Reading List (August 2023)

Hi all! Apologies for the delay on this one - I've been battling the coronavirus. And mostly losing. Starting to feel better though and so will be back to video making from next week! To make up for it, here's a bumper edition of the reading list.

Critical Roll

[Watch | CC | 10 mins] How Save Scumming Makes Baldur's Gate 3 Better - " I see save scumming as less a tool for cheating, and more as a pacing device".

[Read] Playing a halfling in Baldur's Gate 3 has given me a new, shorter perspective - "Whenever I enter conversation with a human, elf, tiefling, githyanki, drow or half-orc, the camera sits behind my head, tilted upwards to meet the gaze of the other, taller party".

[Read] How Baldur's Gate 3 morphed Larian Studios into wild new shapes - "Developers that rapidly expand to meet a project’s needs often go through cultural convulsions - losing part of their identity in the process."

[Read] The not-quite-making of Baldur’s Gate 3 - (From 2018) "Chris Avellone, Feargus Urquhart, and Chris Parker reflect on the RPG series, its long legacy, and possible future".

[Read] Yelling is not journalism - "If I worked as a journalist, and I had a question, and that question had been asked by players constantly since the advent of DLC, I would attempt to do some journalism to find out the answer."

The Design of Games

[Watch | 14 mins] The Underappreciated Sports Fantasy - Leon Massey looks at the difference between sports simulations and sports fantasies.

[Watch | 14 mins] The Design Behind Immortality's Occult Secrets - "Sam Barlow walks us through the inspiration for Immortality, and how the game's systems cleverly lead you to uncover its secrets."

[Read] It's okay to be bad at games - "A Q&A with Bennett Foddy, the high priest of videogame difficulty"

[Read] To Understand Zelda’s Future, Look to its Handheld Past - "Minish Cap approaches the entire Zelda experience as if it was all a dungeon, packing lateral-thinking challenges into every corner."

[Read] The tutorial leash is getting longer - "The dissonant open-world graduations of Jedi Survivor and Ragnarok"

The Development of Games

[Watch | 6 mins] Creating Hey Listen - Mix and Jam missed the deadline for GMTK Game Jam, but kept going with development and shared their story, and demo.

[Read] What Does it Mean to be Wholesome in 2023 - "To identify what are the recurring features of the games showcased I watched the direct three times through with a spreadsheet of every game appearing at the show."

[Watch | CC | 11 mins] Super Smash Bros. for 3DS / Wii U - "Not only was this the first-ever handheld Smash Bros. title, it was also the first time I ever developed a game for two consoles simultaneously".

[Read] The making of Hi-Fi Rush with director John Johanas - "The most important thing we wanted is for people to remember the game fondly".

[Read] Media Training for Humans - "Treat [interviews] as a conversation between two human beings, both of whom have specific objectives that may overlap or diverge at different points."

The Playing of Games

[Read] Venba and Papers, Please Flex the Same Emotional Muscle - "You’re made to inhabit the character’s head by the menial labor they perform in a day."

[Watch | CC | 40 mins] Rekindle the Light - How Studio Ghibli Inspired Tears of the Kingdom - "I look at the many ways the work of Studio Ghibli helped shape this duology, the themes they share, and the lessons they impart." (Featuring a GMTK cameo!)

[Read] Diablo 4's Season of the Malignant is a hell of my own making - "It's true that Diablo has always been about the unending grind, but in season one, the tedium has never been so pronounced".

[Read] Remnant 2’s Wild Data Mining Puzzle Was Solved by Someone with No Coding Experience - "When data miners foiled Gunfire Games in 2019, they decided to bake a secret into Remnant 2 that only data miners could find."

[Read] Have You Danced with Devil Daggers in the Pale Moonlight? - "My relationship with Devil Daggers is perhaps best described as a performance."

[Read] How Yakuza Made A Legend Of Its Long-Time Hero Over Two Decades - "Few video game characters stick around as long as Kazuma Kiryu, the long-time lead of the Yakuza / Like A Dragon franchise--and even fewer have as commanding a presence as him."

The Art of Games

[Watch | 4 mins] How Overwatch broke everything to animate its characters - Using smears and noodle bones to make Overwatch's bonkers animations.

[Watch | 8 mins] The “Secret Sauce” In Modern Sound Design - Marshall McGee looks at a popular sound technique (over)used in modern games.

[Watch | CC | 4 mins] Damage Animations - "With how many unique body types there are in Smash Bros., it tends to be a lot of work to make animations for them all..."

[Watch | 17 mins] A Recipe for Animal Crossing Music - "The music always has this slightly tainted undercurrent - a kind of world-weariness that punctuates the optimistic exterior."

The History of Games

[Watch | CC | 17 mins] How Advance Wars Fixed Nintendo's America Problem - "Without Advance Wars, many of Nintendo's most popular games would never have been released in America and across the world."

[Read | Long Read] Diablo - A long history of Blizzard's dungeon diving RPG.

[Read] Barbie Games Changed My Life, Now They’re Gone Forever - "Adobe officially stopped supporting Flash Player in 2020, and the majority of Barbie Flash games are currently considered lost media."

[Watch | 1 hour, 30 mins] The Two Sides Of Tomb Raider - "A look back at the creation of the Tomb Raider franchise, the studio behind it and how it all turned into insanity and burned to the ground in the span of a few years."

Beyond Games

[Watch | 48 mins] A.I. Filmmaking Is Not The Future. It's a Grift. - "Let's talk about those A.I.-generated Wes Anderson parodies."

[Read] The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades - "TIME’s Stephanie Zacharek on the top films from the 1920s through the 2010s".

[Watch | CC | 11 mins] I tracked my mood every day for one year. - Matt D'Avella looks at the power of mood-tracking.

[Watch | CC | 14 mins] Why your driver's license is badly designed - Designer Linus Boman explains visual hierarchy through US ID cards.

[Watch | 20 mins] David Fincher - Actor's Director - A look at how Fincher uses (and rarely re-uses) actors across his work.

[Read] Oppenheimer undoes decades of American denial - "American popular culture has long wrestled with The Bomb, but largely from the perspective of its wielder, the only world power to have unleashed it on human victims."

[Watch | 39 mins] I used AI in a video. There was backlash. - Austin McConnell used AI for a book trailer. In this interesting video he recounts the experience and rebuffs the comments.

[Watch | 11 mins] When the director forgets to call cut - "The film Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, is the real deal. One 2 plus hour film shot entirely in one go."

[Read | Long Read] Tell Me Why It Hurts - "How Bessel van der Kolk’s once controversial theory of trauma became the dominant way we make sense of our lives".