The Sunday Papers
Sundays are for reconnecting with old friends, reminiscing about good times, and eventually going to bed feeling an unbelievable sense of calm, contentment, and a newly invigorated sense of self. Lol nah I’m going to play Mechabellum and eat gnocchi from a packet. Asda’s vegan pumpkin pesto is very good though. Here’s some writing I personally found interesting about games (and game related things!)
For Game Developer, Nathalie Lawhead wrote about positive feedback loops and the freeing effect of introducing small, toy-like digital toys to otherwise closed ecosystems
Teenage me would spend hours figuring out how to change the word “Start” on the Start Menu to “Fart”, or how to change the bootup screen to some silly Simpsons joke. It was common to find others online theming their machines like that.
There was always a need to take charge of your digital space. To make it something more. Something for you.
It doesn’t even take much to empower people to do this. Just give them something small and silly and it can turn into some precious little digital relic that they found and keep.
As I explored the theme of building and releasing silly cute purposefully useless software, I saw how important it was to people.
For Polygon, Charlie Hall interviewed the publisher behind GHQ – the lost board game designed by Kurt Vonnegut
In 1956, following the lukewarm reception of his first novel, Player Piano, Vonnegut was one of the 16 million other World War II veterans struggling to put food on the table. His moneymaking solution at the time was a board game called GHQ, which leveraged his understanding of modern combined arms warfare and distilled it into a simple game played on an eight-by-eight grid. Vonnegut pitched the game relentlessly to publishers all year long according to game designer and NYU faculty member Geoff Engelstein, who recently found those letters sitting in the archives at Indiana University. But the real treasure was an original set of typewritten rules, complete with Vonnegut’s own notes in the margins.
With the permission of the Vonnegut estate, Engelstein tells Polygon that he cleaned the original rules up just a little bit, buffed out the dents in GHQ’s endgame, and spun up some decent art and graphic design. Now you can purchase the final product, titled Kurt Vonnegut’s GHQ: The Lost Board Game, at your local Barnes & Noble — nearly 70 years after it was created.
If there’s not a third article here it means I got distracted or couldn’t find one. I’m very busy and it’s the weekend, and I didn’t read much this week because I’m playing a very large game for review. Consider it the motivation you need to share all the good stuff you read this week, thus making this the best Sunday Papers ever.
This tweet showed up in my feed and made me want to shoot myself, but in a slightly interesting, post modern way. Do any of you play Warhammer 40K: Kill Team? I bought a big box of bugs and buildings so I can start playing Kill Team. They’re really cool bugs! In less plastic conflicts, this is a great, though terrifying, thread from Caitlin Johnstone on manufactured consent, or rather, the silencing of dissent toward the Western imperial war machine. Green Day demastering Dookie reminded me that Florence Welch and Dev Hynes once covered Nimrod in its entirety, so music this week is Hitchin’ a Ride.