The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for asking for forgiveness, since I missed Sunday Papers entirely last weekend. Alas, I was stricken by a deep malaise, but I return now with renewed vigour and another roundup of links to good writing from across the web. Some of the good writing is even about games this time.

For the LA Review Of Books, Celine Nguyen reviewed Building SimCity, Chaim Gingold’s book about the creation of SimCity.

During the 1980s, while city-building simulations like SimCity were being developed, a movement called New Urbanism coalesced to address problems of affordability, walkability, and transit access. New Urbanists recognized that inadequate transit networks affected how people commuted and how often they saw loved ones. Historic zoning regulations might, years later, saddle city residents with unaffordable rent and impoverished social lives. Most of SimCity’s players live in a world shaped by other people’s decisions. What happens, then, if an urban planning enthusiast isn’t satisfied with changing the world within a game? What could go right—or wrong—when they try to create their utopia in real life?

I enjoyed Anna Merlan’s obituary of the horny profile, the now mostly dormant form of magazine journalism in which a (typically male) journalist tied themselves in knots while trying to describe a woman. There are great, deranged quotes in this, such as this from a profile of Jessica Simpson in 2008:

“Blond hair the way God meant, blond like Clorox sunshine. A caviar body, if you like your caviar lacquered in barbecue sauce. Breasts like plucked guinea hens, undercooked and overstuffed. And those legs, like those of every coed in every early-80s corduroy skirt, waving across the quad at the guy just behind you. Cheerleader legs. Jackknifing legs that split the air like seesaws.”

Designer Joey Schutz wrote about addiction and flow state in game design, and what is lost when video games are concerned solely with compulsion loops and dopamine rewards.

In Natasha Schüll’s fantastically rigorous examination of casino games, Addiction by Design, she investigates the nature of gambling games and the dark power they hold over us. One of the first things she dispels is the idea that gamblers are playing for money – early in the book she writes that they’re not playing to win, but rather “to keep playing – to stay in that machine zone where nothing else matters.” One player explains that if she does win at a slot machine, whatever rush she may feel derives not from monetary payouts, but from the ability to keep playing. It is all in service of “the machine zone,” which one person describes “like being in the eye of a storm…You aren’t really there – you’re with the machine and that’s all you’re with.”

Food critic Jay Rayner has been writing a column for The Guardian for 15 years. It ended last week and he wrote a final entry about what he’s learned.

Brown foods and messy foods are the best foods, and picnics are a nightmare. Buffets are where good taste goes to die. Most dishes can be improved with the addition of bacon.

Phil Spencer has been out in the world, talking about the potential for AI to help with game preservation by optimising the original games “for any device”. Archaeologist Florence Smith Nicholls writes about how game preservation is about not just marketable output, but about preserving the cultural and social history of games and their players, in the excellently titled, “You don’t see me at the club? Well I don’t see you in the 2006 MMO Wurm Online”.

If you peruse the Nature article that Phil Spencer’s announcement is based on, you’ll notice an interesting detail: it does not mention game preservation. At all. The original research was not designed with that purpose in mind. This is why it does not consider the cultural context and idiosyncrasies of the data that the model is trained on in any depth. The paper states that the player data from Bleeding Edge was recorded between September 2020 and October 2022. SteamDB shows that monthly player count during this window peaked at only 32 people.

Nicholls references the “go-along interview” as a method of game preservation, and a paper on the subject (PDF) she co-authored with occasional RPS contributor Michael Cook is also worth reading. I was of course pleased to see that it cites Brendy’s old Ridealong column, and specifically The Last King Of Wurm Online. One of my favourite articles we’ve ever published.

Keeping with the game preservation theme, Stephen Totilo recently wrote in his newsletter about an ongoing lawsuit brought by a science fiction author against Bungie regarding the plot of Destiny 2. Since much of Destiny 2’s story missions have been ‘vaulted’ by Bungie and are no longer playable, lawyers in the case had to file ten-hour-long fanmade YouTube lore videos to make their case.

Music this week is Party Fears Two by The Associates, a great bit of ’80s pop pomp, and on the opposite side of the same emo coin, ’90s alt-rock Saturday Saviour by Failure. As always, all Sunday Papers music picks are available as a YouTube playlist.