The Sunday Papers

You know what, reader? Sundays are for whatever you goddamn feel like. Go swimming. Get lost in the woods. Take a kintsugi pottery class. Fix a broken appliance. Eat more than one hot dog. Learn Welsh. Smash your kintsugi pottery and take another class to repair it. Rearrange towels. Borrow some sugar. Don’t give it back.

Then, as you bathe in the glow of self actualisation, achieving true happiness for maybe even the first ever time, read Bryant Francis’ Game Developer article titled 'Everything hurts and no one knows when the pain will end.'

Not all of those who doomed their companies behaved in this way - but for those who did, the connection is obvious. If you're in a position of power and have no regard for the people around you, why would you care what happens to the hundreds or thousands of people you're responsible for?

To hold these truths in your mind is to know sorrow and anger, especially if you've lived them firsthand. It's traumatic for some, and an overdose of information for those not as close to the blast zone.

In happier news, that Jeremy Peel lad gets everywhere, popping up in The Guardian to tell the tale of how former Gears of War man Cliff Bleszinski found himself funding and producing the Tony-winning musical Hadestown.

Boss Key Productions shut down in the summer of 2018. "It ultimately broke me, and it made it even worse that the internet thought the entire thing was hilarious," Bleszinski says. "I was just like: 'You know what, I’m taking my ball and I’m going home.'"

Then he struck up a social media friendship with Alex Boniello, the actor who played Connor Murphy in the Tony award-winning musical Dear Evan Hansen. "I’m a big Broadway fan," says Bleszinski. "I was a drama nerd in high school." Lifting his right arm, he reveals a tattoo that reads 'comedy and tragedy', in tribute to the dramatic genres first invented by the ancient Greeks.

Eurogamer’s Pride Week returned, its highlights including Kelsey Raynor on Elden Ring’s queerness and my personal favourite, Khee Hoon Chan’s piece on how queer games play with time.

The game's sci-fi subplot amplifies the emotional stakes, with a reveal that places Kasio at the heart of this earth-rending disaster. And when her emotional collapse culminates with the lines, "Time doesn't exist in a black hole. Every moment crushed together, past and present and future, in one endless scream," it's another example of how damaging hegemonic constructions of time have been for Kasio. Like gender and race, time is a social construct built from a series of agreed upon conventions.

For Unwinnable (which just hit 200 issues – nicely done, Unwinnable gang!), Maddi Chilton considers how the Disco Elysium-ness of Zero Parades’ voice does the latter a disservice.

All this is to say, I am not convinced that Hershel’s similarities should simply be written off to this being the ZA/UM house style. Aside from any speculation of how much Disco's style of writing was specific to the Kurvitz-et-al. pre-London move cohort of writers (I do not think that is a productive train of thought, or any of our business) it just seems like a lazy choice for such a text-heavy game to make. Does it not matter how the games are written? Was Disco not doing something with its language on purpose? What is it saying about Zero Parades' intent, or lack thereof, that it thought doing basically the same thing a second time would work fine?

Bit of not-games to finish: Letterboxd’s Robert Daniels on A.I.. The Spielberg film, not the modern, earthboiling shitheap. Well, maybe a little of both.

"Every robot story is a story of workers, of labor, of slavery, as Joe reminds us that David, no less than he, has been made to service a want," observes New Yorker critic Lauren Michele Jackson. "Outside of domestic human life, we see the dark underbelly of society in A.I.: Commodified cruelty; The slave raiding in the junkyard forest. All for the people’s entertainment. In reality, they are just clankers but what really gets us is the inhumanness of slavery. Also their plight for survival implies that there is a soul there," argues shaman_ultra. Gigolo Joe, consequently, tries to open David’s eyes to the truth: "They hate us, you know…. [Monica] loves what you do for her. As my customers love what I do for them," he says. "You are alone now only because they tired of you or replaced you with a younger model or were displeased with something you said or broke." Considering Spielberg’s work on Amistad,where he thoughtfully depicted enslaved Black folks fighting for their humanity during a slave-ship revolt, and later in the court of law, it’s not surprising that thoughts about labor and freedom would unconsciously make their way into this film.

Music this week is the bass solo from Nightshift Superstar, one of the best songs on the best Muse album since 2006, repeated over and over again.