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 somehow still not quite fully recovering from the body clock-winding mishap that was staying up for The Game Awards. Look, central nervous system, how much sleep do you fucking want? Remember how we’d stay up past 1am playing Left 4 Dead with strangers from the Muse messageboard then rise for an early Sainsbury’s shift with zero ill effects? You used to be cool.

Also cool: reading. To whit, here are some words-following-words highlights from the last few days.

One of the more interesting – or, at, least unusual – TGS reveals was Coven of the Chicken Foot, a puzzle adventure where you play an elderly witch trying to coax a woolly monster into helping her traverse a forest. It’s in development at Wildflower Interactive, a studio founded by The Last of Us and Uncharted 4 director Bruce Straley, who’s spoken to Polygon’s Giovanni Colantonio about the differences between working on this and his prior blockbusters.

"I’m scared shitless!" he says. "There’s a lot riding on this for me. Call it ego, reputation, legacy bullshit, whatever it is, but the fact that every day we show up and there’s something new that makes us laugh and you get excited, I just can’t wait for people to play this. It’s something unique that’s going to last the test of time. It’s not something that you need to do a remaster of in the next four years because the tech has already outgrown it."

Not quite from this past week, but: what makes a good parry? Khee Hoon Chan investigates for Game Developer.

"A good parry asks players to engage in a sort of counter-positioning. Instead of standing in safe spaces to avoid enemy attacks, they want to figure out the space an enemy controls with their attack and stand inside of it," Safford said. "The worst kind of parry is one that's too good. If everything in a game is reliably parriable, the space-and-time elements of a combat system start to break down. Positioning no longer matters, because there is no incentive to position yourself outside of an enemy's attack range."

Mobile games executive Christian Lövstedt posted an open letter on his LinkedIn – here’s a summary by GI.biz if you can’t access it – accusing the games industry of overlooking the field, and/or typecasting mobile games as loveless gacha moneyspinners. It’s passionately and, I think, earnestly argued, though I’m not sure the letter gives enough consideration to games (or, rather, business models) that genuinely are tuned for loveless moneyspinning.

Awards and media shape the narrative of what counts as culturally or creatively valuable. When mobile is excluded, we send a message to developers, investors, and publishers that mobile is not a place for ambition or artistry. That narrative influences hiring, funding, and who gets the spotlight on stage.

In non-games, here’s A.A. Dowd for The American Prospect on – and I love this headline to bits, so am just going to reprint it verbatim – The Hit Hollywood Didn’t Want.

Of course, Coogler isn’t just vaguely gesturing toward the inequities of a country built on them. Sinners is after something more specific about how white America covets and exploits Black art. What are the vampires, really, but relentless culture vultures, like the musicians and label honchos who absorbed the sounds of the blues, homogenizing it for a white audience? Coogler’s personal touch on this material is plain enough in the deep love for music running through its plump veins. More than that, though, Sinners announces itself as an allegory of Black artists fighting for ownership—of their work, of their spaces, of their futures. It’s a resonant topic for a filmmaker still navigating the challenges of making big-studio art (sometimes for Disney, no less) without surrendering your soul.

Sticking with films, Dude, Where’s My Car? screenwriter Phil Stark looks back upon his creation and considers – for The Hollywood Reporter – how poorly it’s aged.

But comedy has changed dramatically in the past quarter century. This became apparent to me upon a recent DWMC rewatch, when I was struck by just how much I cringed at the humor. And it wasn’t just because I was watching it with my kids, for whom I am the ultimate source of cringe. What made me cringe is how, 25 years later, some of the comedy feels so dated, even offensive. Sure, the tone is light and silly and the humor comes largely from the charming and stone-y performances of Ashton and Seann. But there is plenty of humor that plays at the expense of transgender people, ethnic minorities, women, gay men, religious cults and Fabio. Did it feel this cringey 25 years ago? I don’t think so. The humor seemed appropriate at the time. But then again, so did Matchbox Twenty.

Music this week is Yorkshire rock band Marmozets, or as I call them when I’m suffering brain fog – definitely not a latent result of all those L4D sessions – The Can You Keep it ToGETH-A-AH Band. Have a good Sunday.