Sundays are for having the first lie-in in a month. No trips to visit family, no waking in unfamiliar beds, and, best of all, no having to wait until the hosts are up before you can get started on breakfast. I will be snoozing deeply in my own particular mattress before having a plate of toast and scrambled eggs at a time that I deem appropriate.
Once that’s all polished away, I will return to bed with a fresh cup of coffee and peruse the week’s best writing at my own leisure.
What’s that? You want me to share? Fine. You can have a read of them when I’m done.
Papers, Please is a game that emerged from the time developer Lucas Pope spent in immigration queues while travelling in Asia and the US. Every interaction with a border officer becomes an exercise in defining yourself, verifying yourself, and proving your existence is recognised. It’s an experience many us may be able to relate to, but in an essay for Deleted Saves Micaela Deitz finds a new poignancy to the game.
As a trans American without correct documentation, I was dancing to the tune of a government that wanted to keep me moving — uncertain and afraid — until I died. They controlled the tempo, the rhythm, the melody, the length of the song: I could rest at their command. I could only hope that the woman behind the DMV desk, the maestro de jure, wasn’t transphobic or feeling crushed by the rules and regulations of the bureaucracy. I handed over my documents, passport included, with shaky hands. “The passport and the license have different genders, but the license is the real one,” I stuttered.
She nodded but didn’t seem to hear. She looked at the documents, my words rotating in her brain. I saw them click, her brows furrowed in confusion. “These are different?” It was a statement that came out as a question.
*Holds up limp piece of paper* Well, this is a sorry excuse for a publication isn’t it. Someone called *peers closely* Graham, er, Smith, writing for *brings greasy, low quality paper closer* Jonk? Has been playing Gunman Contracts, a new VR game that stumbles into all the foibles of so many other VR games.
John Wick has never died because he was unable to access the gun on his belt because his belt was clipped through the floor while he was crouched. Jack Reacher neither. Jack Reacher has never died because his reality phase-shifted to a living room because his head strayed too close to a Ikea Strandmon footstool. Jim Wicker never died because, when trying to remove an empty cartridge from a gun with his offhand, that hand kept instead snapping to the handle with the finger-nipping magnetism of a Switch 2 Joy-Con.
I experienced all of the above frustration and more in an hour of Gunman Contracts – and I still don’t think the game is bad. It’s a little unoptimised and its ragdoll physics are a little weightless, but those are minor complaints. When you achieve some brief moment of synchronicity with it as a piece of software, you glimpse the kind of experience it wants you to have as you headshot one goon, blow up a second by shooting a gas canister, then grab your knife – on purpose this time! – and hurl it at the chest of a third. I am John Woo.
Ah, this is better *slaps paper against knee to demonstrate its structural integrity*. Eurogamer’s Connor Makar has been speaking to developers at The Coalition about their prospects following the release of E-Day. As a first-party Xbox studio working on a first-party game in a series you could conceivably call a flagship for the console, the team are naturally expecting to be laid off as soon as it launches. That’s what Xbox do now. An additional insult to the developers is that it is unclear if they will receive their bonuses if they are laid off immediately after E-Day’s release.
The existence of this bonus scheme itself isn’t irregular; Metacritic bonuses tied to a game’s critical reception have been an established practice at game development studios for years. Likewise the stipulations involved are standard. An internal email, verified by Eurogamer, confirms the existence of this bonus and its relatively typical nature.
However, given the threat of ongoing Xbox cuts, one aspect of this Metacritic bonus has become a cause for concern. In order to be eligible to receive the bonus, developers must be full-time employees at the time of the payout. Studio leadership have communicated to The Coalition developers that this payout date “should be near the end of October”, as one source put it.
As a result, it has been unclear to developers still at the studio and who have recently left whether those such as Juan Vaca, who were recently laid off by Xbox and therefore are no longer employed at The Coalition – but will technically still be on payroll at the time of the payout in late October – will receive this bonus if the game hits its targets. Eurogamer understands that despite concerns, those recently impacted, such as Vaca, will still receive their bonuses if the targets are met.
What remains uncertain, however – and crucially so for developers at The Coalition today – is the question of what happens to current staff’s bonuses if they are laid off immediately following the release of Gears of War: E-Day as some now fear. As of now, it is still unclear whether these developers would receive their Metacritic bonus.
In the background of the past month have been a string of layoffs in the games media. One of the main reasons for the layoffs is Google’s continued push into AI overviews, which are stripping work from websites and pasting it at the top of search results, robbing them of the revenue they would have earned from visitors. Sites that leaned hard into Google as their primary source of traffic are suffering the most. Many of the writers now being laid off from those sites will have been told in previous years by the infinitely wise business people who own the sites thay they need to optimise their work for Google (optimisations that turned out to make their work easier for Google to harvest). So, it was with a gallows fascination that I read Malin Hay’s essay for the LRB on Hollywood flops, in which so many were the result of an executive chasing a fad.
Of course, no producer wants sixty crew members to go to hospital, just as no studio wants to finance a film that brings in zilch. Robey points out that the money-grabbing instinct is sometimes counterproductive: ‘before their downfall’, films that flopped were ‘often dreamed up erroneously as sure things, by some backstage calculus derived from everything box office is meant to teach us’. His decision to order the chapters chronologically gives a sense of the fads that came and went in Hollywood over the course of the century. In the silent era, audiences favoured grand historical epics and weepies, which led to such fiascos as Queen Kelly, in which Gloria Swanson plays a convent schoolgirl seduced and disgraced by a Teutonic prince. The film was scuttled by the ‘defiant overspending’ of the director, Erich von Stroheim, who ‘fondled and dawdled over the tiniest minutiae’, in Swanson’s words, but failed to notice that the talkies had arrived. Swanson footed the bill, and it never got a commercial release in the US.
Earlier this week Mark shared the work of a local artist who’s been writing messages on the walls of the underpasses not too far from his home. They’re all low stakes gossip, from “Rita Ora has the Lidl Plus App” to “Anneka Rice builds forts with the cushions in B&M”. Well, Radge Magazine managed to track the artist down for an interview:
RADGE: What possessed you to start spray-painting British B-listers in radge predicaments onto the sides of buildings?
A: With the greatest of respect, I am from the area and West Denton isn’t exactly being ruined by it; if anything, it improves it (stop your nonsense, you know it’s true). Truly, we have been at a loose end since Vanessa Feltz’s show got cancelled by Channel 5. We used to spend our time wreaking havoc during her phone-in segments until, again, the press got wind and they pulled the plug, it’s just a bit of fun!
There’s something so pleasing to read through the local Facebook group, who are up in arms over it and playing along like some sort of neurodivergent Batman carrying a sordid secret. Replying to a busybody with “What on earth possessed them to write that? I have no idea, and it certainly wouldn’t bring anyone closer together; it was… I can’t explain it; perhaps you’d better go ask somebody else, but I just think it was absolutely ludicrous” is such a rush! Essentially it’s all a bit of tongue-in-cheek fun, isn’t it? Brightens up the people’s day on their cruel commute to work. That being said, I don’t actually know if Annie Lennox gets a boiled egg in her meal deal, but good luck if she does; hope she makes a few bob and does a bloody good job! And as I say, the locations themselves aren’t being ruined, they’re filthy dirty, they’re stinking.
In a profile for The Guardian last month, Jason Okundaye interviewed musician Michael Kiwanuka. Little had been heard of the artist since he pulled out of a festival in July last year. In the piece, Kiwanuka revealed that he had suffered from a stroke and was still deep in recovery. So, for music this week, this is the RAK Studios session of Love & Hate:
Watch on YouTube