The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for more cat. She’s flop and headbutt-level comfortable around me now, but she still seems a bit terrified of my house in general. I’m going to hang out with her a bunch and see if I can instill some sort of object permanence re: my presence in the home. Before that, let’s read this week’s best writing about games (and game related things!)

“New Madden’s lack of launch week review scores was partially by EA’s design” Stephen Totillo writes for Gamefile

For Madden NFL 25, reviewers received code for the game from EA on its early launch date, August 13, according to a Game File check with four sources familiar with reviews across multiple popular publications.

What’s more: EA’s rules for most of the reviewers Game File spoke to explicitly prohibited scored reviews running until August 16.

That means that the average person could have run a scored review ahead of the outlets that agreed to EA’s terms, simply by buying the game on the 13th, playing it a lot for the next two days and publishing their take.

It “feels like they are still actively shielding Madden from critics,” one reviewer told Game File, asking not to be named out of concern their comment would get their publication heat from EA.

An EA representative did not provide any on-the-record comments, when asked about the company’s strategy around Madden reviews.

If you'll allow me to editorialise for a moment: this sucks!

For Polygon, Christian Donlan reviewed puzzle game Malware.

It’s beautifully judged stuff, but I’ve slowly come to realize that Malware works so well as a game for the same reason that malware often works in the real world. These things succeed because they understand that, even before they’ve tried to trick me, I already feel slightly powerless when sat before the bland authority of a computer window. This remains true even when, once I actually think about it, the authority the window seems to possess is not any authority that I remember giving it.

This comes down to the awareness that computers are complex and operate in ways that are far beyond my understanding. It means that when they stoop to my level to offer me dialog boxes that I can at least read and parse, I’m already on the back foot. I already feel like I’m not in a position to question very much. I’ve already lost.

"AI is changing video games — and striking performers want their due", writes Mandalit del Barco for NPR.

Norris says the companies are trying to get around paying the body movement performers at the same rate as others, “because essentially at that point they just consider us data.” She says, “I can crawl all over the floor and the walls as such-and-such creature, and they will argue that is not performance, and so that is not subject to their AI protections.”

It’s a nuanced distinction: the companies have included “performance capture” in their proposal, including recordings of voice and face performers, but not behind-the-scenes "motion capture" work from body doubles and other movement performers that are used to render motion.

But Norris and others like her consider themselves “performance capture artists” – “because if all you were capturing is motion, then why are you hiring a performer?”

Here’s a video of some chill sharks, purely because I found a topic tag named “s-s-s-shark” in the CMS and I wanted to use it. Chat GPT strikes again, this time by (it looks like) fabricating negative quotes from critics in a trailer for the new Coppola film. Ah well, it’s not all bad news. “Tech companies furious at new law that would hold them accountable when their ai does bad stuff,” write Futurism. Turkish Olympic shooter Yusuf Dikec was apparently known on the Japanese Internet as "free-to-play ojisan" due to his lack of fancy cosmetics, via Ex Research. Music this week is “playlist to be a shark”. Gotta justify that tag. Have a great weekend!