Sundays are for luxuriating in the chill of the September air and hoping for more of the drenching rain that’s ended the summer heat. Though, it’s a luxuriating that’s quickly pierced by the worry that we’ve seen the last warm weather of the year. Winter isn’t far off and all the gaps around the windows in the living room are going to start making themselves known again.
Put those worries off for now, and distract yourself with some Sunday reading.
There are far too few articles from writers going wandering in an online game. That deserter prince who founded a poor mimicry of our magnificent treehouse, Brendan, has been doing a fine job of it over at the other place. But it’s Kotaku’s Rebekah Valentine’s search for John Bigwalk in Big Walk that’s been the delight of my week
I’m in the tutorial area of Big Walk, on hour seven of a day-long vigil. I’ve been sitting on this little yellow stool for hours, a glowing orb light in front of me at the center of a circle of stools. Also arranged in the circle are the bodies of three other players, stiff and abandoned by their hosts hours before. I’m tired. I’m bored. I’m ready to log off.
Then, I see it. Coming out of one of the starting doors. A glint of silver. A flash of red.
It’s him at last. It’s John Bigwalk.
There are almost as many articles analysing the growing wave of remakes as there are remakes. But I did enjoy Barrett Courtney’s argument for remakes to treat the original source material more like a new staging of an old play. He remembers seeing a performance of Taming of the Shrew that didn’t ignore its misogyny, but flipped it through witty performance.
We were all really impressed by that production and the lengths of what could be done to take the conversation around an original work of art in a new direction. I remember my drama teacher having to take some time to parse through what she got out of that particular production for a play she had very strong feelings about.
I’m sure we’ve all seen great productions of Shakespeare but I would bet the ones that have stuck with us are the ones that actually had something to say beyond the understanding we came to during 2nd period English.
I’ve been thinking a lot about those theater productions as we have become inundated with video game remakes.
Off the back of a lot of doom and gloom about the games industry facing a crash akin to that seen in the ’80s, the ever excellent Rob Fahey has written up some predictions for the next decade. While not all of them are rosey, he shares good reasons for why it’s unlikely to be anything like as bad as it was in 1983.
While not everyone is catastrophising, nobody seems to be outright rejecting the framing of “Crash 2.0” either. The spectre of the 1983 videogame crash looms large, though we can’t read too much into its invocation in this particular moment. The industry does have an occasional flair for the dramatic and a habit of raising the spectre of desert pits full of E.T. cartridges at the first sign of market turbulence, after all.
Before talking about the future, in fact, let’s talk briefly about the past. 1983 wasn’t a downturn or a rebalancing; it was a near-collapse of industry revenues from over $3 billion in 1983 to a mere $100 million by 1985. Analysts justifiably wondered out loud whether video games themselves had been a passing fad that would now fade into obscurity.
We are not facing anything like that.
Kirk McKeand travelled out to Japan to talk to Fromsoft head Hidetaka Miyazaka about feet (and other things). I’ve never completed a Fromsoftware game, but I am always fascinated to hear more about how they’re made and what people get out of them. It’s not that I can’t understand it, I just don’t have the dexterity to be able to share in it.
The game opens with an arresting image: one hand reaching out for another. A male character is slumped on a chair, dejected; the shot moves in close to focus on their draped fingers. From below the frame, a pale hand slowly reaches out and caresses them before gently clasping his wrist. Hands are a recurring motif in Miyazaki’s games; in Elden Ring, massive crawling hands burrow up from underground to attack you, and hand-like giants are revered as deities.
“It’s not necessarily something I’m consistently aware of – maybe it’s something subconscious coming through,” Miyazaki says when I ask about this imagery. “Take a look online and there’s a rumour that I have a bit of a thing for feet, but I’m not honestly sure where this comes from. I feel like I’m trying to depict some side of human nature or the human existence that is difficult to describe.” (His games have featured, by my count, at least six barefoot female characters.)
Finally, while we did resist the temptation to search out links between Dolly Parton and gaming to write an obituary, the Sunday Papers feels like somewhere we can fit in a little tribute to the country star. I really enjoyed this article by Niela Orr, talking about how she discovered Dolly Parton while she was skipping school.
Loafing on the couch, eating cereal, I began the day by watching the calibrated sociological chaos of Maury or Jerry Springer or TheJenny Jones Show, telling myself that cutting school wasn’t nearly as bad as the stuff the ‘out of control teens’ on those talk shows were up to. Then I’d switch over to HBO or TBS. Pop culture’s twenty-year nostalgia cycle meant that cable channels were regurgitating the staples of Reagan’s America: TV shows such as Family Ties, The Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes and Silver Spoons; women-in-the-workplace comedies like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Big Business, Baby Boom, Working Girl and – most memorable – 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton.
Ending on Dolly, I should probably pick one of her songs (and I would say listen to Trio, her album with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris if you haven’t already). But, what I’ve actually been listening to this week is Manalan Mailla, the song by Vilma Jää that was in Control Resonant’s Summer Games Fest trailer. Look, I don’t often listen to videogame music, but when I do it slaps.