Sundays are for walking the dog, cleaning the flat, and playing Dune Imperium – always. I might also try to self-host a Minecraft Java server, though. Let’s first roundup some of the week’s best writing about video games.
Alice Bell, with whom you may be familiar, asked on Eurogamer: can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life?
Just over two years ago, a friend of mine died in their sleep. It was unexpected. Let’s call them Ash, although it’s not their real name. They were incredibly funny, emotionally open, and kind. And because Ash and I were friends on Steam, I know exactly how many days it’s been since they died, just like I know what they were doing before they went to bed that night. They were playing Sea Of Thieves.
Alice’s new podcast, with Nate Crowley (RPS in peace) and Jon Hicks (honourary RPS in peace), published its first full episode last week. The first Patreon exclusive episode just went live, too. Give them money.
The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane reviewed Grand Theft Hamlet, the documentary film which depicts the attempt to stage a performance of Hamlet in GTA Online.
To an extent, “Grand Theft Hamlet” is picking up where Baz Luhrmann’s “Romeo + Juliet” (1996) left off. The sight of DJPhil whipping out a shotgun, rather than a foil, reminded me instantly of the gonzo scene at a gas station in Luhrmann’s film, when the anachronism of Benvolio’s line “Put up your swords” is swept aside by a closeup of the maker’s mark on a handgun—“Sword 9mm Series S.” But Crane and Grylls, I suspect, are onto something more than the buzz of a smart historical update. Consider the moral environment of G.T.A., where cruelty is funny and where malignity, more often than not, springs from the daftest and the most fleeting of motives and leaves no lasting trace. Might that actually be near as we’re likely to get to the mood of the mob, in theatres and other pits of revelry, in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England?
This prompted someone – I forget whom – to link an old piece on Final Fantasy XV, from Matt Margini in the LA Review Of Books in 2017. New to me, also worth a read:
Before it became other things — an interactive road-trip buddy movie, a cooking game, a simulator of days spent staring at the metal rails of highways — Final Fantasy XV was a Hamlet adaptation. The game was first announced at the Electronics Entertainment Expo in 2006, in a trailer that began with a portentous epigraph from the play itself: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” At that point, it was called Final Fantasy Versus XIII, and its scope was defined in simple, Hamlet-like terms. It was a game about a young, moody prince, dressed in black, who tries to avenge his father.
For The Guardian, Keith Stuart wrote about old video game magazines and their value as a historical resource. I strongly agree except for the bad bits that I wrote, which ought to be pulped.
Looking back on video game history, it’s easy to imagine a smooth narrative flow, a sense of inevitability about which games or technologies would be successful and which would fail. But it wasn’t usually like that: contemporary reporting reveals a mass of complications and uncertainties. “Video game magazines provide a lot of resistance to that very linear idea of history,” says O’Shea. “Especially the technologically deterministic view that more powerful tech would inevitably be more interesting and successful”.
You can now visit the digital archive of video game magazines Keith was writing about.
While we’re thinking of the past, Lindsey Adler wrote about working in new media at Buzzfeed and Vice during their brief heyday, and feeling nostalgia even for that mirage.
If you are a person who misses websites and a broad range of work worth reading, please understand the desperation that is felt by the people who used to be allowed to create them. Our society is poorer (and more stratified) by the cleaving of access to a variety of perspectives and ways to tell a story. Your favorite writers don’t want to be boring. We don’t want to be hacks. We don’t want to be constricted in our coverage by an algorithm that tells our bosses how to simplify our work.
At Games Radar, Will Sawyer gathered the cooking recipes found dotted around Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, then cooked them. This might be the only allowable use of “veritable smorgasbord” in all of games journalism.
Functional recipes are a rare treat in video games and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doesn’t disappoint, featuring 11 full recipes covering dishes from Italy, Egypt, China, Siam, and Iraq – a veritable smorgasbord of culinary delights. But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, so I’ve put the writers at MachineGames to the test by trying out three of the recipes to see if they cut the mustard in… Indiana Jones and the Recipe for Disaster.
One of this week’s pieces of music is surely Questlove’s mashup of live performances from across the 50-year history of Saturday Night Live. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, two-thirds of the screen is blurred throughout and a segment of the song has been replaced by a soundalike, both changes made in order to avoid copyright strikes. Real nice thing this was, for a minute, and now it’s unwatchable.
Let’s continue the theme of looking back, anyway. French electronic dreampop duo Air released their album Moon Safari over 25 years ago, and the music video for All I Need now feels like a snapshot of a different era. The song has vocals, but the video also includes brief interviews with two skateboarders, a real couple, as they talk about their relationship in locations around Ventura, California. One suspects the nostalgia in the YouTube comments is simply people longing to be young again, but I’m no less enamoured. Those bedrooms! The movie posters, magazine cuttings and bucket hats. The video was directed by Mike Mills, now an Oscar nominated screenwriter and director of A24 films.
This era’s Sunday Papers music choices continue to be added each week to a YouTube playlist.