Sundays are for exploring your new home. I’m off to peer at a pier, you’re here to read the best writing about video games from the past week (and beyond).
Danny Chau’s dive into the history of Dance Dance Revolution is a splendid story. The fact that humans are well up for pratting about on gaudy disco machines might well be the most important discovery of the 90s.
Ho ho ho! Merry Monsterchristmas! ’tis the season for those most seasonal of events, and Monster Hunter: World looks holly-jolly in its new event. The Winter Star Fest brings warm winter wear, a festive fondue, and cute snowman outfits for your palico catpal. Older seasonal hunts have returned too, so you can treat yourself to something nice (albeit still warm and dripping with the monster’s blood) this Christmas.
The RPS advent calendar has begun! Pull up your trousers and open door number one…
In a move to keep more big publishers on Steam, Valve are starting to take a smaller cut of sales from games which make loads and loads of money. After $10 million (£8m), Valve’s cut will go down from 30% to 25%, then beyond $50 million (£40m) they’ll starting taking 20%. Valve say that that big games have “positive network effects” for all of Steam so they’re worth keeping around and rewarding. It’s still pretty gutting to introduce a regressive tax, the rich getting richer while many smaller developers struggle.
I’m back from celebrating my time off for American Thanksgiving to bring you the final installment in my close examination of game components. The pair to my last piece, on embodiment and movement, we’re taking the deep dive into space and movement.
I know not all games are made of only four elements — time, rules or constraints, embodiment, and space — but it sure seems like that’s what make up the games I like. Sometimes it can feel like there’s so much Discourse about what does or does not make up a game: Does it require skill? Can you win? Is it difficult? Are there points? At the end of the day, if these questions aren’t proving productive or generative, it seems like it just isn’t worth it to ask. Questions I find more interesting are: what does this piece do with its components? What about it can I find compelling? What does this game teach me? Where does this game challenge me?
When it comes to movement, I think that space and embodiment are two sides of the same coin. When playing a game, one often embodies some sort of representational (or otherwise) avatar, and then there is the space through which that representation moves. There is Pac-Man, and then there is the labyrinthian space through which the Pac-Man Pacs. Last week considered what it meant to control or embody those representations, and this week’s post looks at the requisite space around those representations which gives them context. Here are some games with some neat focus on space:
Pinch and a punch for the first of the month – and no returns! Oh, and Merry Christmas. Fire up SomaFM, open the first door on your advent calendar, and enjoy four weeks of mulling the Dickens out of everything you eat, drink, wear, and play.
What are you playing this weekend? Here’s what we’re clicking on!
One of the things we hear most often from readers is that we’re too handsome, too clever, too lovely. Putting this quantity of quality into the world makes it hard to keep up with us. So as an experiment, I’m revising an old RPS format: the Omnibus. Here, we’ll roundup the prior week’s offerings – like a Sunday Papers but only for our own articles, the real best writing about videogames.
