Sundays are for looking upon my DIY works and despairing. Strewn sawdust, spilled paint, and hunks of broken MDF litter my living room kingdom. When will it be over? When will I be free? When will I be able to reassemble my sofa, sit down with a cup of tea in hand, and admire my books, unpacked and arranged on perfectly fitted alcove bookshelves?
“Today?” I whisper hopefully in response to a paragraph of rhetorical questions. “Probably not,” snaps back Reality. Especially if I don’t get out of bed soon. Still, here in bed I can read the best writing about and not about games from the past week.
Inside our Gchat walls, there is a growing exhaustion with genAI stories. Every day another gaming boss talks about the inexorable march of the tech before putting out a trailer filled with blurry text and six-fingered characters. I don’t doubt the tech is getting better, but it’s not inevitable. As such, Rob Fahey’s latest GI column is something of a balm:
There is currently a concerted and not-so-subtle campaign underway to try to manufacture consent for the use of AI in game development.
At its core, this is about presenting AI as a fait accompli. Every week or so we get a new report making dubious claims about almost every development studio already using AI. The message to developers is “you’ll be left behind if you don’t use it too”; to players, it’s “this is already done and there’s no turning back”. Consume like good little consumers. Shut up and eat your slop.
A further tonic comes from Merritt K, who writes for Aftermath about the technological improvements rolling through Karaoke.
Doesn’t it feel like everything — especially everything Big Tech touches — is getting worse? Generative AI, not merely content with robbing humans of our craft and jobs, has escaped containment into physical reality in the form of shitty event flyers and small business signage. Hugely profitable industries like video games and film are being torn apart by the financialization of the economy as shareholders seek ever-increasing short-term profits. Algorithmic pricing of rent and groceries threatens to further punish the working class for the crime of not being born rich.
But in the heart of despair, we must reach for that which is good and pure and — dare I say it — better than it used to be. Karaoke is one of those things. And it is better not because of the disruption of tech giants, but, as is often the case, thanks to the work of enterprising maniacs toiling in obscurity, purely out of the love of the game.
I’ve been playing Forbidden Solitaire this week, where FMV sequences starring Xalavier Nelson Jr as an obsessive fantasy-author-turned-video-game-developer are played for laughs. So it was with a minor sense of whiplash I read Ashley Bardhan’s piece for This Week In Video Games. Bardhan speaks to horror developers inserting themselves into FMV games to confront and explore violence against women.
Cara Cadaver uses her own photos and videos to represent multiple victims of sexual violence and murder in her unflinching 2025 game Vile: Exhumed. She tells me over email, “Being a woman is inherently a horrifying and violent experience, any way you slice it. One of my inspirations for making games in general is pulling from real-life experience and telling stories that most every woman has lived in some way; that’s real horror.”
“Horror in general has been a major outlet for me while dealing with trauma, and so much of horror as a genre goes back to women,” Cadaver says. “Women’s stories belong in horror — and that has been the case as long as horror has existed.”
Over at RPS-but-it’s-The-Fade, Brendan’s run through what made Bioware games great (and also terrible).
Bioware established romance as a must for any blockbuster RPG worth its frost salts (and not just RPGs).
Kissing your friends on the mouth is everywhere in mainstream and indie games today. It’s a verb now. Characters are “romanceable”. I played Nivalis Nights last month and could not get away from the swarms of horny NPC citizens trying to jump my noodle serving bones. Baldur’s Gate 3 launched with a bug that made your companions fuckable in just a few nights, and people didn’t even notice. They thought: that’s normal and right, I should shag everyone, gender and orientation be damned. See that mountain? You can fuck it. And that’s (at least partially) thanks to Bioware.
GTA is an unignorable thing. It is one of those breakout cultural objects that has its own gravity, drawing in attention and comment from politicians, mainstream press, parents, schools, comedians, columnists, footballers, taxi drivers, and hairdressers. In all the weight of it, I hadn’t yet really seen it as a game. Simon Parkin’s Edge cover feature may not reveal many new details about the game but it has made me appreciate it as a game (and maybe even get a little bit excited for its eventual PC release.
Nelson, grave-faced but friendly, wearing all black, with grey-flecked stubble, settles into a leather-and-chrome Eames chair while we perch on a burnt-orange sofa facing a pair of expansive wall-mounted TVs. In the past, Rockstar has carefully stage-managed encounters such as this. For previews of previous GTAs, one team member played the game while a publicist read from a pre-prepared script, further evidence of the paranoia that can take hold when an artist is working on something the entire world is desperate to see.
Today, however, Nelson has no script and, apparently, no plan. For the next 90 minutes he simply plays the current build, following his nose, confident that the game’s systems will hold together wherever he pushes them, that this world’s glories will glint and shimmer no matter which angle he approaches from. It is an extraordinary demonstration not of paranoia but of trust – in the game, in the team that built it, perhaps even in us.
Nelson picks up the controller and lets Grand Theft Auto VI speak for itself.
I am guilty of forgetting and looking away, but the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has not ended, it is deepening. Writing for the LRB, Selma Dabbagh bluntly captures the ugly events of the past two years :
In January 2025 Donald Trump described Gaza as a ‘demolition site’. ‘You’re talking about probably a million and a half people,’ he said, ‘and we just clean out that whole thing.’ The number is closer to two million people – not a ‘whole thing’ but two million individual human beings – who have been driven into an area that’s less than a third of the densely inhabited land they lived on. Their cities and arable lands – palms, olives, coriander, citrus and pomegranate trees – have been obliterated.
I’d like there to be a big reason for this week’s music recommendation, but really it’s just a little victory lap. I managed to nab some tickets to see This Is The Kit, so give Bashed Out a listen, yeah?
Watch on YouTube