The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. Thanks for all your responses to last week's question about which reviewers have a definable aesthetic taste. My personal opinion is that I don't think there are many good answers to the question, because the realities of modern games media don't provide opportunities for writers to work as critics or with editors long enough to refine their taste and their voice. I'm taking the number of commenters that named designers rather than writers, or writers long-since retired, as a sign you all agree. Don't correct me. Thank god for Sin though, eh? Let's move on to another week of links to articles you might enjoy.

I've wanted to read something in-depth about the booming Pokémon fangame scene for a while. Ana Diaz delivered just that for Fansplaining this week.

The popularity of the fangames themselves attests to the central role they play in the Pokémon fandom, which is massive: Pokémon is estimated to be the highest-grossing media franchise in the world. Fangames have huge audiences; Pokémon Uranium, for example, has reportedly been downloaded more than 1.5 million times. A quick search on YouTube reveals that video in which people play these games can garner hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of views. Fangames have thrived not just because of their creators, but because of their communities. Behind the development of every successful Pokémon game is a massive group of dedicated fans, volunteering their time, effort, and art to help create something for the entire Pokémon fan community to enjoy.

The Video Game History Foundation has been scanning magazines for years, and making them more readable and searchable than previous fan scans or the Web Archive. They're now turning their attention to foreign-language games magazines, starting with an archive of Japanese magazines.

Japanese magazines are a vital resource for studying video game history; in particular, they can be a rich source for interviews with developers—most of which have rarely if ever been reprinted—and first-hand accounts of Japanese player culture.

I loved the GameCube, a console for people who didn't want a lot of games, but wanted the best. Keza MacDonald reminisced about the "purple box of delights" to mark its 25th anniversary for The Guardian.

I didn't know anyone else who had one. But despite being mocked at the time, the GameCube is now revered, fondly remembered as an uncomplicated box of fun at a time when video games were in their performatively adult stage.

RedLogic on YouTube created a Minecraft simulation and ran it in fast forward for over a billion years until it completed itself. This makes more sense if you just watch the video.

Steven Johnson's 2001 non-fiction best seller Emergence explained how a kind of intelligence could develop from simple, self-organising systems, such as ant colonies and in urban development. Here's another example: from one of the slime moulds over at IGN's forgotten petri dish emerged an article on designing caves in Satisfactory's new expansion.

"We want to be very careful how much space we allow for different players, because you still want to have the cave feeling," he tells me. "You want to have the little tunnels to explore, but you want to make sure there's always enough areas that if people want to unleash their creativity, they have the space to do that, but then you don't want to just give them a big box [where they can] just build whatever they want. Level design was enormous here."

"What is Sonic The Hedgehog about?" asks madeline blondeau for Stop Caring. I have a deep and abiding disrespect for the blue hedgehog, but this question is a precursor to a sentence like the one below.

Like all popular mascots, Sonic's very existence is destructive. Parts of our planet are carved up, melted down, and reshaped into his image to make shareholders happy. For all his activist dressage, Sonic is ultimately a son of industry and slave to capital.

I doubt I've ever linked to Barenaked Ladies in all my years of linking songs, either because I don't want to sound like that one scene in Community or because they've been producing bland pap for the past fifteen years. It's as if their songs are now written exclusively to be used as background music in auto-generated iPhone slideshows. It's probably too simplistic to say that this is because singer-songwriter Steven Page left the band a little over 15 years ago, since the decline started before that, and because creative alchemy tends to be more complicated, but it is true that Page's solo work has retained the musical range and playfulness that his former band now lack.

None of which is relevant to why I'm linking to the song below this week, which is simply one of those useful songs. You can go read Page's Wikipedia page and infer its autobiographical significance, but you don't need to. Apply it to your own life. Have it in your arsenal when you're muttering to yourself in the kitchen, cross at your boss or disappointed in yourself.

Sleep well, videogames.