The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. What a week it has been for blog posts. There have been good blogs, bad blogs, new blogs, and much discussion thereof across the internet. It's enough that you could begin to trick yourself into thinking that games media is healing, although I suspect this is in reality a consequence of its recent fragmentation. In any case, I am pleased to be able to link to so many independent writer-owned sites, of one kind or another, in the below roundup of good writing about videogames.

Duncan Fyfe wrote about lore for Remap by looking at the Elder Scrolls series, and talking to its fans and many of its writers about the often haphazard, contradictary way its world has been constructed, for better and worse.

During a dispute with his boss that a colleague remembered as about whether the world of The Elder Scrolls could accommodate Amazon women, Goodall quit the company. “I loved the original Elder Scrolls too much to stop arguing in their favor,” he said later. He had approached The Elder Scrolls full of zeal for the world and conviction in the stories that took place there. He had come into the world factory armed with faith, only to find that it was the heretics who were the worldbuilders.

For Eteo's series on radios, Christian Donlan wrote about Jet Set Radio's depiction of the medium as a countercultural force.

Professor K is very nearly a counter-culture police dispatcher, directing you from one level to another and clueing you into your shifting agenda as you move across the city. He never feels like it, though. He’s a force for dynamism rather than authority: get over there and see what you can do, he seems to say. Good luck! Everything counts. Victory is not assured.

Meredith Gran, the creator of Perfect Tides and recent sequel Station To Station, wrote about the experience of attending GDC this year. This part resonated with me as a person who once took a baby to IndieCade:

This may be controversial, and I may be new to this whole thing, but I don’t think AI is the worst part of GDC. At least some amount of lame technological trend-sniffing is bound to happen at these things. No, the worst thing about GDC is that children are not allowed at the festival under any circumstance.

Speaking of Perfect Tides: Station To Station, for Literary Hub Josh Lambert asked whether it's the most literary game of all time.

The best way I can describe Meredith Gran’s recently released video game Perfect Tides: Station to Station—or at least the best way I can describe it to people who read contemporary literature—is that it feels like a version Elif Batuman’s novels The Idiot and Either/Or that you can step inside of. Batuman’s novels offer the exquisite discomfort of gazing inside the head of an anxious, perspicacious, self-serious millennial college student as she flails around campus and makes bad decisions. Gran insists that you do all the flailing yourself.

For Rock Paper Shotgun, Robert Yang wrote about the time he was hacked by an invader in Dark Souls 2, and then tracked down the hacker to talk to him about it.

I didn't suspect a thing until he made me explode. That's not a metaphor. My hacker literally bathed me in a fullscreen inferno of acid hellfire. I couldn't even see my pathetic corpse through all the poison, lightning, piss, and blood.

Mikhail Klimentov draws from Marathon's lore and setting to explain in what ways Bungie's shooter is a satire. I read this initially via Kimentov's own newsletter, which is worth following, but kudos to Aftermath for picking it up.

I’ve had one friendly encounter in Marathon, on Perimeter, the game’s “starter” map. My team and I crested a hill and heard another team just in front of us. Evidently, they heard us too, and shouted out from the building they’d entered. We agreed to let a good thing be; we’d pass and they’d let us. Actually, I’ve had dozens of friendly encounters, with all the other runners arbitrarily sorted into my squad. I could conceivably befriend anyone else in the lobby. There’s no inherent quality that marks one runner as friend and another as foe. We all owe money to CyberAcme. In all likelihood, we’re stored on the same server rack. But from the fog of Tau Ceti emerges one near-certainty: there’s no solidarity on a right-to-work planet. So I tend to shoot on sight.

Grayson Morley argues against breathlessness in videogame coverage, using the supposed conversation around Pokémon Pokopia as its prime example. Responses to this blog post on BlueSky seemed to split down the middle between those who agreed and those who disagreed; I'm in the latter camp, although I still think the discussion it generated was worthwhile. In fact, its main strength might be that, in arguing against those who supposedly read too much into games, and doing so ambiguously, even sloppily, it produced a piece of writing that others are able to read too much into, and then use as a platform for whatever existing grievance they wish to do a thread about.

If you're an art guy, you might think I'm being too harsh. I guess. But I think you're being too breathless. I'd like us all to be more real about these things. They're not all time-wasters, but a lot of them are. I think we need to start acknowledging that too many adults are evaluating games like they're up for the Booker Prize when instead they're well-constructed children's books. We don't need to pretend. We'd be better off being real.

This past week, Nvidia revealed DLSS 5, to the praise of people with more teraflops than taste. Thankfully the tech received a lot of pushback, too, including from Jenn Frank for The AV Club, who says "nope" to Nvidia's "yassify" tech.

Where does this lead? Nowhere good. We iterate on aesthetic standards; one minor tweak begets the next. Have you ever seen those social-media stars who’ve spent way too long using a FaceTune app? Or someone who’s had what was maybe one too many surgical revisions? Distortions echo upon other distortions, and soon you’ve passed up dysmorphia entirely, embracing something much more alien, something uncanny. This is where a disordered self-image meets your bank account: Someone will always have one more little tweak to sell you. Discernment, human intervention, is needed, because, if anything has become abundantly clear, it’s that AI cannot pump its own brakes.

Two new television comedies are set at American colleges, prompting Noel Murray to ask, also for The AV Club: have TV writers ever been to college?

But it still speaks to the core problem with a lot of contemporary stories of campus life: They don’t take the students’ concerns seriously. The kids are treated as either a joke or a complication. There are plenty of other Vladimir scenes where M and her colleagues gripe about how their students are no fun. They don’t have sex anymore because they’re “too busy calling their moms.” They blow off homework and then blame their lateness on mental-health struggles. (One young man explains that his “executive function” has been weak ever since he came out as a “gynosexual”…attracted to women even if they have penises.) This perspective is echoed in Rooster, where a dean chuckles with his colleagues while saying that a student who claims to have ADHD is probably just lazy.

I like it when song lyrics make references to frivolous memes and celebrities in unexpected ways, so music this week is Ben Affleck by Medium Build, which wrings more pathos that you'd expect out of that one photo.

Sleep well, videogames.