The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for treating your mum to something nice. Let’s gift as we read the week’s best writing about games and game-related things.

For Unwinnable, Emily Price wrote about what time loops mean to her. Price speaks to In Star And Time’s creator Adrienne Bazir about the repetitiveness of loops as well as their hidden sinister sides.

The game’s creator Adrienne Bazir agrees that time loops have an underexplored sinister side. “I’m a big fan of time loop and time travel stories in general,” she told me over email. “But in most of the media that I’ve personally seen, time loop and time travel are used as means for the story to somehow get somewhere, and don’t necessarily go deep into how horrifying those would be.” Siffrin themself slips into hopelessness over the course of the game, isolating themselves from their friends and refusing to tell them about the time loops (this game’s lesson: be emotionally vulnerable with your friends!). Of course, Siffrin’s friends notice something’s up before long and there’s a race against the clock to figure it out, which brings its own difficulties.

Over on Kotaku, Alyssa Mercante spoke to narrative development company Sweet Baby Inc about the ire its drawn from the misinformed. Sweet Baby Inc is an external contractor that developers hire for writing work, that has attracted ire for the assumption that they somehow force developers to make games more diverse.

Sweet Baby Inc. is a narrative design company, meaning most of its work is focused on writing stories and dialogue—they are not a DEI consultancy firm. That means they ensure a game’s plot points make logical sense and are satisfying to players, and that characters speak and behave in consistent ways. Narrative designers may also provide a final round of polish, like a Hollywood “script doctor.” For example, the team worked on Suicide Squad long after the story was written—and even then they joined just to write in-game ads, audio logs, and NPC “barks,” CEO Kim Belair tells me over video call.

Robert Purchese wrote about the magic of maps and speaks to various folks about their influence. David Gaider’s original sketches of Dragon Age’s world are fascinating, I genuinely don’t know how people’s brains can come up with that sort of stuff.

“I feel like it’s a way of understanding the world,” Kirk says. “A lot of the reason why people like fantasy is that it is a different way of understanding the world, and maps play a similar role to that. Fantasy can show us things in a different way, in the same way you might know a place really well, but when you see a map of it, you see a different perspective and you understand how things fit together.”

Not anything to do with games, but hey, I think it’s very interesting. Road and Track magazine commissioned Kate Wagner – a journalist, architecture critic and socialist – to cover a Formula One race funded by British petrochemicals company INEOS. The resulting article was published, praised, then “mysteriously removed”. You can find it here thanks to the web archive, and it makes for a fantastic read that navigates the tension between the wealth, the drivers, and the feats of engineering with real clarity. You feel like you’re getting an honest appraisal of the sport and the people within it.

I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day.

I’ve been enjoying some drama surrounding a streamer who faked blindfolded Monster Hunter speedruns.

Music this week is “City Of Commerce” from the NieR: Replicant/Gestalt OST. Here’s the YouTube link and Spotify link. Really does capture the vibes of waves lapping against the shore.

Bonus music this week is “Try to have some fun for me !!” from Yakuza 0. It’s the music that plays during the cabaret club minigame and it’s such a bop. Here’s the YouTube link and Spotify link.

Apologies for being MIA the last couple of weeks. It’s been a busy time and team absences/holidays have meant Paps didn’t have the capacity for a publish. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this edition. Have a lovely weekend!