The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. I have a question. Who are the videogame reviewers that, to you, have a definable point of view? I don't mean that you like their work, or that you agree with it. I mean, tell me the writers who have a coherently expressed set of aesthetic principles that they apply, resolutely and consistently, in their work? Such that you can say: that guy "hates this type of stuff", that gal "loves this type of stuff"? Maybe that "stuff" is a whole genre, or just a mode of play, a style, a trope, a design choice, anything at all, but whatever it is, it's a defining aspect of that critic's work. Alright? Alright. Now here are some articles worth reading from across the past week.

Japanese game studios have been relatively shielded from the choppy seas of the recent games industry. For This Week In Videogames, Francisco Dominguez tried to find out why.

From the outside looking in, it's a harsh indictment of Western studio culture. Due to Japan's strong labour protections that severely restrict the use of layoffs, reckless cycles of overhiring followed by layoffs never became a regular occurrence domestically. Prominent studio figures from Atlus to Square Enix are naming job security as the reason behind their commercial and artistic success, with Shigeru Miyamoto recently telling Famitsu not to glorify short-term profits.

People Make Games turned their investigative eye to Bobby Kotick and the law firm that emails you if you mention his name. A cathartic watch for many of us.

Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is a non-fiction book rich in language and detail about the natural world, and I cribbed from it in my Naiad review for a lesser website. Its author, Annie Dillard, died last week at the age of 81. Back in '99, Dillard wrote about writing, for The New York Times, in an article titled Write Till You Drop.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Silent Hill: Townfall released this week. It's inspired by the towns of Fife, on the east coast of Scotland, and continues the trend (after Still Wakes The Deep) of acknowledging Scottish life as a kind of nightmare. Lewis Gordon reviewed the game for The Guardian.

The game's setting, St Amelia, is based on the fishing communities of the East Neuk of Fife. The terror lurking here is wonderfully specific: absent lairds, island poverty, an oil-drilling corporation. Anguished beasts lumber down quaint streets lined with sandstone houses and fluttering bunting. This venerable horror series may have shifted to Scotland, yet we remain firmly in classic Silent Hill territory – weather and all.

I was deeply annoyed last year by several critics who decided poptimism was to blame for all of modern music's, and wider culture's, supposed ills. As if a handful of Blogspot users writing about Girls Aloud and Robyn in the mid-00s had more influence than the rise of social media and of music streaming in the years since. I would have been less annoyed if I'd known others were already countering these spurious arguments and definitions, as Carl Wilson - someone who was very much there at the time - did for Slate last year.

At this point, remember, rock had been the dominant force in popular music for nearly half a century. As the critic Douglas Wolk wrote in 2006, rockism was "treating rock as normative … the standard state of popular music: the kind to which everything else is compared, explicitly or implicitly." In itself, he emphasized, "it's not intrinsically rockist to love rock." Rockism meant using rock's vocabulary as the implicit yardstick for whether any piece of music was heartfelt and authentic, as opposed to slick and phony.

Mike Cook wrote about why he loves AI. Put away the pitchforks. Mike has been an AI researcher since long before LLMs, and he's writing about why he loves the work that used to define the field and why he's not ready to start referring to it in the past tense.

You will never get the right answer. That's not what you're here to do. You're here to squeeze every drop out of the knowledge, techniques and insight that you have around you, and to see what new things you can force out of what you already have.

Emily Wilson wrote modern translations of The Odyssey and The Illiad, and then was thrust into popular discourse earlier this year for an extremely negative review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey movie. In a short post, Wilson reflects on that online discussion, and the expectation to keep generating responses and takes ad infinitum.

This is a symptom of a larger and invidious tendency to equate any kind of criticism with either "hating" or "fangirling", to try to slot everyone and everything into pre-packaged boxes, like so many sad, pale little supermarket apples - and to treat journalism and criticism as if they were necessarily subservient to big corporate endeavors, like Hollywood and Twitter. It is a tiny instance of a poisonous trend in media coverage, to be constantly reacting to lowest-common-denominator "takes" on the internet, rather than taking up the responsibility to reframe, investigate, listen, and educate.

Luke Winkie joined Slate a few years ago and found his work ran afoul of some of the site's long-time commenters. So he decided to reach out and talk to those commenters about why they had been commenting on Slate for decades, and why they specifically seemed to hate his work (subscription gate). This is a fairly heartwarming story, and gets at things that are great and increasingly rare about websites, as well as much of what we hope to attain with our free comment section here at Jank.

In that sense, Slate's community became tight-knit through the power of sparsity alone. Here is a band of wonks and nerds—the final standard-bearers of a more erudite era of the internet—gathered under torchlight in the enveloping darkness.

This is incredibly nerdy, but then, so were Microprose games. Sham Mountebank writes a blog where he tracks down the early offices and distribution centres for "Britain's pioneering video games houses." I like this as a project, as well as anything that gives Microprose their due, which this does.

I don't normally struggle to pick three covers for the picture to the left. I prefer to choose games that mean a lot to me but sometimes I'll go for ones I know will be eye-catching. Yes Civilisation. Yes, UFO: Enemy Unknown. Yes RollerCoaster Tycoon. But what about Silent Service. What about Railroad Tycoon. What about Civilisation II. What about Transport Tycoon. Man, MicroProse released a lot of good games. Is it possible they are one of my favourite software houses and I never realised?

Music this week is a gentle piece of folk-pop by Australian musician Way Dynamic. If you like it, consider supporting him on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.