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 rooting out clothes moths. The wool-devouring bastards have started cropping up all over my flat. I've put traps down but that's only dealing with the ones which have already hatched and taken flight. I need to work out where they're coming from.

I'll be taking everything out of drawers and cupboards, searching clothes and towels for signs of nibbling. Then I'll need to crawl around the edge of each room, looking for casings in the carpet. Moths have followed me from house to house and this is the last time. (Hopefully.)

Once the search is complete, I need to expunge it from my mind. Just thinking about the larvae writhing up through the carpet and eating away at my clothes gives me goosebumps. Thankfully, there are some good gaming reads to distract me.

You may have read that Amazon have cancelled their Lord of the Rings MMO, but that news is only a small part of a larger story. For Eurogamer, Connor Makar spoke to the developers of Project Trident, a separate AAA project at Amazon's San Diego studio. The project used an LLM to write the dialogue for its characters, and it was pitched as part of an Amazon-mandated push for generative AI.

"A few days before our pitch, a mandate [was set] for Amazon to innovate with LLM tech in all divisions," a source familiar with Project Trident's development told Eurogamer. "Our team was the first to get the mandate." To this source, they felt it was either pivot to fold in a generative AI element, or "more than likely shut down." That, or go back to the drawing board, "come up with a whole new game idea to pitch and probably get rejected again."
Amazon Game Studios San Diego was given the news "from the top down", in what one source described as a "don't shoot the messenger" situation. According to this same source, the majority of staff were "uneasy, unhappy, and concerned" with the news.

The framing of the piece is that despite being exactly what Amazon asked for, Project Trident was cancelled anyway. Though, as the project was reinvented multiple times in different genres through its development, the feature hints at just how unfocused Amazon's plans for making games were.

Over at cheery RPS fanzine PC Gamer, Sean Martin's dived into Crimson Desert's emerging birdwatching scene. Apparently, a recently added bird feeder has birthed a hobby for many within the open world games playerbase.

Still, it's wonderful to see. If you peruse the Crimson Desert Reddit, you can spy all sorts of threads in recent weeks where people are taking joy in showing off birds they've found, or are sharing locations where they've spotted them, almost like real-life bird twitchers. No affiliation to actual Twitch, unless you stream your birdspotting I suppose. As Ranger_22x comments on one such post: "Pearl Abyss created 5,000,000 amateur ornithologists with one update".

I do wonder how often in-game activities inspire someone to go out and pick up a hobby in real life. Perhaps this will send a flock of twitchers out into the world. Still, if we're talking about games inspiring real-life hobbies, I don't know if anything will top when James played Romeo Is A Dead Man and then cooked all of its katsu curries.

Often Nathan Brown's Hit Points newsletter is a delightfully excoriating write up of the week's gaming industry news – a satisfying balm after some of the worst weeks in the past few years. But his latest is a delight of a much more positive vein, he tells the story of how he tracked down a copy of trance single 'Out Of The Blue' before it was cool. I won't spoil the read beyond the opening paragraphs.

You may already be familiar with the song ‘Out Of The Blue’ by System F, one of several noms de plume used in the 1990s by Dutch trance kingpin Ferry Corsten. Bouncy, catchy and almost comically upbeat, it’s a perfect encapsulation of a very particular style of electronic music — one whose buzzy synth lines were unforgettably compared by one of the music mags of the era to ‘wasps in a tin’ — that was played and danced to in some very particular, and let’s be honest peculiar, places: Gatecrasher in Sheffield, Peach in London, God’s Kitchen in Birmingham, etc.
Out Of The Blue was a hit. Like a lot of ‘90s floorfillers it successfully crossed over from the club scene to the radio, enjoying a brief residency in the UK Top 20 as a result. It took pride of place on countless CD mix compilations, blasted out of town-centre car radios and suburban shopping-mall PA systems, and in perhaps its clearest sign of its effect on The Culture, was featured in rubbish-but-nonetheless-seminal clubland flick Human Traffic. Years later it popped up on the soundtrack of the sadly under-remembered Vita launch title Lumines Electronic Symphony, but that’s by the by. The point is that, for a while, Out Of The Blue seemed to be absolutely everywhere. I, however, knew it when it was nowhere.

And, because it wouldn't be a Sunday Papers from me without a recommendation from the LRB blog, here's Liam Shaw writing about plague ships.

Cruise ship operators hate the negative press attention that outbreaks bring, but they’re a subject of fascination for epidemiologists. The Covid-19 outbreak on the Diamond Princess in February 2020, where at least seven hundred people were infected, permitted some of the best early estimates of key parameters for the spread of the virus. And in November 2020, when ‘cruises to nowhere’ became a popular holiday in Singapore – a multi-day jaunt on the high seas with no ports of call before returning home – analysis of social interactions found that passengers had a median of twenty unique close contacts every day. This means that a typical person was interacting with about twice the number of contacts of an average onshore European. Given that this was aboard ships operating at 50 per cent capacity during a global pandemic, with enhanced safety protocols, mask-wearing and social distancing, the potential for outbreaks is obvious.

As for music this week, Nathan's search for Out Of The Blue, has got me listening to other '90s club staples. Get some of Sonique's 'It Feel so Good' in your lugs.