The Sunday Newspaper | Rock-Paper-Shotgun

Sundays are meant for talking to the Squirmles to try and calm them down after a diplomatic incident following my cat’s various war crimes. To that end, let’s read this week’s best pieces on games (and game-related stuff!).

AI won’t make art, writes Ted Chiang for the New Yorker (paywall unless you refresh the page a few times).

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone who was convinced that they had a great idea for a novel, which they were willing to share in exchange for a 50-50 split of the proceeds. Inadvertently, this person reveals that they see formulating sentences as a burden rather than a fundamental part of prose storytelling. Generative AI appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium offers. It is their eagerness to exploit those possibilities to the fullest that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Monica Harrington tells her story of the early days of Valve in A Woman Inside.

I panicked. We hadn’t made back the money we’d invested. The buzz was still building, but we still had a long way to go. I told Mike that we needed time to figure out a way out, because the value of our ownership stake was highly questionable at that point. At the same time, I was also panicking because I had read the contractual agreement between Sierra and Valve for the first time, and while I thought I understood the major terms that Gabe and Mike had agreed to, there were several points that I was unaware of. The most important of which was that Sierra owned all the intellectual property for Half-Life and had the exclusive option to publish Valve’s next two games, all at a 15 percent royalty rate for Valve. We would do all the development work with a $1 million upfront royalty advance for each of those games, and Sierra would get 85 percent of the revenue and all the intellectual property. At this point, I knew that development costs were approaching $5 million or more per game

Given the licensing agreement we had with id for the game engine license, the fact that we had no intellectual property rights of our own, and the exclusive commitment for future game publishing rights, I could imagine Valve would be in the red for years to come.

We needed a different way forward.

Hannah Nicklin’s contribution to Eurogamer’s Where will games be in 25 years? made me pause. In my chair.

Although we didn’t spend much time developing games in the 40s, I never stopped designing them. But they were more like the games you played as a kid. Not digital. Games like counting magpies, or not stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk; betting with fate that your loved ones will survive the dysentery that’s going around, or that miracle of miracles that the photo you put on the missing person’s board in every town you pass through will be found, seen, found, and you’ll be able to hold each other close again. The next town, that’ll be the city.

Saying “People Make Games latest is a must-watch” feels redundant every time, but it is. A bit of classic Bowie for music this week. I learned this riff yesterday. I didn’t know you could do the walking rock ‘n’ roll move by fretting two notes on the same string. I thought that was illegal! Have a great weekend!