Sundays are for laughing at your sat nav’s American voiceover lady when, as you’re visiting Northamptonshire for the first time, she pronounces Towcester as toaster. That can’t be how it’s said, you snort, surely everyone from there would have to follow-up revealing their hometown by insisting they weren’t born in a bread slot. Silly sat nav, get out of here! You then end up at a racing circuit. Adrian Edmondson is chatting to a local radio host over the tannoy. The host pronounces it toaster. You ask a passerby. They pronounce it toaster. You wonder if your sat nav wife will take you back.
You set about cobbling together some good writings as a make-good gift to your robotic travel companion. The first that strikes you is by Ashley Schofield for Unwinnable. It looks at Disco Elysium, an RPG you continue to love despite all the weird and often negative happenings that’ve followed its release, from the point of view of a trans person reshaping their identity. It’s an important line of thought to consider, especially given the effects recent events have had on trans folks’ ongoing struggle to be granted the basic rights they deserve.
It’s real. After years, decades even, of believing there is something fundamentally wrong with him, Harrier has reached breaking point. It’s the final straw for his sanity. And yet, someone can finally see what he sees. All this time, you were just waiting for someone who could understand. Someone who knows you didn’t ask to be born like this. Someone who knows you’re just trying to make it right. You’re not crazy. You’re just different. You have a vast soul. This life is all you have, but it’s still something. You have to keep going.
Pawing through wordly piles once more, you run across a note. It’s from someone called Niwde. “Psst, I know she’s upset and that you’ve recently been out of the wordly realm,” it reads. “So, these might help.” Well, that’s awfully kind of you, Niwde, let’s see what they are. The first is a conversation between Liz Ryerson and writer Vicky Osterweil about the latter’s book on Disney’s modus operandi taking over the world, including the video gamisphere.
Both Disney and Nintendo achieve a certain cultural dominance by being slightly better than the competition and really aestheticising it, making it cute and touching on nostalgia. One of the arguments of the book is that this nostalgic IP management now has a total monopoly on culture, and it’s had disastrous effects. All competitors now play by the Disney rulebook. The week after Barbie had its huge opening, Mattel announced they were opening an amusement park in Arizona.
That was an engaging read, Niwde, you think. What was the other thing you had for me? Oh, it’s Matteo Lupetti, writing for The Bunker about video games and their complex relationship with war.
Machinima — films made within videogames — have also often critically addressed the representation of war in the medium. Deviation (Jon Griggs, 2006), the first film of this kind to premiere at a major festival (the Tribeca Film Festival), was shot in Counter-Strike (Valve, Sierra Studios, 2000), a game similar to America’s Army. A virtual soldier becomes aware of his futile cycle of deaths and resurrections, but cannot convince his comrades to abandon combat and orders. Because in war games “desertion cannot be played,” says the voiceover in another machinima, How to Disappear – Deserting Battlefield (2020), in which the collective Total Refusal starts from yet another shooter, Battlefield 5 (Electronic Arts, 2015), to tell the story of desertion and disobedience, and their absence from military videogames. But perhaps the point is that “war cannot be played,” as the voiceover suggests. “By definition, a game is played voluntarily – and for most of the participants, there is nothing voluntary about war in the real world.
Right, those were great Niwde, but I need to give this more of a personal touch, so that the sat nav lady knows it’s me that’s regretting my toaster-related behaviour, you think. Delving into the pool of learnings and also 30-second shorts of buses being driven over cliffs in BeamNG.drive that is YouTube, you find the first three parts of a documentary. It’s by Secret Base’s Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein, and sees the pair delve into the history of the first time certain game final scores were achieved in American Football. The practice of spotting one of these scores occuring they have dubbed Scorigami. Also, a team named after a tractor company once played in the NFL.
On October 17th, 1920, the Chicago Cardinals, who we know today as the Arizona Cardinals, hosted Moline Universal Tractors, named after the tractor manufacturer who promised to sponsor them. And what they really meant was that the fellas down at the plant would pass around the coffee can and send them whatever donations they could rustle up, which turned out to be nothing. In response, the team quickly tried to change its name to Moline Athletics, but it didn’t quite stick. The original name was what ended up in the record books, and the Moline Universal Tractor Company will receive free advertising until the end of time.
You top things off with some amusing musings on purchases made during a trip to Japan by Rewinder’s Lexi Luddy and this week’s music, which is Hades 2’s bangin’ soundtrack.
You hope it’ll win the sat nav back. Inside, you wonder if your travel-based marriage might already be toast.
