Dopamine this, dopamine that – everywhere you look, dopamine is the source of all our ills. Ted Gioia argues the rise of “dopamine culture” is what’s behind the fragmentation and degradation of art into entertainment and compulsive consumption; people talk about how they get a “hit” of dopamine when they open TikTok or play Vampire Survivors. Even experts who caution that dopamine is more complicated succumb to the temptation to oversimplify headlines: We Have a Dopamine Problem, Dopamine Nation, etc.
Dopamine is not the “pleasure chemical”. It’s a neurotransmitter that does a lot of things, including helping motivate you to learn and achieve particular goals.
It is wrong to use dopamine in place of “addiction” or “habit-forming” but everyone does it anyway. Why? It lends your argument a pinch of authority and style. It also sounds softer than “addiction”, even though that is precisely what most people mean but cannot bring themselves to say. For many, addiction is too harsh a word to use outside of drugs and maybe gambling. It’s a more comforting elision to say you just need the “dopamine”.
The omerta is perpetuated by the continued refusal of the tech and games industry to even acknowledge the existence of addiction within their spheres, let alone the fact their own designers will lecture at conferences about how to design compulsion loops and optimise retention and maximise engagement on devices that people keep by their sides 24/7. Gamers will tell each other they’re addicted, that they’re playing a game too much to the detriment of the rest of their lives, but they’d rather identify with the games industry rather than anyone who criticises it out of a childish belief that their hobby needs defending, as if it’s still the 1970s. None of this is helped by the news media, which doesn’t take games seriously.
One of the most important works about high-tech addiction is Natascha Dow Schüll’s Addiction by Design. Published in 2012, it describes how slot machines have been deliberately designed to create addicts in the service of money. There are zero mentions of “dopamine” in the book, and that’s not because we didn’t know what dopamine did in 2012. It’s because the word “dopamine” is not required to understand or describe addiction, certainly not when it comes to slot machine design. My ownbook critiquing gamification, You’ve Been Played (2022), also doesn’t use “dopamine” – but it does use “addiction”.
Pretending that “it’s only addiction if it’s lower class, otherwise it’s just sparkling dopamine,” doesn’t help anyone.
Institution issues a brief apology (PDF) followed by claims that “our staff have been subject to personal attacks, which must stop”
By presenting a false equivalence between whatever they did wrong (e.g. plagiarism) and the inevitably unpleasant consequences of those actions (people being angry about plagiarism), the institution lessens the gravity of their wrongdoing and is able to paint itself as the victim.
Institutions can execute this playbook every time because pretty much every instance of wrongdoing will generate at least two tweets or emails that can constitute “personal attacks”, plural.
This isn’t just misdirection against the wrongdoing. It’s misdirection about the institution’s own priorities. We take online abuse and mental health much more seriously these days, and institutes have realised how to exploit that. It’s telling that institutions tend to be silent on whatever day-to-day harm they do to their own workers’ mental health like museums consistently underpaying their staff – it’s only attacks from internet strangers that are worthy of condemnation.
If institutions are serious about protecting their staff’s mental health in the face of online criticism of their own fuckups, here’s my playbook:
Apologise quickly and unreservedly
Whoever would have taken the credit had things gone well (e.g. director, manager, etc.) must now take the blame; and say the public should not send criticism to anyone else involved
Provide an email address for criticism (doesn’t need to be a personal address)
Read and reply to all criticism
When institutions do this mealy-mouthed “the online abuse must stop”, it’s a kind of tone policing that dismisses all criticism because some of it is rude or abusive. We should stop taking it seriously.
Originally posted on my newsletter, Have You Played. Sign up for free!
I’m taking my first break in almost three months, partly because I just had a short holiday, but mostly because I wanted to look back on the games I’ve covered so far and share what I’m planning for the next few months.
My least-readpost was about a black and white game crank-operated cycling game for the Playdate handheld:
The Playdate isn’t so much a console as it is a tiny arcade cabinet that uniquely supports crank-operated games. If the idea of spending $199 on such a thing seems ridiculous when a Nintendo Switch is only $100 more, I don’t blame you. But if its whimsy outweighs its ridiculousness for you, then you won’t mind spending a little more again on a novel experience. And to me, every good crank-centric Playdate game feels like an arcade game.
This was understandable – basically no-one owns the Playdate, and even fewer have heard of, or played, Grand Tour Legends – but still a shame! One way I’ve been able to keep up a weekly posting schedule is by playing smaller games and writing shorter posts, and I was happy to find something interesting to write about this time. There’s an art to making simple games and they made the perfect one for this odd little handheld.
