert Yang wrote a blog post that gathers together the coverage and conversation that followed the Freeplay news, the reasons why events like these are struggling, and what organisers might do about it. I've worked on enough (commercial, mainstream) games events to know that it was a miracle that any of these things ever happened in the first place, where "it was a miracle" means "it was an act of enormous dedication by a village of talented, passionate, generous people who could have had an easier time doing literally anything else." Hey that's all miracles.

Mads call this "The $1000 Problem": the event size / budget that is both too big and too small. For example it might cost $1000 to rent a decent-sized room with AV hookups, so to break even, you'd need 50 attendees to pay $20 each. But at that ticket price, everyone expects more than a room with folding chairs. So then you have to decorate the space, plan a schedule with a slate of presenters, or sell a lot more tickets in a bigger room, which will all cost more money, etc. Or run it as a series of many small events, but who's gonna plan and run all these events now?

Why don't game developers just do the obvious things everyone is asking them to do, if they want to make a bunch of money and be beloved in the process? Developer Christina Pollock answers the question several different ways, but the short answer is that nobody really knows what they want and social media is a terrible way of trying to measure or interpret an audience.

That’s where it gets tricky, because in that social space, content creator opinions get repeated by their fans as correct as part of a desire to affirm themselves as Knowing Things, and to affirm their creators as knowledgeable, despite the creator’s opinions rarely actually relating to the player at all, either through Elo or consumption habits. Of course a Challenger-ranked player is affected differently by a small change than a Bronze player. Of course someone who plays games on stream 8 hours a day runs out of content faster than someone who plays an hour a night.

Iron Lung is a horror movie written, directed and starring YouTube gamesman Mark Fischbach, based on an indie horror game I've never played. Keith Stuart wrote about it in The Guardian's games newsletter this past week, although I'm more interested in his briefer thoughts afterwards about the hoary old conversation around "the Citizen Kane of games".

I think the debate died out because it sunk into self-parody – it represented the reflexive anxiety of a growing medium still living under cinema’s cultural shadow. Ten years later, we’re more comfortable with the understanding that not everything that happens in video games has to be analogous to the history of film. There are games as formally daring as Citizen Kane (The Stanley Project, Disco Elysium, Shadow of the Colossus) and there are games that tell stories with myriad narrative strands (The Last of Us, Life Is Strange, Mass Effect). But the whole package? Possibly not. Ultimately, I think the answer to your question is that it doesn’t matter. Games do different things from films and comparing them in this way doesn’t actually achieve anything. Having said that, the real answer is Shenmue.

James Archer at Rock Paper Shotgun, never heard of it, recreated every katsu curry recipe from Romeo Is A Dead Man.

Like all white, middle-class Londoners, I subsist on a diet comprised mainly of salted caramel and katsu curry. It appears Grasshopper Manufacture, makers of maximalist action adventure Romeo is a Dead Man, appreciate that delightful marriage of rice, breadcrumbs, and carroty sauce as well. Our lad Romeo can gather up katsu ingredients before delivering them to his waiting mum, who’ll turn them into one of ten mouth-watering, buff-applying curries.

Mewgenics is the latest game from Edmund McMillen, creator of Binding Of Isaac, and it launched this past week to huge success. Also to some modest controversy as people saw the wild list of people, many of them assholes, whose voices can be heard meowing in the game. Mark Warren at RPS asked McMillen what his intention was.

"I wanted the game to feature a huge array of iconic voices I’ve been hearing echoing across the internet for most of my time making games," McMillen added. "As some probably noticed I was [pretty] all over the place when it came to cameos and did my best to include and keep ones that clashed or kinda counterbalanced each other.

Hmm! I still haven't played Mewgenics, but I enjoyed the podcast Triple Click's conversation with McMillen, in which he talks about his split from Meat Boy (and early Mewgenics) co-developer Tommy Refenes, how he works with his team now, and his plans for the future.

Juniper Dev, who mainly makes videos about game development, revisited Zelda Online, aka GraalOnline, a fanmade MMO she played as a kid which is still limping along today. I wasn't familiar with Graal, but otherwise there's plenty that was relatable here from my time playing online games as a teenager, and my own stumbling steps to get more involved with them professionally. I ended this video feeling nostalgic for a game I've never played.

Music this week is Code by Flora Hibberd, a timeless piece of guitar pop.

That's all for now. Sleep well, videogames.