Sundays are for hopping over stepping stones across a river. There’s a stone missing in the middle. Immediately, a quest decision prompt flashes up before my eyes, offering three choices: turn back in humiliation; attempt the leap and risk perishing in the writhing waters, leaving this week’s Sunday Papers unfinished; or pile up smaller stones into a rudimentary foothold – an alteration of the river’s flow that will surely lead to calamity miles downstream in the Humber Estuary. Urgency is added by the arrival of swarms of flies.

I chickened out and turned back in the end, but not before taking a lovely photo. Anyway, here are some things to read.

Bruno Dias attempts to decentralise “meaningful choice” in narrative design, arguing that we do not have to adhere to any rigid binary between choices with ‘real’ outcomes and ‘false’ choices that merge back into the flow of events. I like this line: “A choice is ultimately a question you’re asking the player, and sometimes the function of a question is to let the player hear their own answer.” Here is a longer chunk:

Branching choices have a structural dimension; they take part in literally defining the shape of the narrative from the standpoint of which textual fragments are or aren’t included. But they also have a rhetorical dimension; choices say things, in themselves. I tend to make an analogy to the role of editing in cinema, where edits similarly act both as a broad organizing system for a film narrative and as immediate components of its rhetorical or aesthetic content.

Oma Keeling considers modernism and postmodernism by way of two recent platformers, Fallstruktur and Automaton Lung.

i would in a sense argue that the platformer genre emerged as a postmodern medium designed to sell itself to you on the challenge of navigating non-social spaces. its conventions, in the coin pushing of the arcade were built on selling that experience, surviving a spatial confusion machine.

here then, in Fallstruktur and Automaton Lung’s dream logic architectures, two modes of addressing this. A socialised tool for the production of further digital simulations of the types of navigation that haunt and thrill, and a loose narrative world, supporting in its sale the livelihood of one developer and any Megacorporations that take tax on the sale, built around the aesthetic pleasures in the control of space for the arcane collection of credits.

Over at FAIR, Justine Barron makes the case for collective bias among bigger US media outlets towards the idea that Long Covid is a form of mass psychogenic illness.

To varying degrees, articles that psychologize Long Covid tend to acknowledge that the physical symptoms experienced by patients are real, just unlikely to be caused by the Covid virus or any other biological origin. They often point to a vague mind-body paradigm as an explanation, but one in which the mind controls the body far more than the reverse. Overall, these articles emphasize that patients would benefit more from mental health and/or social service solutions than research and medicine.

For Defector, Corey Miller attempts a grand unified theory of “long D&D” and its politics by way of Matt Dinniman’s “litRPG” Carl novels (which I haven’t read – honestly, they don’t sound as compelling as all that, but then again, my interest in the core ideas has possibly been spoiled by watching too many bad isekai shows.)

D&D itself has, in its half-century history, seemed both ally and nemesis to left and right politics alike. Reactionary campaigns to have the game banned for encouraging Satanism have given way to a wistful appreciation for its longtime modeling of racial essentialism; left critiques of that same essentialism have been tempered by an awareness of D&D as a space of liberatory imaginative play, often for social misfits. 

Michael Brough, developer of very good roguelikes, has some feisty advice for people writing about indie games.

Look, “niche” is not a property of a game. It’s a recess in a wall to put decoration in. (Some games do have niches in them.) I guess you’re using it in some metaphorical way to mean that the group of people playing the game is small enough to fit into a niche? This is not very interesting, and it is not even a fact about the game. You’re telling us about the game because you like it! What do you like about it? That’s way more interesting.

You’re not as weird as you think you are. I’m sorry, but you’re actually not. You’re holding onto this idea of yourself being such an atypical person and your tastes being so niche as a way to feel a bit special. And by god you are special. You are so special. You are this beautiful unique incredible configuration of stardust and we love you. You’re great. But you’re not unusual. If you like a thing, there’s going to be a ton of other people who would like it, for the same reasons you do. Maybe they haven’t heard of it yet. Maybe you can tell them.

Cecile Richard recently hosted the third manifesto jam on Itch – 333 entries in total, enough impassioned and often brilliant ranting to last you till Xmas.

Today’s musicians are either Dur-Dur Band or The Doors. Merry Sunday all. Keep your feet dry!