Sundays are for wondering why the neighbour’s cat is mad at you. I thought we were getting along well – I’ve been letting her into the block regularly, and we have a little ritual where she runs partway up the stairs, and I do Mousey Fingers through the bannister. We had a little ritual, anyway. The last few times, she’s hissed at me and run away. “Ho ho, you goofball,” I say, as my heart quietly implodes. “Cats are so weird,” I chuckle, tears dripping from my chin, as I hurry into my flat.
This week has been a one-two punch of sorrowful bullshit in games journalism. Firstly, a number of people have lost their jobs at our partners-in-Ziff Eurogamer, including Alex Donaldson, Tom Orry, and the amazing EG video team who kept so many people smiling during the Covid lockdowns. Eurogamer is probably the website that got me into videogame journalism – I started out with a FFXII write-up for their reader reviews section – and it’s bleak to see the site so depleted. Best of luck to the people leaving, and to the many fine critics and reporters who remain.
Not all the departing staff have spoken publicly about their future movements, but you can still find Alex over at the excellent RPGsite, while video producer Ian Higton remains fully armed and operational over at Platform32. Here’s EG’s latest What We’ve Been Playing, which includes a goodbye post from Orry.
22 years (or something like that – to be honest, I’ve lost track of where it all began). This career is all I ever wanted to do, ever since I realised at a young age that the people who made Mean Machines magazine were being paid to do that. It was a dream. Not one my old school headmaster was that keen on my pursuing, obviously; his stern words attempted to push me (a working class boy who happened to be lucky enough to thrive at school) into a safe career in computing. So I did as I was told.
That’s your first punch of bullshit. In other news, the company currently in charge of Videogamer – previously the home of Alice Bell, Chris Bratt and Matt Lees, among other greats – have taken to using generative AI to create fake writers. Here’s the Press Gazette’s Rob Waugh with a full write-up. I’ve reached out to Clickout Media myself to ask about the AI writer allegations, and whether they’re worried about e.g. being taken to court for some kind of fraud. I am just a simple country lawyer, y’honor, but I feel like inventing writers wholecloth so that you can publish what are characterised as a human being’s impressions of a thing other human beings may then buy would be some kind of fraud?
For the LRB, James Butler writes about the fall of UK politician Peter Mandelson, with some follow-through on the wider impact of the release of Epstein’s private correspondence.
Febrile psychosexual conspiracy theory and black-pilled nihilism will find much to feed on in the Epstein files; its electoral results may be catastrophic. Nostalgia for better historical elites can be potently articulated in nationalist, isolationist terms, though it is mostly fantasy. The politics of virtue also invites hypocrisy and cant, sporadic orgies of denunciation and intellectual conformity. Few people, least of all those of us in easily targeted sexual minorities, would welcome a new crop of Savonarolas. Yet it is impossible to imagine a real resolution that does not challenge some of the knee-jerk scepticism that greets any talk of political virtue.
Analgesic’s Melos Han-Tani has written a blog post about exploration in Angeline Era, considering the usefulness of avoiding a sense of “completion”.
I’m not a huge fan of detailedly planning a day out, or e.g. the way that many Japanese parks/museums motivate guests to see everything through the accursed “Stamp Rally” rather than just walking around the damn thing. Likewise, I don’t really like it when exploring in games is overly motivated by something that, when found, “checks off” the place in the player’s mind as being irrelevant afterwards.
Having a personal philosophy necessarily means taking a stance against other players’ views of games. I’ve read plenty of Angeline Era reviews complaining that levels feel “unfinished”, “incomplete”, or saying “there’s nothing there”. Should I change the game by adding more treasures, rewards, NPCs spelling every area out, or giving them checklists to make sure they’ve had the 100% Angeline Era Experience? I think this would border on ridiculous. And yet, it is kind of the way that “Exploration” tends to be done nowadays. I think it’s boring though. Perhaps games are guilty in making people feel like explorers while really just churning through guided content, the player, fearing uncertainty.
Over at Longreads, Compulsion Games scribe and The Nation music critic Bijan Stephen writes about the afterlife of a Youtube upload of a Donkey Kong Country 2 track that became a “checkpoint” for thousands of fellow travellers.
Maybe all the video game imagery put commenters in a certain mindset. They began to make jokes about being the main character of, well, life. As one commenter explained to another, “Legends say, if you find this video in your recommended, you are truly a main character in your world. Not an NPC [non-player character]. Thus, this is a place to write a ‘checkpoint’ to ‘save your game.’” And people started posting—at first ironically, and then with total sincerity. Which is how Taia’s first video became the internet checkpoint.
I’ll close with a shout-out for Critical Distance, the site that curates and preserves games criticism. They’re having a funding drive in a bid to balance the books. Amongst other pressures, they’ve had to spend a lot of the past year fighting off generative AI crawlers who drive up their hosting and processing costs (RPS have had to fight off a few sizeable bot waves ourselves). Consider throwing them some pennies.
Searching for music appropriate to this week’s games journalism happenings, I find myself thumping and stamping along to the exquisite ham of Woodkid’s Iron. You might prefer to check out Saint Elizabeth, the new album from Problem Attic developer Liz Ryerson.