If you’re going to make a good turn-based strategy game, you should stop thinking about SimCity and start thinking about boardgames. And if you’re making a game about restoring ecosystems, don’t make players blast lasers through forests in the name of recycling.
This is probably my most negative post, and maybe that contributed to its popularity, along with the game’s very recent release. Still, I don’t think I was unfair, and I always write with the intention of being able to defend my words if I were to ever meet the game’s creators.
I do that by being as specific as I can be; instead of saying “recycling buildings sucks”, I try to explain precisely what the game makes me do that I find objectionable, sometimes down to the individual taps. I think I can pay respect to creators by being as thorough as I can, at least in the scant time I have outside of my day job for this newsletter.
Of the fourteen hours I’ve played Cyberpunk 2077, six were devoted to the almost totally-linear prologue and the remainder was mostly spent on a handful of totally-linear main quests. These hours were indistinguishable from linear story-driven games like The Last of Us and Uncharted, in that I didn’t have any choices to make and I was mostly being driven between locations where I would alternately talk and shoot at people, albeit in very pretty surroundings.
Now, I like linear story-driven games. Purists deride them as being barely different from movies but as long as they’re entertaining movies, I don’t mind. And so, just like movies, the best games end up being highly edited, whether that’s in movie-like cutscenes or levels being designed in ways to not waste players’ time.
But Cyberpunk 2077 isn’t edited. At all.
Speaking of scant time, it’s basically impossible for me to complete most long games (e.g. 15+ hours) at a weekly pace. I was expecting more pushback on this on Cyberpunk 2077 and Signalis, which I also didn’t complete, but I’ll always read plenty of other reviews and essays to check whether the game doesn’t become completely different after the point where I stopped playing.
It is obvious to me that practically everything should be shorter. Not just games, but books, TV shows, movies, almost all entertainment. I say this knowing my own games and books and essays commit the same sin. Long games cater to an audience that confuses quantity with quality, and while it’s awfully elitist of me to disagree – I still disagree. Even if you love Cyberpunk 2077, I don’t think your time is best spent playing it for 100 hours.
Pentiment is the kind of game that gets glowing reviews by English major journalists who adore the fact that they finally get to combine their passions. It is also a game that is quite annoying to play. But you should be assured its annoyances are shortcomings of design, not story.
We don’t talk enough about how annoying it is to play most games! A major thesis of my newsletter is that “it’s all too easy for games to hamstring themselves by indulging niche audiences, making themselves impenetrable to all but the most faithful”. Sometimes games like Cyberpunk 2077 succumb to this, and sometimes games overcome it, like Pentiment.
It’s really tiresome to run around in Pentiment, making sure you’ve talked to everyone you need to and inspected every single room and house, just like a point-and-click game from the 80s. There are half a dozen ways they could’ve eased or eliminated this requirement, so that more people might play it and complete it. And yet the game is still well worth playing. It’s a piece of art, not simply in its visuals, but in its writing and its wonderfully humanistic message.
What’s next?
Well, I’m playing Star Trek: Resurgence. It’s… interesting! I will have a lot to say about it.
Also: a fantastic post on OPUS: Echo of Starsong. I can say it’s fantastic because I didn’t write it myself! I commissioned it from a games journalist whose writing I find incredibly perceptive and probing.
I haven’t yet decided how often I’ll commission posts. It’s a great way to give myself the occasional break, and to highlight different voices and games that I’d never have thought to play myself. I like the format I’ve developed for this newsletter because it forces me to describe very clearly what a game is like to play, something that many publications and writers take for granted because obviously we all know what it’s like to play a Japanese RPG or a card battler or top-down shooter.
But we don’t. Not even people in the games industry. In fact, especially not people in the industry, because we’re all mostly too busy to play games other than the ones in our professional genre or those we’re personally into. That makes it hard for people to really understand and learn from games they aren’t already familiar with. So I’m writing the newsletter I’d want to read to learn about new games, and by paying other people to write in a similar format, I get to enjoy it, too!
(Sure, you can watch gameplay on YouTube. YouTube will always be more popular than reading newsletters! The thing is, I can read far faster than I can watch, and I think writing offers a precision of expression and the ability to quote and reference that’s different from video.)
