Reading List (March 2023) (Patreon)

Hello! It's been a wild month - I spent some of it soaking in the sights of San Francisco. But I'm back, with articles and videos aplenty. Here's your hand-picked reading list for March.

The Design of Games

[Read] Brenda Romero is never going to stop making games - "The legendary designer talks Jagged Alliance, Playboy and the source of her persistence"

[Read] How to design autistic-friendly games - "We talk to Changingday's founders Nick and Alison Lang about the making of Blinnk and the Vacuum of Space, a VR title made with autistic players in mind"

[Read] Resident Evil 4 (2005)’s ‘bad’ controls were, and are, great - "Resident Evil 4, among the most celebrated action games ever made, breaks every one of these rules. It constantly emphasizes the break between the player and the character."

The Business of Games

[Read] A guide to properly crediting game workers and why it matters - "As developers continue to see their work unacknowledged, we explore the issues behind this and how to resolve them"

[Read | Long Read] Shooting The Pope: The Near Ruin Of A Country's Gaming Industry - "Italy's right-wing PM Georgia Meloni once tried to save its game industry with disastrous consequences"

The Development of Games

[Read] Can GPT-4 *Actually* Write Code? - "There is a commonality in all of these examples people have been posting. They are all problems that have been solved before, or extremely minor modifications to those problems"

[Watch | 17 mins] How Far Is This Jump? - A well-produced video on different video game cameras.

[Watch | CC | 50 mins] Re-Making The Last of Us Part I - Noclip talks remakes with Naughty Dog

[Watch | CC | 11 mins] Recreating The Pathless' Gameplay - Mix and Jam returns, this time remaking the rhythmic movement of The Pathless in Unity.

[Watch | 16 mins] Unbeatable AI Ruins My Game - "I made a competitive PvP game. Then I realized I don't have any friends (who can beat me) so I made an unbeatable AI to play against. Let's just say I learned some new lessons here".

The Playing of Games

[Read] Lifelong Friends are Made in Dead and Dying Games - "Dead videogames are like catnip for the terminally online like myself. Even a slight dip in a game’s player count is enough to generate countless hours of hasty YouTube punditry"

[Watch | 8 mins] Of Fops and Flops: Cheating the Aristocracy in Card Shark - Errant Signal checks out a game about "cheating Voltaire out of five bucks".

[Watch | 31 mins] The Insane Amount Of Dead Space Crossovers - Isaac Clarke has had a surprising number of cameo appearances. This YouTube channel tries to find them all.

[Watch | CC | 6 mins] Unboxing the Custom VAMPIRE SURVIVORS Puppet We Had Made - What do you do when your interviewee refuses to turn of their webcam? Noclip found a solution.

[Read] Warzone 2 Season 2 is a harsh reminder that Call of Duty's tech is wasted on Call of Duty - "I continue to expect more from Call of Duty, as the series remains happy providing, more or less, what it has been known for since the original Modern Warfare"

The Art of Games

[Watch | CC | 11 mins] How This Woman Creates God of War’s Sound Effects - " Meet Joanna Fang, foley artist for PlayStation Studios and master at creating sounds for movies and video games like God of War: Ragnarok"

[Read] Lunark: Getting retro with rotoscoping - "Fortunately, modern technology has made rotoscoping much more accessible. With a touch of creativity and the aid of a smartphone and graphics tablet, I was able to use this “lost art” to help bring Lunark to life."

[Watch | 17 mins] We Need To Fix Black Hair in Video Games - Kinda Funny's Blessing Adeoye Jr. looks at home games fail at recreating black hairstyles.

The History of Games

[Read] Into the Myst - "The bestselling PC game of the 20th century wasn’t made by Activision, Blizzard, or Electronic Arts. It was built by seven people working out of their homes in the rolling hills near Spokane"

[Watch | 26 mins] iOS Games Emulation Finally Cracked Thanks to Super Monkey Ball - iPhone games are almost impossible to preserve. An emulator might finally change that.

[Read] The narrative had to be baked into the corridors: Marc Laidlaw on writing Half-Life - RPS tracks down the reclusive writer on Half-Life, and asks him why he 'leaked' the story for HL3.

[Read] The Red Ring of Death: How a Billion-Dollar Reboot Changed Xbox Forever - "Fixing this problem eventually cost Microsoft over a billion dollars. Yet this very public mistake proved invaluable to shaping Xbox as we know it today."

Beyond Games

[Read] ‘Eighty-nine perfect minutes’: 30 of the best short films and novels - "Is the trend for epic movies and hefty novels getting too much? Our critics redress the balance with a classic compilation of shorter works"

[Read] AI Art Only Looks Like Art If You Don’t Care - "It’s hard not to think of tech and art as being fundamentally at odds when you consider how many artists’ livelihoods have been decimated by its advances."

[Watch | 19 mins] How your phone knows Up from Down - "Phones use small micro mechanical chips called MEMS, to monitor accelerations and rotations. These are fabricated using semiconductor technology, but are tiny little moving mechanisms."

[Watch | CC | 28 mins] Why Clip Art Was Everywhere... Until It Wasn't - "Clip Art was an inescapable part of growing up in the 1990s, but it was more than that. It was a reflection of the technology that shaped the decades between the birth of the PC to the age of the smartphone."