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Image credit:RPS
Image credit:RPS
Mondays are for hoping your new graphics card arrives, seen as your old one got burgled last week. I’m fine! It’s fine! Burglar: caught. Videogames: written about. Here’s the best writing from the last week.
For UpperCut, Grace Curtisspoiled Life Sim games forever. She’s managed to describe the listlessness that crept into myStardew Valleyfarm so eloquently that the prospect of ever booting up something similar now fills me with dread. Thanks, Curtis.
But after a while, something strange started to happen. I got into a routine. I figured out which villagers I wanted to woo and devoted my time to painstakingly growing their next gift, to saving up for my next coop or barn, all the time with an eye on the clock, watching for the next season change or story event. As I’d imagine is the case with real life farmers, I was so busy doing manual labour I didn’t get a lot of time off. But, every now and then, I’d set an evening aside and stroll down to the docks for a bit of fishing. I’d stand there next to old Willy and wait for the prompt to reel in my hook. And wait. And wait some more. When it got dark Willy would go inside, and I’d still be standing there with my fishing rod, reflecting on the crushing emptiness of it all.
Fox and Sucker Punch’s game lacks a script that can see the samurai as Japanese society’s violent landlords. Instead of examining the samurai’s role, Ghost of Tsushima lionizes their existence as the true protectors of feudal Japan. Jin must protect and reclaim Tsushima from the foreign invaders. He must defend the peasantry from errant bandits taking advantage of the turmoil currently engulfing the island. Even if that means that the samurai in question must discard his sense of honor, or moral righteousness, to stoop to the level of the invading forces he must defeat.
Eurogamer’s “Someone Should Make A Game About” series continues to delight. Here’s Alexis Ong explaininghow the Chinese underworld works.
For Vice, Patrick Klepeck analysed worker representation inAlien: Isolation, contrasting the grim message of the original 90’s film tothe even grimmer message of the 2014 videogame. It’s a disturbingly astute reflection on capital’s onward march towards destruction.
For The Guardian, Zahaan Bharmal reported onthe concept of “lyfe”, designed to accommodate for the fact that our existing preconceptions might be limiting. I think it probably makes more sense to just adopt the following as appropriately accommodating characteristics required for life rather than bothering with a whole new umbrella category, but I’m just your average chump with a philosophy degree.
This led Stuart Bartlett, a complexity scientist at Caltech, and Michael L Wong, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington, to develop a new hypothetical concept: lyfe.
In their recent paper, they define a “lyving” organism as satisfying four criteria: dissipation (the ability to harness and convert free energy sources); autocatalysis (the ability to grow or expand exponentially); homeostasis (the ability to limit change internally when things change externally); and learning (the ability to record, process and carry out actions based on information).
With this definition, life is just one specific instance of lyfe. And in Bartlett’s opinion, there is a higher probability of finding lyfe on Mars than life. A chance event in Martian history may have sculpted lyfe differently from that on Earth.
A treat:
Mighty roar of the day.pic.twitter.com/spFe2VoyL8— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith)July 30, 2020
Mighty roar of the day.pic.twitter.com/spFe2VoyL8
— Dick King-Smith HQ (@DickKingSmith)July 30, 2020
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