I have no plans to charge for this newsletter. It gives me a reason to go beyond my comfort zone and really think about what makes a game uniquely interesting. I suppose if it becomes really popular I might get readers to chip in to commission more posts, but that’ll be plenty of time off.
For now, all I ask is this: share Have You Played with anyone you think might enjoy it!
Here are some observations and tips from my recent week-long trip to Tokyo and Kyoto with a friend. This was from April 25th to May 2nd, and it was my third trip and his first.
I’m not going to post an itinerary – we did all the usual things and I don’t think you’d be surprised by any of the places we visited, though I do have a few notes about Kyoto later on.
Arrival and Departure
Arriving at Haneda at 11am, it took 30 minutes from exiting the plane to clearing immigration and customs and getting our bags. This is a lot faster than the horror stories I’d heard!
We pre-activated our Ubigi eSim before our flight; my friend’s worked as soon as our plane landed but I had to restart my iPhone to get it working properly.
ATMs are plentiful in the airport, there’s no need to bring any cash (we didn’t)
There was a short 5 minute queue to buy a Welcome Suica on the way to the monorail.
Departing Haneda on Tuesday May 2nd, we entered the security line at 6:35am and I exited at 6:47am; my friend who started at same time but went through different security line exited at 6:52am. In other words, it took us about 15 minutes – again, way way faster than I’d feared.
Me pondering a tiny bar in Kyoto
Bullet Trains
We didn’t get a JR Pass and instead used the SmartEx website to buy tickets to and from Kyoto. The website is fairly good but the instructions are extremely bad. I’ve used the JR Pass before and I appreciated the simplicity of “normal” tickets, plus being able to go on the quieter and faster Nozomi bullet trains.
When you buy a ticket through SmartEx, you download a QR code per ticket from the website (for some bizarre security reason, this requires email verification). You can print this QR code out and/or add it to your mobile wallet. The QR code is all you need to pass through the bullet train ticket gate, but only some gates have QR code scanners. It can be hard to spot which ones these are, but they will have an upwards-facing scanner and the words QR on them. If you’re confused, you can just show someone your code at the booth and they’ll direct you to the correct gate.
If you add your QR code to your mobile wallet AND you have a Suica card on your iPhone with Express Transit enabled, you might have a problem (like I did) when exiting via a bullet train gate, in which the gate tries and fails to read your Suica instead of the QR code. On one occasion it kept failing and a guard eventually waved me through; on another I just tried another gate and it worked. I liked the simplicity of having everything on my phone but printing out the QR code is probably easier.
The overhead luggage shelf on our bullet train (a typical N700 class) was able to fit all standard airline cabin luggage sizes.
Shopping in Harajuku along Mozart Street
General
In Tokyo I saw 95% of people masking on the subway, and maybe 75% outdoors; the numbers were lower in Kyoto, perhaps because there were more tourists. No-one seemed bothered at all at people who weren’t masking (we masked most of the time, particularly indoors).
Almost all the toilets I encountered had hand dryers. Maybe I got lucky, but I didn’t see any need to carry around my own towel.
I usually carry a water bottle around with my on holiday but it’s pretty much pointless since there are few places to refill it and there are so many vending machines. In fact, I didn’t carry any bag at all – if we got drinks or a snack, we’d just consume it there and throw away the rubbish in the same place or carry it to another vending machine’s bin. If you can pull off bag-free travel, it makes the constant walking much more comfortable!
The last time I visited Kyoto several years ago, I was pretty stressed out at the crowds at Fushimi Inari (the one with all the gates) and Kiyomizu-dera. They were both smaller this time! We arrived at Fushimi Inari around 10am and while the entrance was busy as usual, it only took 15 minutes of walking for the crowds to thin out where it was possible to take photos with barely anyone in them. In other words, you absolutely do not need to get up at 7am to have a good time here.
We both bought 10GB Ubigi eSims for our seven day trip. My friend used only 800MB by making sure he uploaded photos solely by wifi. In contrast, I used 9GB; I used my phone exactly as I would back in the UK (lots of social media, Discord, Slack, browsing, photo syncing, but little YouTube or TikTok), and this notably included a large 700mb movie download. I was able to tether my MacBook just fine and achieved a peak speed of 2MB/s (i.e. 16mbit) while hanging out on a busy bullet train platform. I should also note that you get solid signal even underground.
