Sundays are, again, for running taxi duty for relatives visiting from overseas. If I had a nickel for every time I had an early morning Gatwick run in tandem with a Sunday Papers post, I’d have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird than I’m being paid in USD when I live in the United Kingdom. In that international spirit, here are some fine writings from around the globe.
For Stop Caring, Artemis Octavio interviewed Jeremy Couillard, the multimedia artist behind such offbeat indie experiments as Soul Injector Commando: an FPS about shooting a sense of humanity into enemies based on real-life billionaires.
I did learn a lot about them. Their names pop up every time in the upper corner when you ‘inject’ them and it states what job they got after they acquire a soul. I saw a lot of these names and, just for fun, I would Google them to learn about them. It’s funny cause the few streamers that were playing the game were doing it as well, which was so awesome. Because that was the whole point of doing that. A lot of these people I Googled are either arrested, or dead, or under indictment charges. They’re almost all criminally involved in something.
This past week’s discourse on gamedev team sizes, sparked by a GI.biz post about Star Wars: Galactic Racer and its “core team” of 75, was clearly an inferior rehash of the Nic-sparked Expedition 33 one last year. But it has produced this thoughtful Game Developer piece, by Bryant Francis, on whether we need a new language approach to fit recent developments in outsourcing.
When done right, the model diversifies financial risk and preserves what works about triple-A development without the need to keep everyone under one corporate entity. When done wrong, you can wind up with a game development class system, where creative direction and funding flows in limited directions, and those not lucky enough to be at the center struggle to keep doing the work they love.
This problem is obviously organizational in nature, and not easily fixed by good copyediting. But organizations begin with language, and the language we use to define our work will define the future of video game development.
Writer and former Double Finer Harper Jay considers when games fail. In the interesting ‘intent and aspirations’ sense, not the tedious ‘sales and Steam player counts’ sense.
Manhunt’s investment into the stealth simulation is not insignificant, especially for the time. Even with the conceit that there is a snuff director engineering these scenarios, it wants you to understand that there is a world. It behaves largely as you might expect. The rules are mostly the rules of the real worlds. a brick falls because there is “gravity” and it makes “noise” like a normal brick would.
But! There’s rules to the game. Do X and a guard will do Y. Exploiting this is a key to progress and getting high scores. hit a wall, the mook says the thing, he walks over. this is the rule. at least so far.
But this guy doesn’t move. It’s not some meta-textual commentary, it’s not some undercutting trick on the player. He’s just not programmed that way. So I mention it to the game club. something’s up.
This doesn’t work. It doesn’t align. The simulation fails. The artifice is too obvious here. The funhouse is on display a bit too brazenly. It’s endearing maybe in the way that all jank can be. but it’s “off.”
Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese meets the man who put a Game Boy Museum into a Game Boy cartridge.
As comprehensive as it is, though, presenting it all online to browse using modern computers and devices is relatively straightforward. But cramming that onto a cartridge for a device made in 1989 is an entirely different matter. So there were immediate obstacles for Pflug’s project. The Game Boy, Pflug discovered, is “a spectacularly bad e-reader”, due to the limited 255 “blocks” it can show on screen. That’s not a lot when you consider several blocks are used for every letter of text, and the museum is primarily a text-based affair. “Reading a museum on a Game Boy, it turns out, is a game of inches,” Pflug notes.
I’ve been learning, as I recommend you do, about the eccentric American moneyman Timothy Dexter (1747-1806), whose preternatural luck in seeing his bumbling investments succeed was matched only by his zest for unhinged wordsmithing. Not really a ‘from this week’, of course. But then I only heard about the guy on Tuesday after Edwin, mad with fury after years of me editing commas into his articles, sent me Dexter’s punctuation sheet supplement, which he included in reprints of one work “Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops”.
As told by Public Domain Review:
Dexter’s life itself reads like literary fable — a Trimalchio reborn in New England, whose wealth afforded him everything but what he really desired: respect. Self-educated, he served as the elected Informer of Newburyport, Massachusetts, tasked with enforcing laws regarding the slaughter of deer. Each week, he synchronized his vast clock collection, and the device that ran truest (or “behaved best”, in his words) was baptized with a grandiose title. He kept a court of confidantes, including a personal poet laureate whose name, Jonathan Plummer, perhaps reflects the man’s talent with verse — “Lord Dexter, like king Solomon, / Hath gold and silver by the ton” — and the upper-class Lucy Lancaster, daughter of a formerly enslaved African king, who provided both council and mitigation: “If Dexter loaded a gun to shoot some one, Luce was sent for”.
I did look around for something BioWare-related to include here, but to be perfectly honest I still think the best eulogy I’ve read is Edwin’s. Even if the first draft needed some commas. Music this week is alternating between Clutch’s gigantic, dive-bombing Wasted Lands, and this SilvaGunner remix of Unbeatable’s best song. Good Sundays, all.