Sundays are for recovering from the friend-of-a-spouse’s wedding you attended on Saturday while suffering from an acute case of Old Person’s Back. Unfortunately, the time for recovery has in fact passed, as you have already moved to the more immediately satisfying phase of assigning blame. Possible suspects: your swivel chair, your mattress, the PC monitor you had to laboriously re-box for transit, your sofa, and that most connviving, spine-bending bastard of all, light walking. Spoiled for choice, you sit down in your untrustworthy chair and begin to read some of the week’s writing highlights instead.
Here’s Mazen Haggag for Deleted Saves on Final Fantasy XVI’s ropey attempt at working in Middle Eastern and North African cultural influences.
Lilith, of mononymic outlet Gamesline, looks at violence, games that scold you for violence, the both-sidesing of violence, and the empowerment of violence, mostly through the optics of a big stompy mech.
I continuously fail to compile a Sunday Papers without someone talking sense, however sadly, about AI. Dr. Michael Cook, artificial intelligence researcher and sometime RPS contributor, remembers the optimism of earlier AI work and contrasts it with what big tech has warped it into.
Bit of not-games to finish, perhaps. Here’s Niko Stratis for Paste Magazine on Nevermind’s 35th birthday.
Actually, it’s not writing, but I’d be remiss not to link People Make Games’ report on Bobby Kotick’s press-targeting lawfare, a two-year (!) investigation primarily by journalist Mikhail Klimentov.
Music this week is, if you’ll forgive the lack of imagination, the Control Resonant OST. Am especially fond of whatever the fuck this is.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-sunday-papers-829
