Welcome to the Save Point, your shelter from the grind. I invite you to sit back and enjoy some choice texts from across the gaming metaverse. Also, sometimes (okay, a lot of the times) outside of it.
Toni Brown commemorates the 100-year anniversary of the New Yorker with this fascinating retrospective of when she was its editor. Controversial once upon a time, she’s the one to blame for the publication’s radical modernization and, some would say, reigning it in from the precipice of irrelevance.
The staff of The New Yorker (and pretty much everyone in the world of print media) saw my appointment as sacrilege. I was, after all, the lady editor who, eleven months before, had put the naked and very pregnant Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair. Where was the gravitas? The veteran New Yorker writer George W. S. Trow called me “the girl in the wrong dress.” Garrison Keillor, the hayseed humorist from “Lake Wobegon,” quit. Jamaica Kincaid called me “Stalin in high heels.” (There’s some truth to that one.)
Monolith Productions shut its doors this February. Of course, I’d played Shadow of Mordor, but to me, they’ll always be the guys that made Blood, the anxiety-inducing not-Doom that scared the bejeezus out of me in elementary school. The Guardian’s Rick Lane explores the story of Monolith:
“Monolith didn’t really have a true identity, and we honestly didn’t really care,” Price explains. “We pretty much just made whatever we wanted to make… We didn’t spend a lot of time trying to figure out what genre would sell the best or what theme would be the most accessible to the mass market. We just tried to make what we thought was cool.”
Also from The Guardian, Keith Stuart takes a look at the cultural importance of games magazines and the people working to preserve it. I’m still mourning the death of Game Informer. I considered subscribing several times but never pulled the trigger. A few months later, the publication was suddenly and unceremoniously put out to pasture. The last physical issue I remember reading had Boogerman on the cover.
Lacking the cultural gravitas of music or movie publications, they were mostly thrown away. While working at Future Publishing as a games journalist in the 1990s, I watched many times as hundreds of old issues of SuperPlay, Edge and GamesMaster were tipped into skips for pulping. I feel queasy just thinking about it.
Tom Francis put his money where his pen was, trading a job of critiquing games to actually making them. I remember feeling a strange bittersweetness when he announced Gunpoint, thinking, “Oh, he probably won’t be updating his blog very often anymore.” Unfortunately, Gunpoint was a hit. This is Aron Garst summing up Francis’ GDC talk on how his team streamlined jokemaking for their latest game, Tactical Breach Wizards:
Francis’s cheats detailed how several well known writing methods worked for Tactical Breach Wizards. Methods like dialogue trees that put the player’s sense of humor first, word-by-word text that helped timed-based jokes hit in stride, character-based comedy that doubled as both jokes and context, and the idea that jokes should be told with the lowest amount of friction possible. Don’t put a ton of work into a single joke—or take your player on a detour—to avoid letting them down in a big way.
GDC content alone could have packed this page, but you know where to find that.