Sundays are for seeing what this new Nolan movie looks like. Before we reach for the popcorn, let’s read this week’s best writing on games (and things related to games).
For Unwinnable, Hayes Geldmacher wrote that Devil Daggers was a performance. How over successive passages, we can learn the choreography of the all-immersive Devil Daggers. It’s up to you to “take the rhythm”.
Devil Daggers does a great job of minimizing, if not eliminating the external form all together – everything is contained, all immersive, almost all of the time. Upon starting the game, players encounter an intro screen with the title and select “Play”. There are no on-screen icons or crosshairs. When they die, they are greeted by a smiling leaderboard before being immediately placed back into another race. The fibrous connective tissue that often holds a game together is entirely gone. There’s no contextual narration, no metagame advancement, or tutorial prompts. It’s just the player and his hellish surroundings, over and over again. When I’m unable to ground my understanding of the game in the familiar terrain of non-diegetic interface elements, something special happens: space becomes the interface.
Geoffrey Bunting asked why games send us back to school, on Eurogamer. I’m a sucker for high school roleplaying, to be fair.
These social connections are at the heart of games that use schools as settings and of our relationship with them. As compelling as the ability to turn back time and put a face to our old demons can be, the way games allow us to rediscover the ease with which relationships were formed when we were crammed into a building with hundreds of people our age is more moving. .
Elizabeth Winkler wrote a long read for The New Yorker about the struggle to unearth Enheduanna, who researchers say was the world’s first recorded author.
But since their discovery, in the mid-twentieth century, scholars have fiercely debated the authorship of Enheduanna. Did the priestess really write these works? Is the idea of a woman at the beginning of the written tradition – two thousand years before the Golden Age of Greece – too good to be true? This winter, an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, “She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia,” will attempt to give the priestess her due. “You ask anyone you know and they’ll tell you the first author is Herodotus or some other man,” Sidney Babcock, the show’s curator, told me. “It always amazed me. No one will ever come with her.
For Gamespot, Michael Higham spoke to the Yakuza devs about how they’ve made a legend out of his longtime hero for two decades. A great conversation about all things Yakuza with Takaya Kuroda (Kiryu’s Japanese VA), Hiroyuki Sakamoto (RGG Studio’s Chief Producer), and Yong Yea (Kiryu’s English VA).
“One of the first sub-stories I played in Yakuza 0 was the dominatrix one, and that gave me the idea that the sense of humor in this series is wild. And yet, when you really think about this story, like yeah, it’s kinky and it’s steamy, but it’s also got a lot of heart in it, it’s about Kiryu just trying to help this woman get her confidence back. It’s the beautiful mix of Yakuza. It’s absurd, but it has heart everywhere you look, and that’s what I love about this show, so many standout moments like that.”
On Disconnect, Paris Marx wrote about Elon Musk wanting to relive his startup days. An article about Twitter’s renaming to X, and why Musk is repeating mistakes he’s made in the past with PayPal.
While Elon Musk’s reputation turns out to be more marketing than real, looking back at his story is instructive. While he had great ideas, he was eventually ousted at Zip2 and X.com because he was a bad leader and didn’t make good business decisions. But he got rich despite those failures and built his reputation in the process so that by the time he launched SpaceX and took over Tesla, it was much harder to remove him from the CEO seat if he didn’t want to. leave. We can now see the consequences of granting him so much power.
Sophie Raworth has penned a touching tribute to George Alagiah, the BBC newsreader who sadly passed away this week. Beautiful words.
Exactly five years after George first called me to tell me about his cancer, we went to lunch on a sunny terrace in London to celebrate that we could still talk. He was back at work, he looked good. George rarely spoke publicly about having cancer. He said he didn’t want to make any routine comments about his illness. But when he gave interviews, he was always surprised to find himself in the headlines. He never understood his interest in him and how much people wanted to hear his story.
This week’s music is Definitely Maybe by Flica. Here is the Spotify link and the YouTube link. Perfect track to read.
That’s all for this week friends, take care and see you next week!