The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for drumming your fingers and wondering what on earth is making RPS unreadable to 90% of the people on the planet, but fine for all of us. Maybe it'll fix itself if I sacrifice a picnic basket to Horace the Endless Bear? I'll give it a show, after I compile a list of the (fine) mostly games related writing which I found across the web this week, while trying not to include some piece of pop-frippery.

• Jamie Madigan at Gamasutra writing about Hedonistic Adaptation in games - and specifically, in game reviews. In short: if you take small breaks when doing something, you'll find it more enjoyable, because your pleasure sensors basically recover. So if you have to review a game without breaks, you'll find it less enjoyable. Which is... well, interesting, but it's worth noting that the games which tend to get reviewed in the one-two-day crunches at the developers are normally the ones that get the 9-10/10s.
• We mentioned Jim's book "This Gaming Life" is now available to read for free online. Well now, I'm mentioning it again. Go read.
• Next-Gen.biz reports on experiments that actually show that good reviews don't just have a causal effect on purchasing (i.e. if you read good stuff, you're more likely to buy) but actual enjoyment (i.e. if you read good stuff, you're actually more likely to enjoy it). As always, worth reading what the experiment actually was.
• Over at How To Play Kid A despairs about the state of story in games. I think he's being more than a little hard on Bioshock 2, as his problem is less about BS2's story but how it relates to Bioshock 1's story. The issue he picks up on isn't about games writing - it's about the writing of sequels. Gaming Daily takes a more analytical eye to the same topic, breaking down what games writing is to four separate areas - which is basic stuff, but useful and exact. And then Craig Lager gets in on the game, writing the pitch for Space Marine: Marine In Space. Yes.
• The Nerdist's Kiala Kazebee on why she doesn't like playing games with other people.
• Allen Varney writes about the five-year anniversary of the Escapist. 5 years! Man!
• Mode 7 Games' starts blogging over at Bit-tech about Frozen Synapse.
• Denby may be reaching a bit here, at least to pin it on APB, but it does highlight a general trend. He compares and contrasts what a "fat" man and a "fat" woman look like in APB.
• How to make your dude-dominated subculture more accessible to women. RPS' approach is to not allow icons, in case anyone has a repeating .gif of boobs bouncing.
• Really old, this, but Marc Singer writing on the Wire through a filter of it being a study of mature-period capitalism is sterling.
• Delightful Fiancée has had a short chapbook of prose-poems published over at Silkworms Ink. It's called the Jam Trap and is enormously silly.
• The Creative Process. It really is like this.
• Julia Scheele does a short comic - Never Say It'll All Be Okay - about her bloke being diagnosed as Bipolar.
• This leans heavily on me being a comic writer, I know, but this breakdown of why Amanda Connor's uses of faces is so brilliant pleased me enormously. More artists who can do this, please.
• Thanks to Consolevania's Rob Florence and Eurogamer's Ellie Gibson respectively I've had the Doobie Brother's What A Fool Believes and Ke$ha's Tik Tok stuck in my head for almost all of this week. My brain's been invaded by light-funk and violently auto-tuned girl. They will not move.

Failed.