Sundays are for lying in bed and listening to the persistent rain beating at the skylight. It’s a comforting sound but one that’s become all too familiar in this seemingly endless winter. This week has at least brought murmurs of sunlight in the mornings, but for now they’re often drowned out by the tap tap tap of rain.
While the sound of the rain is exhausting its welcome, the urge to stay in a cosy bed and pooh-pooh the outside remains very welcome. For now, I will put the thought that I need to go to the shops and pick up food for the week into a shoebox and hide it away under the bed, next to the lost socks and sleeping spiders.
I’ve a fair few bits of game writing to recommend this week.
I feel the same need as Graham (RPS in peace), writing over at his new home Jank, that gaming culture could take more cues from readers. He argues that they take a much less temporal approach to their hobby.
The problem – I don’t think I’m blowing anyone’s mind here – is in part that videogames culture is so commercial. Publishers make money by selling you something new, and the relentless marketing cycle has seeped into everything. Our awards shows are about games that aren’t out yet, all our websites are mainly about games that aren’t out yet or have just come out. Gaming discourse lies downstream from that, talking about games for two weeks after their release, then mostly falling silent until the inevitable remake or remaster.
There is pressure to forever write about the new glittery thing, when older games still offer pleasure and insights. When reading through the submissions for the RPS 100: Readers Edition last year, I came away with a list of games I wanted to play or replay, which have no hook for why they should be played now. Often, the only editorial reason to play a game released more than a year ago is when we approach its five, ten, or other-satisfyingly-round year anniversary. I’ll have to try and do something about that…
There is a growing push from developers to turn horror gaming into a co-op experience. Both Supermassive Games, the new steward of the Little Nightmares series, and the series’s creator, Tarsier, independently landed on making co-op horror games in the past year with Little Nightmares 3 and Reanimal. Over at Eurogamer, Matt Wales, explores what bringing a second player into the mix does for the feelings the games stir up.
I’m not going to claim Reanimal doesn’t lose some of its ambience in the constant companionship of co-op, mind. It’s definitely, perhaps inevitably, one to play solo if you want the full uninterrupted force of its insidiously creeping menace. But even so, I think Tarsier’s found a space where co-op feels additive. It helps that Renanimal isn’t really interested in traditional scares; jolts and jumps are minimal, and there’s no intricate escalation of tension that might be undermined if your attention is suddenly pulled elsewhere. And it helps, too, that there’s just the barest wisp of story to focus on. But more than that, co-op feels like it gets to the heart of Reanimal, its tale of two doomed siblings lost in something like hell. What better way to reinforce that narrative bond – that one tiny sliver of hope and humanity – what better way to accentuate its emotional core, than by piggybacking on players’ real-life connections, allowing them to face hell together with a lover, a family member, or a friend?
I’m sure we will have recommended Simon Parkin’s podcast, My Perfect Console, in the past. It’s a series in which he invites his guest to pick five games that have made an impact on them through their lives. Then, Desert Island Discs-style, he uses those picks to structure an exploration of the interviewee’s life. His most recent episode is with Dr. Elin Festøy, creative producer of My Child Lebensborn. It’s a particularly good episode in a particularly good series of a particularly good podcast. Festøy shares how she went from living in a small village in Norway to becoming a technology journalist in the 90s, to creating a game about the Lebensborn – children born as part of a Nazi programme to breed the next generation of Aryans – and their ostracisation in Norway after the war.
Over at Polygon, Oli Welsh reflects on the recent layoffs at Riot and Wildlight, makers of 2XKO and Highguard respectively, and what their failures may mean about the free-to-play model.
Premium games aren’t immune to crashing and burning; just look at Concord. But there are clear signs that players are drawn to paying for their live-service games again, and that the good old-fashioned “sell stuff for money” business model works for studios, too. Bungie is probably right to charge for Marathon. Would a price tag have saved Highguard? Maybe not. But it might have bought the Wildlight team a little more time, and left them with a little more to show for their trouble.
For a piece of non-gaming reading, I was interviewing a developer earlier this week and our hush-hush discussion reminded me of an essay by Tzvetan Todorov. In The Typology of Detective Fiction, Todorov breaks down the evolution of crime stories and points to one major change between the likes of Agatha Christie’s classic whodunits and writers that followed – the detective became vulnerable.
At the base of the whodunit we find a duality, and it is this duality which will guide our description. This novel contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. In their purest form, these two stories have no point in common. The first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens in the second? Not much. The character of this second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn. Nothing can happen to them: a rule of the genre postulates the detective’s immunity. We cannot imagine Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance threatened by some danger, attacked, wounded, even killed. The hundred and fifty pages which separate the discovery of the crime from the revelation of the killer are devoted to a slow apprenticeship: we examine clue after clue, lead after lead. The whodunit thus tends toward a purely geometric architecture: Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express, for example, offers twelve suspects; the book consists of twelve chapters, and again twelve interrogations, a prologue, and an epilogue (that is, the discovery of the crime and the discovery of the killer).
[…]
Historically, this form of detective fiction appeared at two moments: it served as transition between the whodunit and the thriller and it existed at the same time as the latter. To these two periods correspond two subtypes of the suspense novel. The first, which might be called “the story of the vulnerable detective” is mainly illustrated by the novels of Hammett and Chandler. Its chief feature is that the detective loses his immunity, gets beaten up, badly hurt, constantly risks his life, in short, he is integrated into the universe of the other characters, instead of being an independent observer as the reader is (we recalled Can Dine’s detective-as-reader analogy).
Meanwhile, on the London Review of Books blog, Amna A. Akbar writes about the ways ICE’s constant presence in her neighbourhood is changing the behaviours of herself and her fellow Minnesotans.
Everyone’s physical safety is at risk, and you feel it when you walk around. Things are quiet, until they are not: symphonies of whistles and car alarms alert us to ICE’s possible presence every day. Many people do not go out. Day to day, distribution channels organise, pack and deliver food, toilet paper and art kits to those trapped at home. Those who are on the streets wear colourful whistles around their necks and are on high alert. The other day, as I was standing at a street corner near my place with S, nothing visible to suggest we were on ICE watch, a woman rolled down the window of her small car and said to us: ‘I think that car behind me is ICE. Do you see the tags?’ I turned towards her but I wasn’t sure what she was asking me to do. She must have seen my pupils widen. She repeated herself and mumbled: ‘Maybe I’m being paranoid.’ I took a few steps to look. ‘It’s not ICE,’ I told her, and she looked relieved. I was relieved, too, realising the paranoia is shared.
Music this week is Cinder Well’s The Wise Man’s Song, the theme from Small Prophets. The series is the latest drama from Mackenzie Crook, creator of The Detectorists, and it’s an equally poignant and gripping series. I watched the entire thing in a sitting and highly recommend it to fans of Terry Pratchett’s brand of fantasy. Likewise, while I’m recommending themes from Crook’s programs, Johnny Flynn’s music for the Detectorists is a good listen on these rainy days.