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 - well, very early Sunday mornings - are for watching a whole queue of hungry wild animals pass your kitchen window, because a neighbour has decided to leave a bollard-sized catfood dispenser outside the block entrance while they're away on holiday. I'm pretty sure the neighbour's cat wouldn't eat from the dispenser even if there wasn't a badger wedged eagerly inside it. She's an aloof and disdainful creature, who hates going near the front door because that's where those stinky humans come from.

Will I try to feed the poor moggy, denied her dinner by a bunch of Farthing Wood rejects? No I will not, because I'm too busy reading articles about videogames, and things that are vaguely in the orbit of videogames. Here are a few of those articles. Look, please stop fretting about the cat. She's perfectly plump and glossy, whereas that badger looks like he hasn't had a square meal since August.

Chloe Mashiter writes about the labyrinthine question of safety protocols when playing a live-action role-playing game inside another live-action role-playing game.

The best place to start is how The Castle works: set in contemporary England, it is focused on a group of people who live as if they are a medieval court. Every player therefore has a ‘persona’ – a figure at the court – and a ‘character’ – the modern-day individual who is pretending to be that ‘persona’. (I’ll continue to use this language from the game to help distinguish between the two, with ‘player’ meaning the actual real-life person participating in the larp.)

So, as a player, you’re pretending to be someone (the character) who is in turn pretending to be someone (the persona).

It is entirely possible for you as a player to play in a way that’s safe, respectful, conscientious and suchlike, whilst your character is playing in an unsafe, abusive, exploitative, manipulative way. It is also entirely possible for The Castle as a game to be (comparatively) safe, whilst the charade (the in-world name for the pretence of the medieval court) is not.

For Rascal, Thomas Manuel writes about the 30-60 player game of Band of Blades that spanned an entire school, discussing how troupe play and the sharing of characters may become a kind of institution-building, with a closing aside on Covid and Game of Thrones.

By asking you to refract every step of that experience through dozens of different view points and to empathize with them all to some degree, it prompts a story that is full of people who can’t be classified into good and evil, loyal and disloyal, weak and strong. It makes you appreciate diversity. You need both the person who is polite and the person who cuts to the point a little too quickly; you need both the person who follows rules and the person who does whatever it takes to get the job done. You need the person who will take up leadership and the person who is skeptical of it.

When was the last time you read something depressing about generative AI? Five minutes ago? Time for another helping: Futurism's Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian report at length on Brown Brothers Media, a firm who buy established journalism outlets in order to transform them into lakes of stochastic gruel.

Their trainwreck-laden funhouse mirror of a respectable media company has masqueraded as a purveyor of genuine news and information, enjoying enormous success at capturing reader eyes and attention through platforms that actual journalism relies on — while publishing oceans of trash that would get a real journalist fired immediately, and responding to questions with empty and contradictory platitudes about transparency, accountability, and responsible AI use.

It will have taken you at least another five minutes to read that, I reckon, so how about one more? Here's 404 Media reporting on unredacted court filings in which Microsoft and OpenAI executives state rather unambiguously that generative AI is, as one put it, the “largest theft of labor in human history.”

OpenAI’s policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was “creating systems that substitute for the labor of the people that define the ‘culture’ of society” and Microsoft, in a policy document, wrote that generative AI could “significantly disrupt the employment of the very people who generated the data on which the foundation model was trained […] LLMs are a product that destroys its supply chain.” OpenAI called itself an “existential threat” to news publishers, and an OpenAI software engineer testified that “no matter how prominently we show the links, users won’t click.”

Let's counteract the genEnnui with this sprawling bit of StreetView sleuthing about the early days of MicroProse from Where Were They Now - a blog dedicated to revisiting the offices of some of Britain's foundational videogame developers. The write-up includes a few jolly mentions of embryonic videogame journalists, busy plying their trade in a prehistoric utopia when articles didn't have farking comments threads underneath them.

The UK press seemed suspicious of MicroProse in its early days. Maybe it all started to go wrong with the official company launch at the American embassy. It had been the scene of a memorable anti-Vietnam war riot in 1968 and the flat-roofed modernist building (complete with a 35 foot gilded aluminum aluminium bald eagle glowering down from the top) seemed to give flashbacks to some hacks.

In much the same way that a billion typewriter monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare, so it is said that if you throw enough Jank.cool writers at a videogame, you will eventually have a good article about that videogame. Not this group write-up about trying to play Wardogs without spending any money on gear, mind you. This write-up is a document of disgrace. Here's Jonty making the best of it:

As I begin my fourth life I get lucky with an SUV. I try touting for passengers, but apparently my zero-budget attire radiates a one-star Uber rating. Eventually somebody launches and immediately crashes a helicopter, which earns me one presumably desperate passenger and a decent sum for delivering them. I drive around for a bit and stop to drag a downed colleague off a hill and get the $500 for rubbing him back to life. I try to parlay this into a regular ambulance gig but there’s nobody around, so I resort to my established tactic of following other people to control points and getting sniped. A nice man with a Scandinavian accent bandages me up, which makes me realise that I’ve been playing for half an hour with a red-tinged screen. I tip him, warn him about the sniper, then we both go outside anyway and are killed.

As for this week's music: please howl like Pink Floyd, hurl like Pretty Sick, or dance like it's Final Fantasy 9. Have a good Sunday. Don't let the badgers grind you down.