Simple and delicious: pork katsu from Niigata Katsudon Tarekatsu in Kyoto
Dining
We had dinner reservations for three out of seven nights, which was just about right; for everything else, we just searched Google Maps for general cuisines and walked past a few until we found one that seemed right (not too busy or dead, etc.). The longest we waited was 40 minutes at a high-end sushi conveyor belt place near Ueno Park in Tokyo, Kanazawa Maimonzushi; everywhere else was just a few minutes wait, max. I don’t think it’s worth overplanning or stressing out about whether you’re going to the “best” place – the general quality and value level in Japan is really high.
Everything is far cheaper across the board, too: easily 30-40% cheaper than London prices, and better quality. The portions are smaller, which is why you should do as locals do and buy yourself a fancy snack in the afternoon.
Kiyomizu-dera
Highlights
I believe Japan still doesn’t have a major design museum but Tokyo’s 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT always has excellent temporary exhibitions, and better yet, it’s inside the beautiful Hinokicho Park, with the fancy Tokyo Midtown mall right next door, if you like that kind of thing.
If you’re looking for quieter park and shrines in Kyoto, Maruyama Park leads into some lovely trails to the west and north, and you can loop back through the Chion-In Temple complex.
Hinokicho Park in Tokyo
It’s hard to resist the temptation to overplan a trip to Japan, especially if it’s your first trip. But there’s so much to see and do, and the cities are so easy to get around, that it’s worth taking your time to wander about.
It’s astonishing how much easier it is to be a tourist in Japan now, even compared to just five or ten years ago, with mobile internet and translation apps and more information being available in English. We had a blast!
Originally posted on my newsletter, Have You Played. Sign up for free!
Roadwarden is an illustrated text-based role-playing game (RPG) where you explore an isolated, godforsaken peninsula in search of the previous roadwarden who’s gone missing, while also trying to re-establish trade and political ties between the peninsula’s fractious settlements and your home city of Hovlavan, while also fulfilling your official roadwarden duties as combination ranger, diplomat, trader, and postal worker. Oh, and you’ve only got forty days.
That’s an illustrated text-based RPG, alright
There’s a lot going on in Roadwarden, maybe a little too much. When you arrive at an outpost on the way into the peninsula (which, I will note, is deliberately unnamed), you meet a couple of guards whom you laboriously ask twenty questions in a row to download into your brain what feels like the entire history and politics and economy and flora and fauna of the region. It’s such an exhausting, un-fun data dump that I almost abandoned the game there and then.
As soon you leave the outpost to explore, the game becomes punishingly hard and obtuse. You start with a handful of coins – but what is a coin worth, and how easy will it be to earn more? How much should I really be paying for dinner? What happens if I choose to sleep in the cheaper stables rather than get a good night’s rest in an expensive inn? You’ll endure too much pain for too long in answering these questions. It turns out that even though you’re an agent of the notional central government here to help the people of the peninsula, no-one gives a shit (probably because the previous roadwarden annoyed everyone and disappeared), and in fact everyone kind of hates you.
This quickly establishes the peninsula as an intriguingly brutal place lacking in trust, but the fact that you’re a homeless civil servant, as one reviewer put it, for the first few hours of the game is a real drag to play. Your chronic exhaustion, filth, hunger, and penury constantly get in the way of doing anything interesting, even just travelling, since you sleep in late if you’re tired. If re-establishing contact were so important to your Hovlavan masters, surely they’d have kitted you out in more than rags given how so many characters judge you based on your clothes.
You eventually learn how to play more effectively: locating cheap places to sleep, securing affordable rations, buying soap so people don’t run away from your stench, that sort of thing. Yet I never felt far enough from utter destitution to pursue interesting and risky quests until I googled “roadwarden tips”, whereupon I learned that a) gambling is such a reliable source of cash that it’s practically cheating and b) fishing traps are the same but with food. I’d never have figured this out on my own, once again demonstrating how forums and wikis make playing games more enjoyable.
Once you have money, you can take on quests that demand more health and equipment, resulting in bigger rewards and new opportunities. This loop allows you to accumulate all the supplies and fancy clothes and armour you could only have dreamt of a mere twenty in-game days ago. Levelling up in Roadwarden is as satisfying and compulsive as in any other RPG, but it’s also faintly ridiculous. The game works hard to establish how tough life is in the peninsula, but how tough is it really when you can go from zero to noble in forty days?
(This is “ludonarrative dissonance”, a term that highlights how weird it is that some games’ narrative portrays the player’s character as virtuous whereas the gameplay – the ludic bit – makes you mercilessly mow down hundreds of enemies. It’s a term that is both an accurate description of a real issue in games but so overused it’s ceased being a helpful criticism; we get it, it’s weird how you kill so many people in The Last of Us! Still, it’s neat to apply it to Roadwarden’s odd power curve.).
