This week's edition of The Sunday Papers explores diverse topics within game culture and discourse. Bruno Dias offers a fresh perspective on narrative design, arguing against a rigid binary of 'real' versus 'false' choices. Dias suggests that choices are fundamentally questions posed to players, with the act of answering holding significance regardless of branching outcomes. He draws an analogy to cinematic editing, where cuts serve both structural and rhetorical functions in storytelling. Mai Keeling examines modernism and postmodernism through the lens of recent platformers, Fallstruktur and Automaton Lung. Keeling posits that the platformer genre itself emerged as a postmodern medium, centered on the challenge of navigating non-social spaces and the 'spatial confusion machine' of arcade games. The current titles are seen as addressing this legacy in different ways, one by providing a socialized tool for creating digital simulations, and the other by constructing a narrative world that supports a developer's livelihood through the aesthetic pleasures of spatial control and credit collection.
In a piece for FAIR, Justine Barron addresses media coverage of Long Covid, arguing that many larger US outlets exhibit a collective bias toward framing it as a form of mass psychogenic illness. Barron notes that while these articles often acknowledge the reality of patients' physical symptoms, they tend to attribute them to psychological factors rather than biological origins, suggesting mental health solutions over medical research.
Corey Miller, writing for Defector, delves into the complex politics of Dungeons & Dragons, or 'long D&D', using Matt Dinniman's Carl novels as a starting point. Miller traces the game's history, highlighting how it has been interpreted by both left and right political perspectives, from early concerns about Satanism to critiques of racial essentialism and its recognition as a space for liberatory play.
Developer Michael Brough provides pointed advice for writers discussing indie games. Brough contends that 'niche' is not an inherent property of a game but rather a reflection of the writer's perception or the size of the player base. He encourages writers to focus on what they genuinely enjoy about a game and to recognize that shared tastes are common, countering the notion that liking an indie game makes one uniquely unusual. Brough champions the idea that even if a game appeals to a small group, there are likely many others who would also enjoy it if they knew about it.
Finally, Cecile Richard hosted the third manifesto jam on Itch, which received 333 entries, indicating a significant volume of passionate creative output. The piece concludes with a musical reference, comparing contemporary musicians to the Dur-Dur Band or The Doors.