Sundays are for watching Youtube videos about different types of laminate primer and working out if you’ve taken on too much by redecorating the kitchen. One video will recommend one brand and 120 grain sandpaper, another will talk about MDF undercoats and sugar soap, a third will say to ignore the haters and just use a vinyl wrap.

You’re going to need a big mug of tea to get to the bottom of this. Or, you could put off the research and the inevitable trip to B&Q and just read some articles about games (and everything but games.

Over at Aftermath our old friend Nathan Grayson has taken a closer look at the graffiti in Left 4 Dead, speaking to writer Jay Pinkerton about how they hit an authentic tone.

“My memory of the Left 4 Dead graffiti is that it was an early attempt at crowdsourcing,” Pinkerton told Aftermath. “I remember we covered several walls of the office in butcher paper and laid out dozens of markers, pencils and pens, and we invited literally anyone who happened to be walking past to contribute. If they weren’t feeling creative, we let them flip through a big script book of things we’d pre-written and let them pick one that felt right to them, and encouraged them to rewrite it in whatever style they liked. If people wanted to go off script, that was also fine. We tried to reinforce that this shouldn’t be taken lightly, obviously, they should picture themselves in a tight situation with maybe only a few moments to write something on a wall quickly that a loved one might see. But otherwise we offered very little oversight.”

While I shouldn’t promote Jank after what they did to poor Edwin, I will say they’ve got a great piece on singleplayer extraction shooters written by the lovely, lovely Nic. I’m not normally one for multiplayer games, but I do find the small team sizes in the emerging shooty-runaway genre and the ability to play them solo lets me treat other players largely as AI enemies – as Jeremy Peel advises.) That said, I’ve not explored any of the single player spins on extraction shooting, so I’m glad for the introduction. Especially as I’m envious of every sharply-honed sentence of Nic’s writing.

Witchfire is Destiny with a cut ethernet cable and a coffee table full of artbooks by Goya instead of Christopher Foss. It’s as close as I can to get to the murky, gothic splendour of Hunt: Showdown alone. It’s free of lobbies and real money currencies and emotes and skins and the first level is a shipwreck-blotted coastline and yet I do not believe it will ever release a themed event tie-in with, say, Muppet Treasure Island. Despite the isolation of it all, it buzzes with some of the same noisy vitality that makes these things a tolerable trade-off in games that do have them.

I already linked to Lewis Gordon’s Black & White Making Of earlier this week as it let me finally vent about how little weed I was offered when I did my work experience at the studio. However, I don’t only want to focus on the one tiny bit of the long read that mentions drugs, because it’s largely an exploration of the AI creature at the centre of the game. It’s a technology that takes on a different significance when you follow the threads of its creators to their current roles, as Gordon lays out.

Today, the animal – which can take many forms: bear, lion, tortoise, and more – remains one of the most ambitious applications of AI in video games ever, born, in part, from designer Peter Molyneux’s dreamy ambition and Evans’ whip-smart engineering. Black & White has also become a curious and complex footnote in the broader and rapidly evolving history of AI. Evans went on to work at Google DeepMind, the company founded in 2010 by his predecessor at Lionhead Studios, Demis Hassabis. No organisation more encapsulates the possibilities and hazards of AI: Google DeepMind has big society-bettering aspirations – for example, using the technology to answer questions of hard science, like the structure of proteins (which won Hassabis the 2024 Nobel prize in chemistry).

But it is also associated with the technology’s enshittifying and tragic implementations: the sometimes factually bogus “AI summaries” scraped from media outlets which now accompany Google search engine queries; or, more troublingly, in how the tech giant is facing a lawsuit for the alleged role its Gemini chatbot played in the death of a 36-year-old man from Florida. Between Black & White and Google DeepMind, the trajectory is clear: AI escaped containment – from the relative safety of video game worlds to the real one where the risks are existential.

Writing for the LRB (yes, I am once again linking to the LRB), Stephanie Burt tells of how she followed around twee punk band Heavenly in the ’90s. I love the way she captures the excitement of hearing a new sound, getting hooked on it, and letting it drag you into a new life.

The first time I saw Heavenly play, in 1991, I wasn’t sure what I’d seen: a girl-group revival? Children’s music, amplified? I figured out days later that my life had changed: this kind of beauty (and girlishness) seemed meant for me. When Heavenly returned to America, playing the same tiny venues – but to packed houses – I got on a coach to see them again, then found a ride in another fan’s crowded sedan to a third and fourth show. I slept on strangers’ floors till we got to a festival thrown for a feminist zine in New York. I moved to England the following year, to study British and Irish poetry, but also to see Heavenly again.

Off the back of Burt’s article, I’m listening to a lot of Heavenly (who have just put out their first album in 30 years). But if there’s been a score to this week it’s been Mr Little Jeans’ Oh Sailor, which I stumbled across when looking for Sylvan Esso on Spotify. Though the upbeat pop is someone marred by the reason the music streamer suggested it: Sylvan Esso took their music off Spotify in September after it came out that CEO Daniel Ek is invested millions in the AI weapons company Helsing. While I decide whether or not to cancel my subscription, why not have a listen to Sylvan Esso’s WDID.