You know what, reader? Sundays are for whatever you want. Go swimming. Get lost in the woods. Take a kintsugi pottery class. Fix a broken device. Eat more than one hot dog. Learn Welsh. Smash your kintsugi pottery and take another class to repair it. Rearrange the towels. Borrow some sugar. Don’t give it back.
Then, as you bathe in the glow of self-realization and perhaps even achieve true happiness for the first time, read game developer Bryant Francis’ article titled “Everything hurts and no one knows when the pain will stop.’
Not everyone who condemned their company behaved this way – but for those who did, the connection is clear. If you are in a position of power and have no respect for the people around you, why would you care what happens to the hundreds or thousands of people you are responsible for?
To keep these truths in mind is to know grief and anger, especially if you have experienced them personally. 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 boy is everywhere, appearing in The guardian to tell the story of how former Gears of War man Cliff Bleszinski found himself financing and producing the Tony-winning musical Hadestown.
Boss Key Productions closed its doors in the summer of 2018. “It finally broke me, and it’s even worse that the internet found the whole thing hilarious,” Bleszinski said. “I said to myself, ‘You know what, I’ll take my ball and I’ll go home.'”
He later 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 huge Broadway fan,” Bleszinski says. “I was a theater buff in high school.” Raising his right arm, he reveals a tattoo that reads “comedy and tragedy,” in homage to the dramatic genres invented by the ancient Greeks.
Eurogamer Pride Week returned, its highlights, including Kelsey Raynor on The Elden Ring Quirk and my favorite, Khee Hoon Chan’s article on how queer games play over time.
The game’s sci-fi subplot amps up the emotional stakes, with a reveal that places Kasio at the heart of this heartbreaking disaster. And when his emotional breakdown culminates with the lines: “Time doesn’t exist in a black hole. Every moment crushed, past, present and future, in an endless scream,” is another example of how damaging hegemonic constructs of time have been for Kasio. Like gender and race, time is a social construct constructed from a series of agreed-upon conventions.
For Impossible to win (which I just reached 200 numbers – well done, Unwinnable gang!), Maddi Chilton considers how Zero Parades’ Disco Elysium vocals are doing the latter a disservice.
All of this is to say that I’m not convinced that Hershel’s similarities should simply be attributed to the ZA/UM house style. Aside from any speculation about the extent to which Disco’s writing style was specific to Kurvitz-et-al. The pre-London cohort of writers (I don’t think that’s a productive train of thought, nor any of our activities), just seems like a lazy choice for such a text-heavy game. Isn’t it matter how are games written? Didn’t Disco do something with his language on purpose? What does it say about Zero Parades’ intention, or lack thereof, that he thought doing essentially the same thing a second time would work well?
A few non-games to finish: Letterboxd’s Robert Daniels on AI. Spielberg’s film, not modern hot shit. Well, maybe a little of both.
“Every robot story is a story of workers, of work, of slavery, as Joe reminds us, David, just as much as he, was created to meet a need.” observes New Yorker critic Lauren Michele Jackson. “Outside domestic human life, we see the dark underbelly of society in AI: merchant cruelty, slave raids in the junkyard forest. supports shaman_ultra. So Gigolo Joe tries to open David’s eyes to the truth: “They hate us, you know… (Monica) loves what you do for her. Like my clients love what I do for them.” he says. “You’re alone now only because they’re sick of you or they replaced you with a younger model or they’re upset about something you said or broke.” Given Spielberg’s work on Amistad, where he thoughtfully depicted black slaves fighting for their humanity during a slave ship revolt and then in court, it’s not surprising that thoughts about work and freedom subconsciously find their way into this film.
This week’s music is the bass solo from Night Superstarone of the best songs of the best Muse album since 2006repeated over and over again.
