The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. As I write this, on Saturday evening, my son has just fallen asleep as I read him the closing chapters of The Hobbit. I don't take this personally. It's the first time either of us has read the book, and I think he's enjoying it, but there is perhaps nothing greater than lulling your child to sleep with a story. As you read this roundup of some good writing about videogames on Sunday morning, may you also drift off for another peaceful slumber.

Aftermath have been publishing up a storm with the delightfully named Woke Week, a "week of stories celebrating Woke 2". There were more interesting articles than I've yet had time to read, so I'm going to pick three. You should start with Gita Jackson's take on what Woke 2 means to her.

In this first version of wokeness, I wasn’t nearly as skeptical of figureheads and corporations co-signing social movements as I needed to be. I had this unshakeable belief that justice would emerge in the end, that people would do the right thing just because it was the right thing to do. I trusted companies, I put my faith in people who posted about the right things online.

Bee Wertheimer wrote a love letter to "girl games", many of which no longer exist, and how the tools and tutorials of game development mean there are more barriers to making more of them than platformers and shooters.

When I learned programming, my skills were built on the foundation of conventionally masculine genres: it was easier for me to make a platformer and a first-person shooter than it was to make a dress-up game. That’s not just because of a university program. If you want to learn game design on your own, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a tutorial online that doesn’t tell you to start with the “basics” — making a character move and attack. But these are only the basics for a certain kind of game.

Nathan Grayson wrote about Games Done Quick's work to make the culture of speedrunning more welcoming to all. There are lessons here for anyone running a gaming community.

GDQ has spent years intentionally curating a crowd that both does and does not fit the standard gamer mold. On one hand, speedrunners play games more than just about anyone. Whittling down run times from dozens of hours to just two, one, or none requires incredible dedication. Top speedrunners spend months or years labbing games to discover and memorize optimal routes and skippable sections. I guarantee: You do not love your favorite game as much as its best speedrunner. You probably don’t hate it as much, either.

The theme week was in service of a subscription drive and paired with an ongoing sale, if you've been meaning to sign-up to Aftermath and needed an extra push.

As covered in The Lie-In previously, Grammarly recently launched an AI tool that claimed to mimic the editing advice of various subject matter experts, including several games journalists. Grammarly are now being sued and have pulled the feature. One of those whose identities and work were used without notice, consent or compensation was PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon, who wrote about how that feels.

Sitting in that coffee shop, everyone around me suddenly felt like the enemy. What were the odds one of them worked for Superhuman, which had an office just a 20 minute walk away? Should I interrupt their conversations to ask them "Hey, did you do this? Did you just steal my identity? What the hell man?"

One of the most common (and most absurd) claims by proponents of generative art is that it democratises the creative process, by letting those who can't make stuff, make stuff. The newsletter Animation Obsessive challenged that argument in a recent entry looking at approaches to animation by people without access to traditional tools, training, or even skills.

[Animator Caroline Leaf] didn’t consider herself much of a visual artist. “I can’t really draw; never could,” she said in 1976. “But it is interesting, not being able to draw and trying to find solutions around it. If, for example, I knew how to draw a hand with all the correct shadings and perspective, there would be no problem. But that hand would come out looking like a conventional hand.”

Old but new to me, Lee Hutchinson for Ars Technica on the experience of working in a US videogame store in the 1990s. Reads like a pitch for an Empire Records-style movie about the launch of the Nintendo 64.

It is September 1996, I am 18 years old, and I am the “keyholder” at Babbage’s store no. 9 in Houston. This is the North American launch day for the Nintendo 64, which makes it the third major 1990s console launch I am lucky (or “lucky”) enough to work. As the yelling escalates, I wonder if I’m going to make it through my shift without getting punched in the face.

Sometimes "music this week" is an old track I've had back on rotation, and sometimes it's me pulling something from the archive in a hurry because no single track stood out over a week of music. Still other times it's a five day-old song that I've already listened to 20 times, as is the case with One Thing At A Time by Courtney Barnett.

Like the song? Consider supporting Barnett on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.