Reading List July 2021 (Patreon)

With the quarterly wrapup finally live, that means I had time to catch up on my massive backlog of Content™, which means it's time for another reading list! The obvious big flash fire right now is the Activision-Blizzard controversy, but GDC also happened, and there was a decent amount of discussion about shorter games respecting your time in there, too!

Second Opinions

Whenever I finish a review, I usually end up watching a few other reviews or other related content afterwards. Here’s some of the best stuff other people have had to say about the games I’ve been talking about lately!

The Game That Won’t Let You See All Of It by Jacob Geller: Geller’s a regular on this list, but this time, he happened to also be topical! This time around, he ruminated on Before Your Eyes’ blinking mechanic and how this same idea has been explored in other mediums.

How the Best Game of 2021 Respects Your Time By Ending Too Soon by Adam Millard: Millard, another regular, held Before Your Eyes up as an example of how to end your game satisfyingly without dragging it out forever, then went into the larger topic describing the ways other games do that, too!

The Back Half Problems of Horror Design by Josh Bycer: Bycer also talked about nailing video game endings, but highlighted Yuppie Psycho, which has been covered here in the past. He discussed how the game stays scary through its final act twists compared to most other horror games, namely Resident Evil, escalating into full on action movie territory.

Turning Cities Into Puzzles by Hotcyder: A little bit of structure can go a long way towards giving a player a sense of direction. Left adrift in an ocean of decision paralysis in more freeform city builders, he’s turned towards more restrictive games like the phenomenal Islanders and Dorfromantik that use the same mechanics to give the player a more direct challenge.

Why Descenders Might Be My New Favorite Racing Game by Writing on Games: Hamish Black of Writing on Games recently got hooked on fantastic downhill racer Descenders, highlighting its incredible ability to convey speed and its risk vs. reward mechanics.

Absolute Cataclysm

To say Activision-Blizzard has been having a bad week in the press is an understatement. Sparked by a lawsuit blasting the company’s horrific work culture, abuse both past and current has been brought to light nonstop. Understandably, that’s sparked a lot of discussion about the systemic issues that lead to companies like Activision-Blizzard, Ubisoft, and many, many more becoming such hostile work environments.

The Activision Blizzard Lawsuit Fallout is What Women Have Been Saying All Along by Ethan Gach: The lawsuit might be news, but discrimination and harassment in the industry certainly isn’t. Gach talked to several women that have already been decrying it — and the conditions at Blizzard specifically — for years.

Blizzard’s Culture Crisis Runs Deep by Jason Schreier: While only touching on all the troubling news we’ve heard about Blizzard over the past few weeks, Schreier described the company’s relationship with its other half, Activision, and how the two companies have been slowly merging in painful and less than helpful ways.

The Kick-Ass Shit That Women in the Game Industry Don’t Get Enough Credit For by Ari Notis and Patricia Hernandez: While a lot of the discussion surrounding Blizzard has been on the harassment and abuse committed against women in the industry, the writers at Kotaku were inspired by a conversation with one of their interviewees and put together a story exploring the lives and work behind the women fighting for equality.

GDC Highlights

The GDC talks themselves always lag behind and show up a few months later on youtube, but in the meantime, sometimes people do some neat little write ups highlighting a specific talk or another.

Understanding the Meaningless, Micro-Reactive, and Marvellous Writing of Disco Elysium by Chris Kerr: Kerr broke down a talk done by Disco Elysium’s writer, Justin Keenan, discussing all the tiny touches the game’s dialogue system goes the extra mile to include even though they don’t necessarily contribute to the game’s “mission critical” progression.

Star Wars Galaxies Devs Discuss Why It Died by Jody Macgregor: Macgregor highlighted a Star Wars Galaxies postmortem discussing how the game’s attempts to make itself more marketable paradoxically killed the game by driving off the fan base it had initially garnered.

Everything Else

Gaming and the Golden Record by Chariot Rider et. al.: If you haven’t heard about it before, there are several satellites we’ve launched out into space with a ‘golden record’ to try and give a snapshot of humanity if anyone out there happened to stumble upon them. Chariot Rider got to thinking: if we made a golden record today and sent it into space, what games would we want to put on it? And then got a bunch of other youtubers together to collaborate all of their top picks. Most interesting of all, a lot of the selections aren’t just whoever’s favorite game, but are picked with actual consideration for how to express some basic facet of humanity or with consideration for their hypothetical alien audience.

Empathy for the Refugee in “Bury Me My Love” by LambHoot: LambHoot talked about Bury Me, My Love, a game about the harrowing and heartfelt journey of one Syrian refugee told entirely through text messages to your phone. He highlighted in particular its ability to build a very real anxiety in a player through the passage of time, but the essay truly comes together when LambHoot starts exploring the game’s obvious connections to the real world.

10th Anniversary Spectacular of Introspective Narcissism by Errant Signal: Errant Signal turned ten years old this month, and for a youtube channel, that’s a heck of an achievement. And he took the opportunity to leverage his personal experiences over those ten years to talk about success, video game win states, and how the latter has a way of twisting our perception of the former.

The Game Prototype That Had to Be Banned by Its Own Studio by People Make Games: “This game will test your friendships!” Just about every Diplomacy-style game will proudly declare on the back of the box. But at Halfbrick Studios, they made a prototype game that legitimately did just that, incentivizing coworkers to even go so far as to bribe each other with money and nearly ruining a studio’s internal work culture. This is that prototype’s brief and surprisingly fascinating story.

How a Young Iraqi Programmer Tried to Adapt Gilgamesh, the Oldest Surviving Hero Story by Edwin Evans-Thirlwell: Evans-Thirlwell did a one on one biography of Auday Hussein, an Iraqi-born developer that has been working since the Amiga to make a video game adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Are You a Binger or a Drifter? By Daryl Talks Games: As part of their Psych of Play series, Daryl investigated different ways people organize their play time. Which one are you? Do you binge a game clean through one at a time, or do you move at a more relaxed pace, set it down, and come back to it later?

Nasty YouTube Death Threat Hoax Has a Happy Ending by Ian Walker: In an absolutely wild story about the crazy things people will do on the internet, Kotaku covered the recent saga of how youtube channel Girlfriend Reviews had to deal with a particularly troublesome harasser.

Buying a PC With Dell: My Journey into Hell by Super Eyepatch Wolf: SEW chronicled the existential horror that is trying to get a functional pre-built PC. What started as a twitter thread has become a full 35 minute dramatic retelling of his aptly labeled journey through hell and back.

The Messy, Stalled Reckoning at an Assassin’s Creed Co-Developer by Ethan Gach: While Activision-Blizzard is under the microscope this month, Ubisoft still has plenty of its own woes. Take the case of Ubisoft Singapore, which as Gach details, started as a one-sided deal by the company to take advantage of tax breaks from the country while not covering its side of the bargain and only got worse thanks to toxic management.

How Genshin Impact Content Creators Handle a Multi-Generational Audience by Ty Schalter: Genshin Impact’s wildly popular enough to draw in players of all walks of life, and for content creators that have made the game their job, one of the largest challenges is being both entertaining and safe for all age groups to watch. Schalter interviewed several streamers on how they walked that tightrope.