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 making and freezing a bunch of sandwiches so I can later toast them at my leisure. Not sure why, just fancied becoming the sort of person with a bountiful hoard of sandwiches. Before I get seriously locked in to some rhythmic bread slapping, here’s some writing I personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)

"Frostpunk 2 set off a personal and ideological storm in my head", writes Andrei Pechalin for Eurogamer.

It reminds me of an exchange between Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Varlam Shalamov, survivors and chroniclers of USSR's brutal Gulag prison system. Solzhenitsyn's best known character, the prisoner Ivan Denisovich, is portrayed carrying his own spoon around a Gulag that had a resident cat. Shalamov, who did hard labour in Kolyma in temperatures below minus 50 degrees Celsius, complained to Solzhenitsyn that this was unrealistic: Gulag food was much too watery to require spoons - and it is difficult to believe that the cat would have survived the hunger of the prisoners.
There is something absurd about their exchange. An argument over who portrayed the more authentic Gulag experience, when both men survived one of the most oppressive penal regimes in history, feels a little like two war veterans comparing scars when both have lost limbs. But it only seems absurd because it is so far outside my typical frame of reference. By analogy, Frostpunk made it easy to introduce and tolerate extreme measures because it often put me in situations for which my usual moral system has no analogue.

This is a slightly older piece I found because Austin Walker Xittered it. "Pokémon Is all about reading," writes Joseph Earl Thomas for The Paris Review.

The Pokémon VGC regionals in Charlotte, North Carolina, are notorious for attracting some of the best players and biggest crowds, so when you walk into the Charlotte Convention Center there’s a shoulder-to-shoulder clash of subcultural sycophants and lookie-loos and handshakes and hugs and awkward mustiness and ashy lips and great hair and gold frames and ill-fitting blouses and incredible cosplay fits and unexpected intimacy and accidental resistance to normativity collapsing space in the otherwise stale corporate enclosure

"The Crush House wanted me to make a steamy reality show, but I got tired of being told to film butts and made a nature documentary instead," writes Emily Price for PC Gamer.

Something I knew when I watched reality TV, but didn't fully appreciate until I played The Crush House, was how much a reality show is just a collection of choices. Even when I removed myself from the pressure of manufacturing events, I still wanted to play God with the cast, who were (via my documentary style) being removed from the spotlight they asked for. Although the game let me film whatever I wanted, I couldn't break out from this mindset: like my audiences, I made the mistake of thinking I knew what other people needed better than they knew themselves. Whether you lean into or away from audience satisfaction, in other words, The Crush House will catch you acting like a real-life producer.

Here’s Elster from Signalis doing the Alan Wake 2 dance. This link is cursed, be careful. Here’s a piece about the loss of the .io domain and the geopolitics involved - Itch sounds like it'll be fine, by the way. Music this week is Alien Isolation x Lofi Girl. Have a great weekend!