Worth Reading: 10/28/2014

I'm still recovering from 24 hours of playing video games with the likes of Dave Lang, but it was a wonderful, surreal experience that resulted in raising thousands of dollars for an excellent cause. There's just enough distance from the madness I'm confident we'll be back next year.

Since Worth Reading is already an entire day late, let's just get on with it. Let's blame it on Taylor Swift.

You Should Read These

• "Fake deaths, cheap resurrections, and dealing with real grief" by William Hughes

Having lived through a series of significant personal losses in the last few years, the most striking personal change has been my reaction to media. I used to wonder how other people cried so easily during movies, which is no longer a problem for me. If anything, I'm peeved when a story's able to extract cheap waterworks from me because of my past, and William Hughes painfully but faithfully articulates how unsettling this storytelling trick is. Death is one of the few constants that binds us together, and stories often treat death as the most efficient way of drawing emotional responses from the audience be deploying the nuclear option. It doesn't mean death should be off-limits, but when death becomes meaningless, it becomes a trope. At that stage, we should be wondering why stories aren't demanding more from themselves. I don't mind crying, but hey, earn it.

"It’s not really Guardians’ fault--dead and dying parents have been a motivating trope since people first started writing down stories. But the movie’s opening, with young Peter Quill failing to say goodbye to his dying mother, is still blatant, gross manipulation of its audience, and, sitting in that theater with tears streaming down my face, I found myself getting pissed off. Having death shoved in my face in the first minutes of what was supposed to be a vacation from the shitty reality of my life tainted the entire movie-going experience, and suddenly, I couldn’t help but see every subsequent moment of the film--the weirdly bloodless combat, the plot-mandated sudden sad revelations that occurred like clockwork every 15 minutes, the perfunctory killing off of the supporting cast--as bald manipulation by people who didn’t understand what sorrow really was, or that death wasn’t just a plot device but a real thing, hideous and ever-present. The movie has a body count in the hundreds, but none of those deaths mattered, because no one involved with the thing had any respect for death as anything but a beat in the plot."

• "More Than My Pain" by Mattie Brice

Though Mattie Brice hasn't stopped writing about games, she has distanced herself from games culture because of the last several months, and it's a loss for all of us. Though Brice doesn't explicitly talk about GamerGate in her piece, it's certainly appliable to this and other movements in which two sides sling mud at one another with no end in sight. She talks at length about how one of the most common reasons people reach out to her is to publicly comment on pain, hate, and harassment. In her words, she becomes a chess piece in a larger conversation about her without allowing her full participation in it. In that way, our industry has failed her and others like her.

"What I’ve realized during my time engaging with the online community surrounding games media and development is that minoritized voices often only get visibility and resources when they are talking about their pain. This is particularly true for people who aren’t men, who on top of doing good work, they must put themselves out there enough for hordes to harass them. As is seen with turf wars with games journalism, people are looking for personalities in their media, and the technologies we converse on emphasize these tendencies. In a way, social media is reality TV the audience gets to heavily participate in and shape."

If You Click It, It Will Play

These Crowdfunding Projects Look Pretty Cool

• Boss Fight Books wants to publish another series of books, including one by Spelunky's Derek Yu.
• Haphead imagines a world where video games have evolved to the point of teaching lethal skills.
• Collapse is a deck building game about doomsday prepping, aka made for Vinny Caravella.

Tweets That Make You Go "Hmmmmmm"

Oh, And This Other Stuff

• Cara Ellison rips on the ridiculous graffiti throughout Alien: Isolation (and lots of other games).
• The Wayfaring Dreamer interviews Chris Remo about moving in and out of development.
• Jim Sterling helps explain why Bayonetta is such a complex character and disagreement is just fine.
• Max Landis, who wrote Chronicle, once penned a ridicule adaptation for Super Mario Bros.
• Mike Williams spoke with Tolkien scholars about how Monolith approached Shadow of Mordor.
• Planet Money tried to figure out why so many women mysteriously stopped coding in 1984.
• Sam Rosenthal explores games attempting to tell coming of age stories.
• Barry Petchesky points out how the Kansas City Royals nearly crashed due to Clash of Clans.
• John Linneman explores the pre-patch version of The Evil Within you should never, ever play.
• Felicia Day wrote how recent events impacts affected her emotionally. She was later doxxed.