Expedition 17
The Bathysphere
Hello and welcome back to the Bathysphere. Please come in, there is plenty of room. On this expedition, Christian is playing Solitaire, Florence is experiencing a Quiet Year and Keith is looking through his video game book collection – again! Thank you for joining us. Enjoy the ride.
The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart
Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com
Delightful games
A Solitaire Mystery is finally out on Steam and giving me flashbacks to UFO 50. All these new games! Almost too many of them. Where to start? Which ones should I really pay attention to?
For A Solitaire Mystery it’s further complicated by the fact that all of these games are variants on Solitaire in the first place. Luckily I’ve found a way in. Time Travel Solitaire.
Is this the best variant to start with? Probably not. But it’s the one that has claimed my heart. It’s Solitaire, but you can borrow cards from the future in order to free up other cards. The only challenge is that cards you borrow from the future come with a countdown, and you need to return them when the countdown reaches zero.
This reminds me of something a school friend who was doing A-level physics used to tell me about un-sandwiches. He said he could eat un-sandwiches in the morning, but he had to remember to go and make them in the evening or the universe would explode. I think he would like Time Travel Solitaire quite a bit. CD
Every game by Zach Barth feels like a little investigation into what games actually are and how they work. His latest, Kaizen: A Factory Story, is a case in point. It’s ostensibly a simulation in which you run a factory during the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s, but it also asks questions about the drive for efficiency and the idea of player-defined goals. I am enjoying its charm and deceptively simple construction. I give it a five star rating for safety. KS
I’ve been at a conference this week and ran a session on keepsake games. The term was introduced by Shing Yin Khor to describe games that produce a physical artefact through the gameplay process. I would highly recommend Shing’s keepsake game A Mending, in which you trace a route to a friend by stitching onto a map. FSN
Related to the concept of keepsake games and map-making, I played Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year this week, a GM-less TTRPG about collaboratively drawing a map and charting a community over the course of a year struggling after the collapse of civilisation. In our version we had a complicated religious schism over the worship of pikas. FSN
Interesting things
Catherine Lacey’s The Mobius Book is an astonishing thing. It’s a kind of memoir/auto fiction experiment about some deeply serious themes, and it’s arranged like a Mobius strip in a way. Well, I mean that you can start the narrative at either end of the book and read back to the centre and it all works.
Now I’ve written it down like that it doesn’t feel entirely like a Mobius, but the structural conceit is secondary to the text itself, which dazzles, horrifies and, as with all great writing, elevates the soul a bit. For my money, read the red half first. CD
If you’re looking for a new podcast, may I recommend Games of Note, presented by game designer Will Luton and bizdev consultant Wayne Emanuel. Each episode they analyse a classic game, interrogating its winning qualities and impact on the industry. So far they’ve done Shenmue and Castlevania and they plan to cover both well-known and obscure titles going forward. KS
While at the Develop conference in Brighton last week I attended a talk entitled What Game Designers Can Learn from Cognitive Psychology by Roy Caseley, a lecturer in game design at UAL. It was an interesting event during which Caseley referenced a paper on game design that I’d forgotten about, but is definitely worth reading. Written by Greg Costikyan, I Have No Words & I Must Design, is a look at puzzles and game design and how we describe/explore the differences and interactions between the two. It’s a long read but worth it. KS
Essay: the changing act of reading about video games
Over the years I have built up quite a large library of books about video games – partly because I’m interested in the history of the medium, of course, but also because we’re still in the early years of figuring out how to catalogue games and game culture in long-form publications – and seeing this take shape is interesting.
In the early 1980s, most books about games were highly directed and education. They were either teaching you how to program your own home computer games using basic listings, or they were teaching you how to beat the most popular arcade and console titles of the era. I recall owning both Mastering Pac-Man by Ken Uston and Mastering Rubik’s Cube by Don Taylor at the same time, and it made sense to me that this was the way books would treat games. It’s telling that in 1982, a young Martin Amis had to disguise his legendary analysis of arcade culture, Invasion of the Space Invaders as a ‘how to’ book. That was the only format that made sense.
A little later, a few knowledgeable journalists started to understand the sociocultural impact of video games, usually alongside the wider impact of home computers – so we had books like Steven Levy’s Hackers, about the rise of talented young coders, which contained a fascinating section on early adventure game creator Sierra Online that’s still really worth reading. It was another decade before the mainstream publishing industry really cottoned on to the impact of games, leading to an influx of history books, including Leonard Herman’s Phoenix: The Fall & Rise of Videogames (1997) and Steven Kent’s Ultimate History of Video Games (1981) as well as MANY others.
I think I’ve written before about the two books that made the most impact on games journalists of the 1990s. They were Game Over by David Sheff, a fairly traditional business biography, but one written about Nintendo, and Trigger Happy by Steven Poole, a pop culture analysis of video game design and aesthetics. There were copies of these titles in every games mag office because they showed a very different way of writing about games beyond the endless consumer production line of the dedicated magazine market.
Since the 2000s academic writing and publishing on video games and video game theory have exploded – I have dozens of these weighty and expensive tomes. I also own coffee table art books, books on game design theory and gorgeous walkthrough books, which hark back to the ‘how to beat’ titles of the 1980s, but with much more lavish designs (The two official Elden Ring books are my favourites). But clearly there are still gaps in the market. We’re only really at the very, very beginning of mainstream video game-focused fiction; there’s little on the history of the independent game scene or mobile games or ‘games as a service’. The shift that’s going on in popular entertainment right now, with video games replacing super heroes as the ‘go to’ material for film and TV mega-franchises, has largely gone unexplored so far.
It’s taken 40 years for the scope of book publishing to move beyond seeing video games as a curious yet exploitable fad, toward understanding them as a successful business, an academic discipline and finally a cultural product. There are however so many human stories, so many social and political regions left virtually unexplored. Right now, it’s nature writing that’s undergoing a vast structural and thematic shift in mainstream publishing, with authors such as Robert MacFarlane and Helen Macdonald transmogrifying what we think of when we think about the countryside or the creatures that live in it. I’m looking forward to that transformative gaze turning upon games.
Retrospective adventures
No essay about the history of game books would be complete without a mention of the absolutely seminal Usborne computer books of the 1980s. There were general guides to home computer technology, themed program listings and publications about computer music and robots, all beautifully designed with luscious illustrations. They’re expensive to buy on eBay but Usborne has made a selection available for free download from its website. I thoroughly recommend a visit. KS