The Sunday Papers

Feature by Ed Thorn Senior Staff Writer

Published on June 4, 2023

Sundays are for recovering from yet another wedding. Before you consume some electrolytes, let's read this week's best writing about games (and game related things).

Over on The Washington Post, Daniel Wu wrote about the life of the ohio farmer meme. A lovely little article on Dave Brandt, an Ohio farmer who became the face of the "It ain't much but it's honest work" meme, and how he pioneered soil conservation techniques. There's always a storied history behind folks and this is a prime example.

Jay said his father didn’t share much about his time in the military. Brandt, big and gregarious with hands “like big old bear paws,” instead threw himself back into farming, Jay and Kleinschmidt said. Forced to sell his family farm after the death of his father, Brandt became a tenant farmer tasked with the challenge of growing crops on a hilly stretch of farmland where the soil was sloped and vulnerable to erosion.

Emma Kent wrote about running a fashion boutique in Fallout 76. The highs and lows of establishing a clothes store in an apocalyptic wasteland.

Gradually, however, my adventures through Appalachia began to produce results. I found plans for fancy lighting and sturdy tables, and purchased brick walls from a player. I scraped together the 800 atoms required to buy mannequins from the Fallout 76 Atomic Shop. I even managed to find enough concrete to build an entire catwalk, giving customers the opportunity to parade around in their new purchases. And to my surprise, I found that high-level players would readily help out: some dropped aid items, plans, or even apparel items to assist with the building of the store. In one particularly alarming incident, a high-level player gunned down an entire squad of Brotherhood of Steel soldiers in front of me, picked over their corpses for loot, then deposited a suspicious orange jumpsuit at my feet. I guess I can't say that all my clothes are ethically sourced.

For Sidequest, Melissa Brink has a roundtable chat about labour in video games. A discussion with members of the team about games that portray labour in interesting ways, or those that don't quite stick the landing.

I nominate Spiritfarer! The game isn’t exactly about labor and workers’ rights, but it’s chock full of side plots and easter eggs having to do with labor movements. The main one that comes to mind is Astrid’s “Unite!” storyline, in which Stella confronts a cowardly Bottom Line Corp. CEO who’s hiding from the striking picket line, but my favorite easter egg is when one of the workers ends up singing lyrics from classic union ballad, Pete Seeger’s “Which Side Are You On?” The entire game takes a pro-labor stance, from Uncle Atul’s prior career as a union leader to the tongue-in-cheek Raccoon Inc. Theodores poking fun at Tom Nook’s many capitalistic ventures.

Indie Tsushin wrote about Neko Can Dream, a surreal Game Boy-style adventure about trading dreams for real food. What starts off a seemingly simplistic adventure, turns into an emotional gut punch, all told through a cutesy and slightly disturbing sequence of events starring eight tuna fish.

The dialogue from the fish starts to get a little darker, too. They are still cheerful and perfectly willing to return to the auction once you've found them. But they start dropping hints that they know that they are about to die. The fish and surrounding townspeople are nothing but smiles and good cheer, but that just makes the whole situation that much more disturbing and sad.

For Bloomberg, Jason Schreier wrote about Redfall's development woes. I wouldn't say any of the article is surprisingy in the slightest, but there's morbid interest in reading how the seams came apart from the off. Perhaps the most damning thing is hearing about the devs' hopes the game would be cancelled post Microsoft acquisition.

The acquisition gave some staff at Arkane hope that Microsoft might cancel Redfall or, better yet, let them reboot it as a single-player game, according to sources familiar with the production. Instead, Microsoft maintained a hands-off approach. Aside from canceling a version of Redfall that had been planned for rival Sony Corp.’s PlayStation, Microsoft allowed ZeniMax to continue operating as it had before, with great autonomy. Microsoft’s Spencer would later say in the Kinda Funny interview that Xbox “didn’t do a good job early in engaging Arkane Austin.”

People Make Games have just released a lengthy video which delves into Disco Elysium and the allegations it was stolen from its original creators. Here's a post we wrote which goes into those original allegations.