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Image credit: RPS

Sundays are for getting your 10,000 steps in, apparently. I bring this up specifically because I’ve been crap at exercising recently and I need you, RPS readers, to shame me into doing it more, much as you did when I admitted on the podcast to rarely using sunscreen. I’m counting on you, everyone.

In exchange, here are some good writings, mostly about games, from the past week or so.

Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland argues for the return of cheat codes. I’m not sure their intent was to let players “customize their gameplay experience,” at least at first – didn’t they start as developer skipping tools that were left in by mistake? – but it’s true that built-in, menu-enabled God modes and difficulty modifiers don’t have the same naughty magic.

Back in the day, players usually found cheat codes from a source outside of the game itself, passing around the arcane knowledge through online forums, printed magazines, or schoolyard rumors. That outside sourcing made it clear that, while these codes were obviously part of the game in a sense, they were also somehow separate from the core gameplay experience. Even the term “cheat code” connotes the idea that you’re getting away with something by evading the game’s built-in rules.

For Well Played, Josefina Huq explores Melbourne’s game development communities, finding them nourished by the power of “showing up.”

Every dev I spoke to mentioned showing up in some form, whether physically just being a body in a space, or how we’ve come to use the phrase to describe how someone can seriously and earnestly invest in something. Being the last one at the party, being a bum on a seat, or as Leura described, the phenomena of someone seeing your face so often that they’ll eventually feel the need to say hello. Terry describes it as “much like a protest... you just being there is massively contributing to the thing.”

InFlux developer Joe Wintergreen recounts the narrative advice he received, many moons ago, from Valve lead David Speyrer. Probably some wise words in here for aspiring devs, and an interesting insight into the craft for the rest of us.

The state of InFlux at the time was that it had been a simple sequence of puzzle rooms, and some folks thought it should stay like that, but I was observing puzzle fatigue (a term I had learned from Valve’s developer commentary) that I had thrown in lower-engagement “overworld” sections as a solution for. That made it feel like it had to lead somewhere, have some sort of narrative, and I didn’t have one. There was just enough to the overworld, though, that players were inventing narrative elements that I hadn’t thought of suggesting, and I had started reacting to that by planting evidence to support people’s interpretations.

Defector’s Kelsey McKinney reviews Taylor Swift’s new album. Not games-related, unless Tay Tay is secretly planning a leveraged buyout of Ubisoft, but Life of a Showgirl’s dizzying arsenal of special editions is uncomfortably reminiscent of certain game publisher tactics.

As it has been for her past few releases, Swift’s business acumen has been on display in full force for the promotion for The Life of a Showgirl. Upon announcing the album, Swift put up a vinyl for pre-order on her site, and then another, and then another. Before the album was even released, she had promoted and sold on her site eight exclusive vinyl variants in different colors with different names (“Sweat And Vanilla Perfume Edition,” “Baby, That’s Show Business Edition,” etc.), and eight CDs, and one sweater which comes with a CD. The vinyls cost $34. The CDs cost $20. The sweater/CD costs $70. And one of those was a Target exclusive edition! Don’t forget Target! The marketing scheme for each of these releases (which came one after another) was scarcity. They will sell out! You will never have another opportunity! Hurry! Show your love and devotion!

Through the prism of a Yakuza Kiwami 3 character’s face, Moises Taveras considers for Endless Mode what games stand to lose from remakes.

It’s an attitude in games that, frankly, I despise, and one that becomes further codified with each remake produced in this space. It is a belief that often frames older games as amateurish drafts that only saw the light of day because a product release demanded it. And even if that’s the case, that’s art, man! A painting on an easel is a collection of brushstrokes, some more elegant than the others. A composition is sometimes made up of pleasant and discordant tones working to make something more harmonious. To remake a game, or to remake an image, song, movie, show, book, or whatever, is to break a thing down and recombine it into something else, even if it looks and sounds similar enough. And there’s something to cherish in the nuances between these distinct forms, just as much as there is something to mourn—something that’s lost—in the transformation.

Music-wise, I’ve been dipping into Mongolian throat singing, originally because my wife – descended from some pretty prolific steppe-conquerors – had control of the car stereo at the time. More recently, because it turns out I like it. The work of Okna Tsahan Zam is a good place to start.