Sundays are for basking in the cool September air and hoping for more of the heavy rain that brought an end to the summer heat. However, it’s a feeling of luxury that is quickly pierced by the worry of having seen the last warm weather of the year. Winter is not far away and all the gaps around the living room windows will start to be noticed again.
Forget these worries for the moment and distract yourself with some Sunday reading.
There are far too few articles from writers wandering around an online game. This deserter prince who founded a poor imitation of our magnificent treehouse, Brendan, made good job at the other place. But it’s Kotaku’s Rebekah Valentine searches for John Bigwalk in Big Walk it was the pleasure of my week
I’m in the Big Walk tutorial area, the seventh hour of a day’s vigil. I’ve been sitting on this little yellow stool for hours, a glowing orb in front of me in the center of a circle of stools. Also arranged in the circle are the bodies of three other players, stiff and abandoned by their hosts a few hours earlier. I’m tired. I’m bored. I’m ready to disconnect.
Then I see it. Coming out of one of the starting gates. A silvery reflection. A flash of red.
It’s finally him. It’s John Bigwalk.
There are almost as many articles analyzing the growing wave of remakes as there are remakes. But I enjoyed Barrett Courtney’s argument for remakes to treat the original source material more like a new staging of an old play. He remembers attending a performance of Taming of the Shrew that didn’t ignore its misogyny, but subverted it with a witty performance.
We were all very impressed with this production and how much could be done to take the conversation around an original work of art in a new direction. I remember my drama teacher having to take the time to analyze what she got out of this particular production for a play she had very strong feelings about.
I’m sure we’ve all seen great Shakespeare productions, but I’d wager that the ones that have stuck with us are the ones that actually had something to say beyond the understanding we came to during 2nd period English.
I’ve been thinking a lot about these theatrical productions as we’re inundated with video game remakes.
Following much pessimism regarding the video game industry facing a crash similar to that seen in the 80s, the still excellent Rob Fahey wrote some predictions for the next decade. While not all is rosy, he shares good reasons why the situation is unlikely to be as bad as it was in 1983.
Even if not everyone is catastrophic, no one seems to categorically reject the “Crash 2.0” framing either. The specter of the video game crash of 1983 looms, though we can’t quite understand its invocation at this particular moment. After all, the industry sometimes has a certain sense of the dramatic and has a habit of raising the specter of deserted pits full of cartridges AND at the first signs of market turbulence.
Before we talk about the future, let’s briefly talk about the past. The year 1983 was neither a slowdown nor a rebalancing; industry revenues nearly collapsed, falling from more than $3 billion in 1983 to just $100 million in 1985. Analysts wondered aloud, and rightly so, whether video games themselves were a passing fad that would now fade into obscurity.
We are not faced with anything like this.
Kirk McKeand traveled to Japan to talk to Fromsoft head Hidetaka Miyazaka about feet (and other things). I’ve never completed a Fromsoftware game, but I’m always fascinated to learn more about how they’re made and what people get out of them. It’s not that I can’t understand it, it’s just that I don’t have the dexterity to be able to participate in it.
The game opens with a striking image: one hand reaching out to another. A male character is slumped in a chair, dejected; the shot moves closer to focus on their draped fingers. Beneath the frame, a pale hand slowly reaches out and caresses them before gently squeezing his wrist. Hands are a recurring motif in Miyazaki’s games; In Elden Ring, huge crawling hands emerge from underground to attack you, and hand-like giants are worshiped as deities.
“It’s not necessarily something I’m constantly aware of – maybe it’s something subconscious that manifests,” Miyazaki responds when I ask him about these images. “Take a look online and there’s a rumor that I have a thing for feet, but I honestly don’t know where that comes from. I feel like I’m trying to portray a side of human nature or human existence that’s hard to describe.” (His games have featured, by my count, at least six barefoot female characters.)
Finally, while we’ve resisted the temptation to look for Dolly Parton and video game connections to write an obituary, the Sunday Papers seems like a place where we can fit in a little tribute to the country star. I really enjoyed this article by Niela Orrtalking about how she discovered Dolly Parton while she was skipping school.
Lounging on the couch, eating cereal, I started the day watching the calibrated sociological chaos of Maury, Jerry Springer or the Jenny Jones Show, telling myself that cutting school wasn’t as bad as what the “out of control teenagers” on those talk shows were doing. Then I would move to HBO or TBS. Pop culture’s twenty-year nostalgia cycle meant that cable channels regurgitated the staples of Reagan’s America: TV shows like Family Ties, The Facts of Life, Diff’rent Strokes, and Silver Spoons; comedies about women in the workplace like Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Big Business, Baby Boom, Working Girl and – most memorably – 9 to 5, starring Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton.
To end on Dolly, I should probably choose one of her songs (and I would say listen to Trio, her album with Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris if you haven’t already). But what I listened to this week is In the land of Manalathe Vilma Jää song that was featured in Control Resonant’s Summer Games Fest trailer. Look, I don’t listen to video game music often, but when I do, it slaps me in the face.
