Welcome aboard the 19th expedition of the Bathysphere! This week, Florence watches NPCs fight each other, Christian plays with the universe and Keith gets trapped in an office. There’s also a little look back at a famous video game adult content controversy from the early 1990s. Nothing ever changes.

As ever, please consider taking out a paid subscription as it will allow us to continue our strange journey. For now, please step inside, and be careful of those pipes – they’re hot for some reason.

The Bathysphere crew
Christian Donlan
Florence Smith Nicholls
Keith Stuart

Contact us at bathyspherecrew@gmail.com

Delightful games

I’ve been excited for Curiosmos since it was announced, and the new demo is an utter delight. This is a sort of toybox universe sim with the playfulness of a Vectorpark joint. The demo offers a very hands-on approach to accretion theory, and I can’t wait to see what the full game contains. CD

We love a backrooms horror game here in the Bathysphere so I devoured the demo of Pager from Bilge, a forthcoming 1bit horror game set in a 1990s office block, where you must do whatever your pager tells you to do in order to progress your career. Featuring glitch-heavy black and white visuals and weird empty functional spaces, the game is absolutely loaded with nameless dread – which is the best sort of dread. KS

Interesting things

For no reason in particular, this week I would like to recommend the interactive essay “good writers are perverts” by Freya Campbell of DOMINO CLUB. It’s a great meditation on why being unabashedly into the things you’re into is important if you want to create interesting works of art, and that “too many contrasting and unconfident voices have averaged out to a sort of perversion of the commons.” FSN

I will also recommend the Adult Analysis Anthology #3, a collection of fourteen essays on adult games. This is an area of games culture and history that has been side-lined for as long as the medium has existed. FSN

If you’ve been at the free book space in the coffee shop at Brighton Train Station and you were hoping to nab the sun-bleached copy of Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History, I have bad news. I have been, I have nabbed and now it is mine.

This is a wonderful book. Written by Iain Borden, it’s a glorious examination of skating and the urban environment that has shaped it. It’s the perfect read to accompany the recent Tony Hawk remake that I also utterly recommend, and it even fits that my copy is so gorgeously stained by sunlight. CD

Essay: NPC Coliseum

It was the early hours of the morning, battling insomnia, that I first encountered an Elden Ring NPC battle video. Bleary eyed, I made the unwise decision to open the YouTube app on my phone and let the algorithm offer up some mode of distraction, like wandering a polluted beach and seeing what the tide would bring me. My eyes found the headline: “50 Skeletons VS Bosses - Elden Ring.” I clicked and took the plunge.

This video, and others like it, follow a simple formula - get a bunch of NPCs and have them fight with a series of other NPCs. In the case of Elden Ring, this often means having a horde of lower level enemies like the skeletons go up against a roster of major bosses to see how long they can hold out. At first I was just bemused, but watching this group of 50 skeletons pursue demigods with a mindless determination became strangely hypnotic, especially because skeletons can potentially revive themselves from death indefinitely. Doesn’t seem like a fair fight, really.

My favourite videos are the most irreverent, or ones in which I can’t help but ascribe some kind of emergent political narrative. I found myself morbidly impressed watching a horde of 22 imps take on the infamously difficult boss Radahn. Is this a win for the ordinary folk of the Lands Between? Perhaps not. The aptly named YouTube account EldenRing Fights has a whole roster of themed battles, such as “Miquella’s Haligtree VS Crumbling Farum Azula,” which lend themself to a sense of regional rivalry. I prefer “Giant Lobster VS Bosses” though, personally (I’m on the side of the lobster).

Perhaps it’s just my video game archaeologist brain going into overdrive, but there is something archaeological about these videos as well. They allow you to witness the dance of an enemy's attack patterns in closer detail, tracing how the AI attempts to deal with different kinds of targets (and when it woefully fails). Plus, the videos are a kind of gameplay archive, reflecting the release of new Elden Ring titles like the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC and the more recent Elden Ring Nightreign. EldenRing Fights’ latest oeuvre is uploading fights between Nightreign and original Elden Ring bosses, the series now not only being haunted by its own past but actively battling it.

These NPC battles, in which the camera hovers above and detached, makes me feel like some kind of Elden God watching from the stars, a child dispassionately sending their toy soldiers to die. It's a kind of digital colosseum in which the point is pure spectacle and endless conflict just for the fun of it. I could characterise these videos as a modern circus distracting me from the things that keep me up at night. But that would belie the real craft and labour that goes into making them.

The Elden Ring NPC battle videos are a form of machinima, part of a broader genre of filmed in-game battle simulations across various titles. For example, you can find videos such as “The Biggest Battle in Minecraft (over 25,000 mobs)” from an account called NPC War. The scale of these videos and their deliberately ridiculous set-ups remind me of speed-runners trying to find glitches to exploit. The modding and tweaking that goes into them reveals the seams of video game craft - how far can you push the simulation?

In the case of NPC War’s videos, these are more firmly in the camp of traditional machinima that tell a coherent story using video game footage. For example “The Biggest Siege in Minecraft's History” opens from the point of view of an individual soldier who has been sleeping on the job. There’s also sweeping landscape shots and dramatic background music. Even the YouTube behemoth Mr Beast has videos in this vein, such as “1000 Zombies vs Mutant Enderman!” Though in this case the main focus is him and his friends shouting.

Call me pretentious, but I prefer my NPC battle videos without narration and an extra helping of hyper surreal skirmishes. The YouTuber Nameless Ring actually goes beyond conventional NPCs, also pitting “10 Balls” and “10 Ballistas” against various Elden Ring bosses. It’s this inspired creativity I have to thank for letting me witness Margit, The Fell Omen exclaim “I shall remember thee, Tarnished” to almost a dozen metallic orbs.

Perhaps the ultimate fight is not between the NPCs, but our own warped imaginations, and the game world systems that we occupy. FSN

Retrospective adventures

For no reason in particular, I thought it might be interesting to look back at the furore that erupted over the 1992 Mega Drive CD game, Night Trap. Created by Digital Pictures, this self-consciously trashy interactive movie was effectively a slasher flick with most of the blood and terror removed – yet it managed to cause a moral panic that led to a US Senate Hearing on adult content in video games which could have led to government regulation. Ultimately, the industry aligned to set up its own regulatory body, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, while in the UK, Sega responded to the controversy by submitting the game for BBFC classification – it received a mere 15 rating, which rather dampened the media frenzy. This news piece from the Derry Journal shows the hysterical tone that developed around the game. KS