The Sunday Papers

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The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

November 8th, 2005 was my first day as a full-time games journalist, which means I have now entered my 20th year of doing this. "This" has changed a lot over time: from producing CD and DVD coverdiscs, to writing for a magazine, to editing magazines and a website, to solely editing a website, to managing several websites. Sprinkle podcasts, videos, events and a lot of other things in there and "games journalist" doesn't really cover it.

One of the only constants is that I read a lot of writing about video games.

Dapper gent Oli Welsh wrote for Polygon about the fan reboot of City Of Heroes. We briefly covered fans getting an official license earlier this year, but Oli went and spoke to the folks making it all work.

City of Heroes: Homecoming may have an official license and around 30,000 monthly active players, but it’s still effectively a not-for-profit fan project, sustained by donations. The team that runs the game uses pseudonyms in public (a precaution taken to avoid community drama spilling into the real world). Over email, I talked to Widower. “Trying to summarize any of our jobs in a few words is difficult,” he said, but described himself as “a sort of community manager” who had started out as a game master on the team. Widower took his alias from his favorite villain character in the game, Ghost Widow, “a ghost who can’t move on because of the untimely circumstances of her death.” In real life, he works in charity fundraising; most of the team works in IT or related fields.

Video Game Weather ASMR is a YouTube channel with a descriptive name. I don't experience ASMR, but I do enjoy ambient weather sounds and slow YouTube videos, so here's an 8 hour, rainy, night drive around Los Santos in Grand Theft Auto V.

I think often about On Smarm, Tom Scocca's 2013 essay which Lit Hub last year called one of the most influential of the 21st century. I think there is a lot of smarm in videogames and videogame media, and I hope that at our best RPS is the snark rising to meet it.

It's nearly impossible to keep smarm values at bay, though. Even well-meaning people fall into them. Publish a long, serious article and wait for the discomfiting benedictions to roll in from Longform and Longreads: Here is a piece of writing that has attained a certain length—a form that you can read, secure in the knowledge that someone did a lot of typing, and that you are doing a lot of reading. Everyone recognizes that there is virtue, or an approximation of virtue, in doing a lot of reading. Share it, this quantity of reading.

I needed another good video game article for the Paps, so I simply Googled "Jeremy Peel", and lo: why Stalker: Shadow Of Chernobyl's difficulty modes have divided players for a decade. It focuses on a particular disagreement about weapon accuracy and whether it changes on higher difficulty settings.

The trouble starts when players start trying to solve the accuracy of their weapons through tweaks to the game, rather than taking the time to adapt to its peculiarities. You’ll find various long-running threads in which old hands recommend switching to Master mode, Stalker’s highest difficulty. There, they claim, bullets hit harder and with greater accuracy, for both you and your enemies—paradoxically making the game easier to get to grips with.

In 2011, Battlestar Galactica reboot creator Ron D. Moore created a pilot for a TV show about wizard cops. It's called 17th Precinct and the unaired pilot, which stars several former BSG castmates, is on YouTube. I haven't watched this yet, but how could I not share it?

Random complaint: Didn't November 5th used to be a single evening and not a week-long Fantavision LARP? I am writing this on November 9th, on what is now the 7th straight night of my dog being frightened by fireworks. She's hiding under my desk right now.

Right, music. Let's have some songs I've been singing along to this year. Lloyd, I'm Ready To Be Heartbroken by Camera Obscura is surely one of the greatest pop songs ever written. Pitch A Fit by Petey is better shouted than sung - which is good, because I'm better at shouting than singing. And I could pick nearly any Metronomy track, but It's Good To Be Back is from their most recent album and a bouncy pick-me-up. I can't resist the stuttering backup vocal singing "b-b-b-b-b-b-b-bout it".