The Sunday Papers

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

While following a peculiar trail of silver and saffron leaves around the largest roots of the Treehouse, you come across a hexagonal wooden door lying half-hidden among ivy and moss. Scraping away the dirt, you discover a faint, absurd engraving of a newspaper. What mystery is here? You turn the brass knob – strange, it is warm! – and the engraving of the newspaper flutters. The pages turn faster and faster, emitting a howling gale that bowls you head over foot. When you pick yourself up, you are inside a vast attic full of books and bricabrac, lit from one side by windows that offer no view of the outside world – just light and mist.

Tarnation! You have been lured into the eternal prison of Sunday Afternoon. Fortunately, there are several ways to escape. Each of the arcane objects before you is secretly a portal, transporting you to another site of arcane activity, in a bizarre web of diversions that cannot possibly reflect the hand of a human curator. Which will you choose?

As you step forward, your toe nudges an ornamental scroll. It growls and wriggles like a panicking caterpillar, scooting away under a table. Before you lose sight of it, you discern the title and subject of the text – it's an essay by Kyle Tam about the yokai of Promised Mascot Agency.

Each country has  folkloric creatures - faeries, aswangs, dokkaebi, and aos sídhe. Japan has yokai. But when the creatures of yesteryear no longer scare, they must find a place in the world — they are commodified and transformed into more presentable, advertisement-friendly versions of themselves. In the modern day, yokai have survived through reinterpretation and repackaging. They are prominent in popular media as creatures of horror and mirth, used to bring a touch of the extraordinary to everyday life. But yokai are more than just spirits who go bump in the night. They represent the old ways of Japan, the place where the supernatural lives side by side with the mundane. In Promise Mascot Agency, Japan’s yokai have been reimagined as mascots. Not underpaid and heatstroke-prone humans in suits, but walking, talking, flesh and blood - or, in some cases, tofu and whipped cream – mascots.

Deep in a drawer, you discover a sour-smelling binder full of extracts from an ancient and all but indecipherable dispute over the discovery of "generative AI" in something called "Big Walk". The stakes are long-buried, but many of the individual pieces of writing are lively. Here is Bruno Diaz noting in passing that "one of the harms of the 'AI' political project is the propaganda machine dedicated to making you feel stupid and helpless." Here is a professorial interjection from Brendan Keogh calling on the warring parties to recognise when "critiques of generative AI are actually just deflected critiques of the capitalist relations of technology and labour". Here is Mike Cook arguing that "what's happening is not unusual, it's not extreme, it's not unfair and it's not a 'public flogging'." Here is a ticker tape message from Hannah Nicklin observing that "if your radical position doesn’t have room for transformation it will not be safe until it contains just you".

A footnote in the same dusty sheaf of papers points you towards another work from Mike Cook in a different drawer. This one consists of neon slides, slotted into an antique View-Master, and explores a comparison between procedural generation and street photography.

Peering at the weirdly white and opaque windowpanes, you realise there are intricate equations traced in the condensation. It appears to be a post-mortem for a "post-cosy" game called Danchi Days, in which developer Melos Han-Tani discusses wishlist conversion rates and the problem of not fitting neatly into any recognisable genre.

Personally, I think it’s kind of a blow to storytelling and games in general if you can’t use certain aesthetics for storytelling. Like, there is a game visual aesthetic for ‘philosophically and emotionally deep’ (it’s darker, featuring brooding or distant-looking characters, certain ways of writing and constructing sentences), but I always think that if we really want to push game stories we have to move away from signalling the whole theme of the game through the aesthetic alone. Of course, as designers and writers we can do that, and succeed artistically, but that’s also just not a method that works well with marketing and mass audiences.

A snowglobe stands on a mantelpiece, the flakes still orbiting a miniature washtub as though the object had been recently shaken, even though the chamber has clearly been abandoned for decades. You put it to your ear, anticipating the faint jingle of Xmas bells. Instead, you are almost deafened by a screeching guitar chord. Here is Erin Keane to explain.

Of all the childhood Christmas movies I grew up watching in the late 1970s through early 1990s, my all-time favorite is the 1977 HBO special Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas. And of all the songs the Jim Henson and Frank Oz puppets sing in this musical, the standout track is a heavy, glam-psychedelic banger played by teenage critters decked out in full rock star regalia, blowing the minds of one small town on Christmas Eve: “Riverbottom Nightmare Band,” written and performed by The Nightmare, a gang of toughs from a bad neighborhood who nobody expected would walk away with the Christmas talent contest grand prize.

Is there any mention of Christmas in this self-referential tune? No. And yet I submit for the record—to the Sirius XM DJs, the playlist engineers, Mariah Carey or Darlene Love or whoever gets the last word on what is and is not a Christmas song—that “Riverbottom Nightmare Band,” Paul Williams’ anthem of adolescent alienation that is also an undercover ode to second chances and the beauty of artistic creation, be given full consideration as a classic of the genre.

Next to the snowglobe on the mantelpiece, there's a souvenir shop conch shell, polished to a high sheen. You put that to your ear, hoping to catch the soothing shuffle of surf on shingle, and a disembodied voice tells you to piss off. Tim Sniffen has some thoughts about gentrification, and why only he should be allowed to do it.

Hey, stranger. I couldn’t help but notice you walking along the path of crushed oyster shells by the shore, gazing wistfully at the lighthouse, and I wondered if we could chat for a second. Is there a chance you’re thinking of leaving city life behind to reinvent yourself in this misty hidden gem of a town?

Yeah, I thought so. That is such a charming instinct, and I so want that to happen for you, except I did it six months ago.

You heard me. Harbor Cove is mine.

Again, one of these mystic artefacts hides the key to your release from the suffocating stillness of Sunday Afternoon. Which will you choose? Or have you, perhaps, brought a sorcerous teleportation device of your own? Please share. Here is Joanna Newsom's Cosmia to help you think.