The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I normally write this article on a Saturday night after my kid has gone to bed, but he was at a sleepover at a friend's house yesterday. This slight change in routine was enough to completely throw me off. I spent the night playing games and only remembered The Lie-In when I went to bed at 2am. Consider this tardy issue of The Lie-In as bleary-eyed and emotionally fragile as my 10-year-old normally is after staying up all night with four friends, yet still full of links worth reading.

There are a million little ways in which the social contract is eroded by social media mega-sites. Laura Michet writes about "self-censorship practices as anti-shibboleth"; how a failure to signal that you've learned the rules, or that you know there are rules to learn, makes it harder to extend trust and respect.

In my experience, self-censoring adult terminology on that site in particular is a great sign that you're dealing with someone so incurious, with such a limited experience of online conversation, that they don't understand where they are, or who they're dealing with, or who's accountable for maintaining the peace in the community where they're speaking. I do not want to read the things these people write, and I do not want to talk to them. I'd rather not be the person who teaches them to be curious.

Daniel Kolitz wrote an article about "gooning" that went viral, and the higher paid writing assignments that led to may save him from the hell of payday loans. Not before writing about the ecosystem of those loans for The Baffler, though. Funny and bleak.

I USED TO GHOSTWRITE SEO-OPTIMIZED promotional web content for a living. I thought the good times would never end. Each morning, people I'd never met, flacks for various midsize B2B tech startups, would put in their orders. A Forbes editorial on improving business practices "during times of economic uncertainty." A press release for a high-performance modular battery solution. A LinkedIn post, on the occasion of International Women's Day, about the challenges faced by black women in STEM.

Children (and their parents) need online spaces that are safe and fun. Club Penguin used to provide that but closed down in 2017, and these days children are more likely to get trapped in Roblox hell. Some former Club Penguin developers are now working on Imagine Island, a new game that hopes to fill the gap. There's a lot of inevitable CEO fluff in this GamesIndustry.biz article about their efforts, but where else would I read about this.

"So there's a degree of 'yes, kids will be kids'. But we always do the over the shoulder test. If a parent walked by and said, 'What are you playing?', and they're playing Imagine Island, what would they see on screen? Would it pass the sniff test of a parent? And that's the thing that we keep in mind. So time to penis is exactly the stuff we talk about all the time, and we try to make sure that the things that we give them don't very easily make these shapes."

Videogames and TTRPGs have flourishing DIY communities. How might the same might be fostered in the boardgame space, which is otherwise "such a consumption oriented hobby", asks Doruk Balci in "speculations on a d.i.y. board game culture".

A concept I love is Keepsake Games, games where you make an artifact as part of playing it. A Mending, for example, is a map making game where you embroider a map as part of playing it. What if the board games we have, they became lived objects, rather than things to keep pristine. What if we added house rules to games, legacy house rules, or ways to mod existing things in the game. I saw a video once where some players added a house rule to Catan where the winner of the game can name one of the sheep, and write it on the card.

Real Lives, released in 2001, is a simulation game that uses real statistical data to put you in the shoes of a random person somewhere in the world. The website Any Human Ever does something similar, but with any (statistically estimated) person who has ever lived at any point in history, and without the choices along your route to inevitable death from disease in poverty. Do I love the optional AI-generated portraits? No, I do not, but the rest is an interesting window into considering historical data.

I don't listen to a lot of videogame music, which is why it rarely features here. I haven't listened to much music at all this past week, though. So take this piano performance of Greenpath from Hollow Knight by the original composer, Christopher Larkin.

Someone made this, and you can hear it in a videogame that costs £12.49.

Sleep well, videogames.