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 walking past a minivan full of Toy Story merchandise with purple, green and white livery and knowing, knowing in your marrow that the owner has named it "Bus Lightyear". These are uncertain times, but any universe capable of materialising the concept of "Bus Lightyear" can't be entirely beyond redemption. Anyway, here's some stuff I've read this week.

Khee Hoon Chan writes for Rascal about CrypticCrafter's boardgame adaptation of horror videogame Inscryption (beware some spoilers for the latter, mostly in the last few paragraphs of the piece).

CrypticCrafter’s resplendent recreation of Inscryption is only the most recent addition to an ongoing phenomenon. Since the release of the digital deckbuilding game five years ago, a community of fans has been replicating big chunks of it in real life, from printing the cards and totems used in the eponymous roguelike deckbuilder, to crafting the masks worn by its sinister game master, Leshy. One creator even forced players to sacrifice their cards by feeding them to an altar — essentially a paper shredder hidden in a box. Unlike many of these recreations, Hockridge wanted to create a version that’s “playable by two people, and as fair and balanced as possible”. This feat wasn’t as straightforward as playing the version of Inscryption portrayed in the video game. “It's designed asymmetrically where Leshy has the advantage, and you almost have to break the game to win,” Hockridge explained. “That doesn't work in a two player game.” Maintaining this sense of outwitting a more advantaged player, but still keeping the game playable and fair for everyone, proved a significant hurdle. 

Jeffrey Arlo Brown writes for the Baffler about the obscenely well-heeled buying orchestras so they can fulfil their dreams of being composers, putting this in the context of patronage in other eras.

The musical adventuring of socialite-turned-soprano Florence Foster Jenkins and financial-publisher-turned-conductor Gilbert Kaplan and conductor-turned-Valium-baron Paul Sacher show that rich people never really lost their desire to prove themselves in the musical realm. But the last decade or so has seen a striking rise in pay-to-play arrangements, a situation that recalls the days when orchestras belonged to princes. These experiences allow people with money but little musical ability to roleplay composer and conductor—for a price. This development flows naturally from this era’s extreme inequality as well as classical music’s precarious state, even in such historically generous countries as Germany. It risks reshaping the art itself to align with the whims of wealthy dilettantes.

For Typebar Magazine, Erik Hane writes about how the layered worlds of Magic: The Gathering have been colonised and distorted by licensed crossover cards, comparing the dominance of the fan-made "Commander" format to the commercialisation of fan fiction in book publishing.

The stewards of Magic have responded to this surge in the same way book publishers did: they’ve tried to feed a beast that will never be sated. As a result, card design has spiraled ever outward in both art and mechanics. Maybe the cards should have Marvel superheroes on them; if they’re fans of one thing, they’re probably fans of another thing too, right? Or Final Fantasy, or Lord of the Rings, or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, or Avatar: The Last Airbender. The brand-collaboration possibilities are infinite once you’re for sale and open to suggestion. Better make sure too that the cards are “fun” enough for Commander—powerful abilities on the most recognizable figures in order to produce splashy, satisfying interactions for people with no interest in Magic’s original concept. (One imperfect but still useful way to track this metric is a simple count of how many words appear on the cards. Paragraph-long descriptions of effects set in tiny font now replace the clean keywords and short phrases that appeared on cards from a cycle ago.) And if those overpowered cards with a different company’s characters on them affect a game of Standard Magic, well, that’s a drop in the bucket when the line is otherwise going up.

Astrid Anne Rose slices up Marathon's narrative setting and aesthetics for Bullet Points Monthly. The site's other pieces on Bungie's latest FPS are also excellent. I've still not played more than 45 minutes, because I can't be doing with looter shooters at the moment, but writing like this makes me want to go back.

The runner is a ragpicker. She scavenges through the abandoned algae farms of New Cascadia, through terraformers and environmental research zones, and extracts what she can carry. "Industrial magic," in Baudelaire's words, renews the refuse. But history rubs off on her. There is a transference, a two-way exchange. Benjamin says the use of an object leaves a trace; the object in turn leaves a trace on the "physiognomy" of its environs. The trace is an imprint, a remnant, a ping on a radar readout. Any single weapon in Marathon can only be looted four times. After that, it dissolves into currency. This "trace status" is like a slow-acting acid, like the decay eating away at the runner's consciousness. All goods on Tau Ceti are damaged goods.

Some sadder news: as reported by Kotaku, the A.V. Club have effectively washed their hands of videogame criticism by laying off veteran editor Garrett Martin and associate editor Elijah Gonzalez, both of whom previously worked on Endless Mode, the short-lived vertical spun out from Paste Games last year. Overseen by Martin since 2011, Paste Games was a haven for considered longform criticism and reporting, hosting such amazing editors and writers as Holly Green, Maddy Myers and Dia Lacina. Critical Distance have started a Bluesky thread of favourite Paste/Endless Mode features. It's not a recent contribution, but let me pick out Emily Price's review of Saltsea Chronicles.

It chooses not to structure post-Flood Saltsea as a perfect utopia, instead noting repeatedly and often the ways it fails. In my time with the game this was what impressed me the most: its commitment to realistically presenting the challenges that would be present in a society that’s nominally about fairness and mutual input. People get greedy and claim power anyway, people leverage non-hierarchy to be in control. And less maliciously, people are forced into a controlling role despite their wishes, because of other people’s expectations and desires.

The pot-stirring barrel-scrapers of Jank dot poo are at it again. This time it's Graham waxing lyrical about why Peter Molyneux is secretly Beyonce, or words to that effect. Graham! Please try to have some dignity.

You can't convince people to like you, but you can embrace your role within culture fully - and there's nothing wrong, in pop music, with playing the villain, the cad, the preacher. Think of Robbie Williams, who has turned being annoying into a cornerstone of his identity. (And what better a game developer to be played by a monkey in a movie biopic than Molyneux? Or perhaps a cow.)

(The cow line makes sense in context, and/or if you've played Black & White.)

Music this week is Pink Floyd's Have a Cigar. Did we tell you the name of the game, boy? We call it riding the Gravy Train Simulator Classic.