Sundays are for doing back mobility exercises because your body is crumbling. Let’s stretch as we read the week’s best writing about games and game-related things.
For IGN, Wesley Yin-Poole wrote about Delaney King’s Xweet thread, all about why Starfield’s character smiles look like they’re dead inside. Apparently it’s because of a very specific muscle not contracting??
King references Hungarian model András Arató, who was made famous by the Hide the Pain Harold meme. His orbicularis oculi doesn’t contract far even with a genuine smile, resulting in the smile we’ve all seen across the internet for so many years.
Over on Eurogamer, Tom Phillips asks: Can game design help you beat The Traitors?. Phillips speaks to former The Traitors contestant Ivan Brett to see whether there’s a method to the series’ social deduction format. If you’re unfamiliar with the Traitors, it’s a reality show (originally British, has since gone on to the US etc) where 22 strangers are moved to a castle as “Faithful”, all hoping to share a big prize pool. Among them are “Traitors” whose job it is to eliminate the faithful without being caught. If they do so, they get the money for themselves.
This year, The Traitors returned to the UK with a slightly different vibe – not least due to the influence of prominent player Paul. (“Paul is a brand new thing, someone who has been built as a villain and a Traitor, whereas previously the traitors are built as the protagonists of the show,” Brett muses. “I’m sure Paul is lovely but I’m also sure he’s accepting, watching this back, that he played the part of the villain because he knew that’s what was expected of him and he’s doing it well.”) But beyond the impact of having a different cast of players, there are other changes – and an attempt to make each episode’s challenge more interesting via the introduction of shields. These were initially introduced as a way for players to potentially sabotage missions for personal gain – immunity from murder that night – but haven’t yet had the impact Brett had hoped.
Sean Hollister’s article for The Verge sings the praises of NVIDIA’s AI-powered NPCs. Sure, I think the act of speaking at a robot and it responding to you is cool, of course it is! But I genuinely can’t see how those AI responses are in any way better than some NPC chats in other games. I suppose there’s also the question around what a ‘good chat’ is with an NPC, as it’s subjective innit.
But many of today’s biggest video games already set a pretty low bar for NPCs. Saddling up to the bar of a cyberpunk ramen shop to ask real questions with my real voice — it exceeds what I expect from the average denizen in The Elder Scrolls or Assassin’s Creed.
For Dazed, Günseli Yalcinkaya spoke to author Ruby Justice Thelot about the online communities trying to preserve our digital memories. Not a specific case, but I find a lot of lovely memories shared in World Of Warcraft soundtrack vids. Lots of them make me blub like a baby.
If you were tapped into the algorithmic YouTube rabbit holes of the 2010s, chances are you’ve stumbled on what is sometimes referred to as a digital checkpoint – personal stories shared by users in the comment section of a particular kind of video in the lo-fi ambient corners of YouTube. These videos would usually appear via autoplay on the ‘recommended for you’ sidebar, enticing users with their mysterious, Kanji-spelled titles and nostalgic 8-bit imagery that, if clicked on, would play around an hour’s worth of synthy video game music, the sort of obscure crate digger-type tunes directed at fans of Midori Takada’s Through the Looking Glass and other kinds of 80s new age or spiritual jazz. It’s here that users would take to the comments section to share personal reflections that begin with the word ‘checkpoint’, a reference to video game checkpoints – where a player saves their progress in gameplay.
Music this week is “Anticipate” by Skream (Netsky remix). Here’s the YouTube link and Spotify link. Rediscovered this recently and it’s fantastic for when you need to get yourself pumped for something.
Have a lovely weekend all!
