The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I have a bumper crop of good articles to share this week so there's no time to spare. Let's get going.

Patrick Miller has been writing about and designing fighting games for years, and most recently worked on Riot's 2XKO. This past week, he wrote more about what he values in the games he plays, why he loves fighting games specifically, and why he doesn't care for games he describes as "opiates".

I say this as someone who has loved video games his whole life; if games serve a load-bearing function in someone's life, it's the life that needs fixing, not the games.

A man after Brendy's heart. Personally I don't want videogames to be opiates, but I'm okay with them being weed.

A similar argument from a different angle, Lincoln Carpenter wants MMOs to waste his time again. Me too.

WoW has become a relentlessly efficient machine, ensuring players waste the least possible time while being propelled through seasonal ranks and escalating difficulty tiers. In terms of providing their users with those quantifiable successes, it's hard to argue that the MMOs of today aren't better designed than their older iterations. And yet, it's the moments when I step off the treadmill where they still feel the most magical.

Everyone is tired at the dopamine theme park. Here, again, is a similar argument from another angle, as Steven Santana argues that the writing is the reward.

Numbers going up in videogames is boring. It is pervasive and a hamster wheel. Receiving text in games is what makes them worth playing due to their potential to move me and speak to me in ways numbers could never.

Is the writing the reward in literary fiction? Not according to author and critic Devon Halliday, who rips apart the opening pages of two forthcoming novels that are either being celebrated or from celebrated writers.

When I read literary novels like Switzy and Ply, all I can feel is that the writers are stalling for time. If they really had something urgent they wanted to communicate, they wouldn’t waste sentences on how slick dolphins are or how drab February is.

"What's the point of literary criticism?" asks Colin Burrow for the London Review Of Books in the process of reviewing Helen Vendler's final book of poetry criticism.

A good critic is a kind of lightning conductor who picks out the energy in what they read and passes it on to others. When I was a teenager I coached the unliterary but perfectly clever younger brother of a friend whose destiny was to become an engineer and whose main ambition (which he has now achieved) was to own six motorbikes. He would say of every poem I put in front of him that it was ‘weird’. Well, that was a start. What made it weird? Was it a good kind of weird or a bad kind of weird?

Every eighteen months or so, a reputable outlet publishes an article about the end, death or decline of reading. Last month it was The Atlantic's turn, but for Defector, Joel Pinckney asked what booksellers made of the argument.

“I've been a bookseller at the same building since 2014 here in Austin, and I have no reason to feel hopeless,” Flores told me later. “The culture of readers here is bigger than ever, with readers interested in the underground, the translated, the texts that demand the most out of one's attention.” Flores’s observation was echoed by every one of the 21 booksellers I spoke to in the course of my reporting.

I was about to say that I recently bought some bookends in the shape of birds, and then I looked across the room at them and remembered, wait, those are fish. I am bird-brained, I guess. Perhaps it's just as well I didn't allow a bird in my home, as George Grace Gibson explains while writing about birdwatching, illness, and a mobile game. Probably this week's best article? Read this one.

SkyCards is an aviation-themed mobile game where you photograph various aircraft and are rewarded with cards that you can use to battle other players — sort of like Pokémon Go for plane spotters. The difference between the two is that planes actually exist, and so SkyCards is real-time. The planes that you collect are depictions of the ones actually flying above your head, tracked by the app Flight Radar. You might have seen this app fleetingly on your neurodivergent friend’s phone last time there was a particularly loud wooooooosh over the smoking area.

For The Ringer - a website I don't typically associate with videogame coverage - Lewis Gordon looks at Capcom's historic run of hit games and asks how the Japanese studio is thriving during an industry downturn.

Remakes are the clearest examples of old and new colliding at Capcom, a strength reflected across all its titles, from the reptilian showdowns of last year’s Monster Hunter Wilds to Street Fighter 6’s triumphant 2023 comeback. This makes sense in the context of the company’s hiring policy, which calls for recruiting approximately 100 new graduates every year. “You’re bringing in new talent, fresh eyes,” says the former Capcom employee. “Sure, they need to be taught because they don’t have that practical experience. But you’re getting a lot of people that can add a new dimension.”

Double Fine is independent from Microsoft again, and currently running a new iteration of Amnesia Fortnight and associated Kickstarter. Tim Schafer spoke to Jason Schreier at Bloomberg about the corporate split.

"No one puts Double Fine out of business except for me," Schafer said. "Asha’s not going to shoot my dog. I’m going to shoot it. But I’m not going to shoot it because it’s going to do great. A lot of people want to walk the dog."

Music this week is Fuck My Computer by Ninajirachi, a clear Jank anthem. The whole album is great, so if you like it consider supporting Ninajirachi on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.