Death to Realism! 013
Death to Realism! 013
Lucky for you number 13 is a pretty brief one. If you need a refresher on the origin & nature of these bi-weekly updates, check out the first issue before reading on.
What's New?
I have a job interview for a position that would actually involve using my degree this week! I have no idea what my chances are but it does give me an opportunity to bring up what I would do with this thing if I do get a full time job actually in the field (rather than the full time job I have now which is totally unrelated). My pay and day-to-day involvement with games curation would go up and I'd have a more formal outlet for my work, so I'd probably put this newsletter (and all related subscription charges) on hold, and shift to more irregular, free updates when anything extra special happens.
I also am continuing to help out with the back end and some interviews for the Keywords in Play series. An interview with Leon Xiao on lootbox regulations went up this week and my conversation with Felan Parker that I recorded recently will probably go up in a few!
Coming Soon
The second Domino Club jam has started! I'm learning a new-ish to me engine for it and have finished writing the script. I feel like that's all I can really say because some fellow Domino Club members read this newsletter and part of the fun of the jams is anonymous submission and guessing whose is whose... however I also think my subject is really obvious (like last time) so I am never really as tricky or mysterious as I'd like to be.
The Rec Room
All this week I have been playing Mirrors, a rather unique PC-88 VN that got a translation patch recently. I say unique because many of the characters are obviously photos of the members of Depeche Mode, except the main character, who is obviously David Sylvian. The narrative is dreamy and suspenseful and does some crazy visual and audio stuff with the limited capabilities of the PC-88, but also, I find the idea that, in a world where Dave Gahan didn't exist Depeche Mode would just be fronted by David Sylvian to be a really interesting conceptual proposal????
I've written about Dating Ariane as one of the mysterious videogame mazes of my youth... This week I found out that there's a massive sequel game that not only has three potential romantic interests, but a surprisingly high-concept sci-fi backstory?? Surprised and delighted that this is the path one of the most notorious HTML porn game devs took.
For Zone's ongoing Halloween season, one of the films we watched this week was Noroi (The Curse). I don't tend to love found footage horror, but the variety of footage and modes of exposition used in this one was really interesting, as well as the sort of deliberately sprawling and left incomplete "lore" behind the strange events in the film.
I got Scrivener, finally. Wrestling with Open Office finally became unsustainable and I wanted a one-payment offline piece of software I could write with that wouldn't handle formatting across file types so inconsistently. I love it! If you make a NaNoWriMo account over the next month or so, you can get a small discount on it, and I don't think you're necessarily on the hook to write a novel with it, but that'd be cool...
I've Been Reading
Stephen and I took a day off to return to our favorite activity after a long time of neglecting it: used bookstore browsing. We visited Voltaire & Rousseau and Thistle Books on the West End, and I was able to pick up a copy of Great Expectations by Kathy Acker and The Accidental by Ali Smith, two novels I'd been meaning to read for a while, in addition to a truly unexpected find: The Abbey Explorer's Guide by Frank Bottomley. It's a pocket-size dictionary of terms relating to the architecture, history, and activities of various British monasteries and will be holding me over until more chapters of Misericorde come out.
In terms of articles over the past two weeks, this long read on the ambivalent and complex role of Steam in China's indie game scene was really informative. Leeroy Lewin has also finished up their series of fascinating posts on Pitfall II, which make a really compelling and in-depth argument for reconsidering the role corporations and copyright law currently have in determining the narrative of gaming history. The final post is here, but also read them all if you haven't. Finally, I really enjoyed this old Wired article on Riven, preserved on someone's tumblr blog. It captures so many weird details as well as the rather distinct "Wired Style" of that period, both for better and worse.
I think that's all I have this bi-week! For new subscribers who have signed on since the last newsletter, you can check out the archive of past issues at any time!
Thank you again for your support,
Emilie