The Sunday Papers

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The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

Sundays are for stumbling upon a ruined church, squirrelled away among the hawthorns behind a currently active church in the neighbourhood. I was flabbergasted – I've walked past that churchyard a thousand times without noticing. In this case, I just happened to take a different route around the cemetery. The old church is roofless and barred, but I managed to thrust my phone through a grill and take pictures of a peaked mausoleum, squat in the middle of the transept crossing, together with the coruscating beehive thumbed into the arch of one window. Magic. Anyway, here are some articles about mostly videogames.

Dr Emily Price writes about how Titanium Court's humour keeps you skating off its depths, in a spoiler-filled read. I still haven't played this, but I wonder if dismantling or exceeding the sincerity/insincerity binary is in some way, part of the game's agenda.

I don’t mean to suggest this distance was accidental or subconscious. In fact, it seems intentional. But the game’s humorous remove often came across as defensive, as though through shifting between seriousness and humor, the game was trying to control my experience, keep me happy, or maybe keep me away from something vulnerable. I can understand that, or at least the last part. But if you’re worried about getting too real, then why be vulnerable at all? I know this game can be sincere. That sincerity pops out from time to time. But it’s only given a moment; then it’s time for a joke.

Stephen Gillmurphy has a few characteristically skull-opening "mere gripes" that I think chime with some of Emily's thinking above.

consciousness is not reformist, is not satisfied by the compromises and half-measures we might call reasonable, the most we can expect. we think we've made our peace with limitations, settle down to live our lives inside some little patch of carved off autonomy, and then wonder why we still find ourselves banging our elbows into the walls. there's a tendency to look at previous generations and say, let's not go crazy. we just want what they had: the steady job, home ownership - the other stuff, the grand abstractions, we can drop, if we have these. and then we go back to inhabiting a world already poisonous with the rage and denial of those same generations, the intricate systems of punishment and delusion they constructed in the effort to convince themselves that the trade off they'd made against the possibility of something better had been worthwhile. old machinery still hammering away, minus whatever it was constructed to protect. is all we ask for to inherit the machine?

Kerry Brunskill writes about "perhaps the ultimate 'girl' game", Angelique Special 2, "the prettiest nightmare I've ever had".

Special 2 makes a real effort to avoid getting bogged down in traditional game-y language and presentation as much as possible, the manual—ah, I mean “Queen Candidate Guidelines”—choosing to open with a series of gorgeous full colour spreads explaining the setting (the queen of the universe is going to put two queen candidates the test to find her successor, but nobody knows why), the information delivered as if I’m hearing the cast discuss it amongst themselves. The rest of the 60 page book carries on in a similar manner, advice often presented in a more conversational way—in fact much of what I learn comes direct from the cast themselves, via their individual interviews. Despite appearances I’d actually say it’s a more intense, “hardcore”, way of going about it. There’s a presumption that the kind of person who plays Angelique is curious and thorough, that I’ll read through the entire thing in an alert and inquisitive manner and extract the information I need myself, without needing it all to be parcelled up into explicitly instructional “If here, do this” chunks.

Juliet Jacques writes about trans segregation becoming UK law in the form of the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s new code of practice on ‘single-sex spaces’.

For younger trans people reading this: don’t despair and don’t give up, but don’t feel you need to devote every waking hour to combatting this legislation in particular. One way to respond to people motivated by hatred is to outlive them: not just in the sense of surviving beyond them, as you likely will because British transphobia is driven partly by late middle-aged people who despise the young and can’t admit how far they’ve moved to the right, but also in having more vibrant, creative and exciting lives. At a demo last Saturday, I quoted writer Toni Morrison’s dictum about how racism wastes your time, and how this code is designed to suck all your energy into opposing it. People do need to fight it, of course, and will have to get their hands dirty by taking that fight back into mainstream media spaces that have been doing us harm and trying to change their editorial lines where possible. But you can circumvent tiresome arguments whose terms are set by our appalling billionaire-owned media by making art or music, writing, performing, or just existing – ultimately, that will win hearts and minds as much, if not more than getting bogged down in arguments with bad faith actors. 

I'm late to it, but Tom Burgis has a really good investigation of crypto fanboi Nigel Farage's receipt of millions from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. It was published prior to the UK's recent local elections, in which Farage's Reform party made serious gains, and also makes connections to the Trump family's embrace of crypto. There has been more reporting about Harborne since.

Harborne does not give interviews. His lawyers at the London reputation-management firm Schillings said he would not “reward” me for my prior coverage by granting one. “Our client has not sought to influence, nor has he influenced, any politician to support cryptocurrencies or any other of his business interests,” they wrote. “The prime ministers and senior politicians to whom you refer are fully capable of making their own informed decisions on matters such as cryptocurrencies.”

Harborne does appear to believe that – on other occasions – he who pays the piper calls the tune. The lawyers said his sole on-record response to my questions was a line from the media critic Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” (The inference: my employer would not want me to treat him fairly.)

As May's unseasonal heat gives way to drizzle, the mind turns once more with sorrow to Jank.cool, the site founded by a bunch of second-rate Lucifers who fell from the light of Rock Paper Shotgun and are now reduced to fomenting controversies about, in this case, whether cats are better than dogs. Yes, it's that absolute creature Brendy, trying his luck with a Versus format article in this, the year 2026. What next, pivoting to video? Do not cry for him. Instead, please Become Animal.

It is a conflict that has raged for as long as humanity has had a gristly bit of mammoth salami they did not want to eat. Who will get the scraps: man's best friend, or best frenemy? One is known for boundless enthusiasm, strength, loyalty, and also for going "bee-woop-dee-boop" while battering gasmasked dorks. The other is known for putting small dead rodents in your slippers, and rescuing an entire city of robots from an endless night. This will be a tragic fight, because in another world, at another time, Dog and Cat would have been inseparable pals. But not here and not now. This is Dog from Half-Life 2 versus the Cat from Stray. It's now or it is never now. Select your character!

Today's music is either Creedence Clearwater Revival running through the jungle or Judy and Mary's 90s pop number Sobakasu, which you might remember from Rurouni Kenshin. I hope this weekend finds you well. Please let me know if you discover anything interesting in a churchyard.