The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for drawing polygons then rotating them in code, for no good reason. Best justify the time that’ll take by first gathering the week’s best writing about videogames.

• Star Wars: Galaxies was a fascinating game at launch, one which treated the world of Star Wars as a real place and went to great pains to offer more than simply a power fantasy. That’s why people still remember it so fondly and also, I suspect, why it never found lasting commercial success. Raph Koster, one of the game’s designers, wrote this past week about how they dealt with the game’s Jedi problem. As in, how do you make a multiplayer game where everyone wants to be the game-breaking superhero class? I’m fond of one, unused solution, quoted below.


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The Sunday Papers

Easter weekend waylaid my ability to gather papers last Sunday, which means that my link document is overflowing. Quick! Let’s splurge everything as fast as we can.

• Chris Livingston has been playing Pillars of Eternity as a part of bears, as his wont.


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What Are You Playing This Weekend?

Hallo there! You might have noticed things were a bit sluggish around here yesterday: we were on holiday. Mostly. We’ll be quiet on Monday too, rolling around with swollen bellies full of chocolate eggs rather than posting. That doesn’t mean we can’t still play video games, mind. So, what are you playing this weekend?

Me, I’ve just bought a swish gaming laptop to replace my ailing PC and should put it through its paces. So far all I’ve confirmed is that Dota 2 looks really very nice at highest settings.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for sheltering from the harsh weather and cursing the time lords who stole an hour from your sleep. Better hunker down with a particularly fine selection of the week’s best (mostly) writing about games.

• After the end of Saturday Crapshoot around six months ago, Richard Cobbett started a new PC Gamer column on story and writing in games. That sadly ended yesterday with this excellent piece on representations of depression in games, with Life Is Strange’s display of contact information for a suicide hotline as the jumping off point. No spoilers inside.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for something productive. If you don’t decide what soon, you’re going to spend all day tootling around in Cities: Skylines with the cheats on again. Quick, stall for time by reading and watching the week’s finest (mostly) games writing.

• I like the impressive scope of this Ian Bogost article: Video Games Are Better Without Characters. It escalates from lamenting the demise of Maxis and celebrating systems-driven games, to setting those in opposition to identity politics, to essentially challenging people to grapple more with all the world’s biggest problems. I don’t agree with all of it but you should read it.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for returning, after a GDC-enforced absence, to compiling lists of links to the week’s finest games writing. It’s nice to read, isn’t it?

• Leigh Alexander and Laura Hudson launched Offworld this past week, reviving Boing Boing’s videogame wing as a website dedicated to those people most ignored by most other gaming sites. I am not one of those people, but I’m enjoying it all the same. Start anywhere.

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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for exploring the world via the medium of Google Earth, and wondering what life would be like as the sole inhabitant and proprietor of PhinDeli Town Buford, Wyoming.

• Forbes’ profile of Notch, based around an exclusive interview, carries an occasional finger-wagging tone but contains some interesting thoughts.


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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for contemplating those who are gone and those who go on.

• Darkest Dungeon is a brilliant game. Dingy, but brilliant. Austin Walker’s thoughts on the sanity system – and sanity systems in general – might be the best response to Red Hook’s gothic masterpiece so far.


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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for rolling around on the floors of your new home in search of a stronger mobile data connection, while waiting for Monday to bring a BT engineer and a proper internet connection. Good thing Friday’s are for trips to coffee shops and advanced assemblages of fine internet writings about videogames.

• I’m aware I link the Guardian here a lot, but they’ve been doing good stuff of late. This week’s piece on the current state of industry crunch – examining whether anything has really changed since 2004’s EA Spouse – is essential reading. So read it.


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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for packing all your worldly belongings into cardboard boxes, because it’s almost moving time. Look at all those DVDs you haven’t watched since the last time you moved.

• Eurogamer announced that they’d run out of numbers, preferring instead to measure the future quality of games solely via thousands of words of carefully written prose. Except also sometimes with three short conclusive labels.


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The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for scrubbing the oven because you’re moving out and that thing is filthy. At the next place, you promise yourself, you’ll clean it more regularly while living there so you don’t end up in this position for a fifth time. Ack! Let’s put it off by reading some fine writing about videogames.

• Beware the spoilers in this Alien: Isolation interview with writers Will Porter and Dion Lay, but if you’ve played it and you’re interestsed in how it was written and how its world was developed, there’s good stuff inside.


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What Are You Playing This Weekend?

Regular readers of RPS will be well aware that around these parts, we like a spot of Warhammer. Regular readers will also be aware that the last month has been a rather splendid time for such things. Earlier this week Vermintide was announced and Regicide was revealed, whilst in far-off January Total Waaaarghammer was confirmed and Battlefleet Gothic – Armada made its presence felt. Warhammer Quest crawled onto PC that same month, and towards the end of last year we got Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon too.

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What Are You Playing This Weekend?

An intrusion like the moon through clouds. A misplaced man, a misplaced question. The question: one of play. But what of play?

So rude, crude; a thought pre-chewed. Its exhalation an imposition, its intonation an accusation. So to play we return again. Reveal your secrets, my secret brethren.

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