Sundays are for leveling the strength. Don’t be a hero now. Get that baseline 60. You’re going to need it. Before you reach the motivational high of turning a two-shot into a three-shot, let’s review the week’s best article about games (and game-related stuff!)
For Eurogamer, Graeme Mason told the story of Captain Blood, not to be confused with Captain Blood, Captain Blood (2024) or Cap’n Blood (my cat*). This is a strange gem of a 1988 Atari game about tracking your clones across the galaxy and killing them, with a fascinating communications interface.
“Captain Blood’s limitation was to create a universal text adventure game, playable by every player on the planet and transcending languages,” notes Ulrich. “I loved the icon-based language, like ‘I love you’ and ‘You beautiful, you strong’. It worked in any language and I realized that by combining a hundred words/icons you could express a real scenario with humor .” This means of communication, called the Universal Protocol of Communication – UPCOM – became the main gameplay of Captain Blood. “We simulated intelligence using big data – I wrote hundreds of sentences with icons representing the characters’ knowledge, history, secrets and of course the precious coordinates of inhabited planets.”
This piece on coolness, scarcity, and subculture from Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick really resonated with me, because what “subculture” actually means in an age where you can acclimate yourself to a scene in a few hours of Googling is something I’m thinking about. often. Of course, I don’t mean this entirely negatively. It’s great that artists, game makers and the like can reach an audience without having to rely on publisher labels. But I also think that perhaps the feeling of being part of something small, special, and new can create valuable experiences with both the art and the community that may not be replicable if these possibilities are removed. I’ve never really been into vinyl — my dad owned a record store, and as Broderick notes, coolness is scarcity — but, to give an example, the phrase “online crate digging” always seemed to me to be missing something fundamental.
That said, I think there’s something strange happening with the way we understand subcultures. These communities still exist, of course. There are punks and metalheads and hippies and queer kids and weebs and ravers and all the rest. And thanks to the internet, there are more subcultures and sub-subcultures than ever, with platforms like TikTok generating new ones every day. But thanks to the Internet, the barrier to entry into these communities has actually been eliminated. You can go consume their respective knowledge on Reddit or YouTube, go to Amazon or Hot Topic, grab some stuff and go.
At Futurism, Frank Landymore wrote about the copywriter who found himself the ‘last human’ when his team of sixty was slowly replaced by AI. Grim.
Months later, management decided to cut people out almost completely. In the future, the AI model would generate articles in their entirety. There was poor automation, and as a result most writers lost their jobs. Miller retained his, although his role would be a little different than before.
Now he was tasked with polishing the AI’s bland prose and, to quote the BBC, “making it sound more human.” If only there was a way to do that with human writers.
Stop Elevating Mediocre Indie Games is a thoughtful and, honestly, quite exciting video from Pixel A Day, a million miles away from the ill-informed fad bait that the title might suggest. No shade, YouTubers have to eat. I recommend just checking out the Why It All Matters section if you’re short on time, and also so you don’t have to hear mean things about the fun cat game. I’ll be thinking for a while about the distinction in design intent being made here between “indie” and “AAA in miniature.”
The Earth has Terrible Worldbuilding video is a fun celebration of the planet’s many oddities. I haven’t finished the new Folding Ideas video I Don’t Know James Rolfe yet, but you’ll be happy to know that it’s quite doable after just fifteen hours. The incredibly dedicated fan base that remade Final Fantasy 7 in its entirety in Little Big Planet appears to have completed the project. Music this week is Cut Your Hair by Pavement, because it’s never a bad time to listen to Pavement. Nice weekend!
* Not a real cat. The name really warms my heart though.