If you’ve played Roadwarden, you’re already shouting, “But Adrian, why didn’t you choose an easier difficulty level?!”
True, you can pick between three difficulty levels at the start of the game. The easiest removes the forty day time limit and makes quests easier, while the hardest gives you only thirty days and makes quests tougher.
I dithered for a while before picking the regular difficulty. And I still think that was the right choice. I play action games on easy because, as a child, I was cruelly deprived of a SNES or Megadrive and thus did not hone the fine motor skills required to enjoy such things; but Roadwarden is not an action game, it’s a thinking game, and I like to believe I am just as good at thinking as the average gamer.
Perhaps I’m wrong and that’s why I had such a hard time at the beginning, but a lot of players seem to agree with me, with some suggesting there should be a modified version of regular that keeps the time limit but has easier quests. Maybe! Except I think mucking about with difficulty multipliers (e.g. making food 50% cheaper, combat 20% easier, etc.) only gets you so far and if you want to make a game substantively more enjoyable (which is not the same as easier!), more serious surgery is required.
As for the time limit: while I’m not a fan of artificial timers in games, the standard forty day limit seemed central to Roadwarden’s premise. I liked the idea that whether I did “everything” or not, I’d have had a complete experience as the designer intended.
Which is what I got. Few other games have transported me like Roadwarden did, with its richly detailed world emerging from haunted ruins and broken promises and sideways glances and seemingly mundane quests. Instead of a classic hero arc to save the world, most of my time was taken up by routine roadwarden tasks: clearing roads, repairing bridges for trade caravans, driving out wolves, delivering packages, playing matchmaker, finding someone to read a letter for a farmer. Practically everyone you meet has some grudge, some revealing tale, some little request.
And sometimes those requests are bigger, involving many trips over many days. These can open up new areas for exploration and force you to make tough choices. There are plenty of opportunities to do the right thing or to betray people’s trust, with no traditional “morality meter” tutting at you; usually the only lasting consequence for being selfish is your own guilt. Most people identify Roadwarden’s message as anti-colonialist, which isn’t wrong, but I’d argue it eschews the usual RPG didacticism to ask an even wider question: what is it like to be the person who picks up the pieces after a storm, knowing you may be bringing another on your heels?
All this amid a world of high fantasy. Cults, guilds, zombies, golems, magic, blood sacrifice – they’re all here, except without the usual kings and castles. Instead, we get a power-hungry, expansionist mayor; a foolish merchant wasting his money on snake oil; a commune of the young who you alternately admire and condescend to.
Each and all are well-drawn despite Roadwarden’s reserved, monochromatic appearance. Artwork is reserved for maps and locations rather than characters, who you only see in big, book-like chunks of text. Sometimes the style makes the peninsula blend together but overall it’s a subtle, effective accompaniment.
Even the place names are evocative. I found myself murmuring the name of my home city over and over again, even when I wasn’t playing. “Hovlavan,” I’d say, savouring its mouthfeel. Gale Rocks. Pelt of the North. Howler’s Dell. As you reach them, you uncover a bit more of the pleasingly non-literal map. Places right next to each other might involve arduous hikes, whereas the long eastern road can be traversed speedily if you’ve cleared it.
The forty day time limit means that even if you’re rich, you still have to worry about whether you’re spending your time efficiently. Travel is counted in hours and it’s dangerous to venture out at night, meaning that as the days grow shorter, the difficulty neatly ratchets up. Unfortunately I wasted a lot of time revisiting locations and talking to people just to see if their quests had advanced; in theory the game’s journal would help with this, but as is the case in so many RPGs… it doesn’t.
Then again, my aimless wandering made the peninsula feel like an open world. When I couldn’t figure out what I was “meant” to do next, I’d trot around setting fish traps, foraging for food, and repairing huts. But the game never quite manages to be a real open world, partly because its systems aren’t flexible or complex enough to support the illusion. There are merchants you can buy and sell things from, but there’s no proper economy of scarcity and abundance. You come across dangerous beasts but it all seems a little random rather than part of a living ecosystem. And so the game’s limited options means you can never ignore its prompts to pursue the main quests.
Spoiler: saying “treasure” doesn’t work
Speaking of prompts, you’re occasionally invited to answer open-ended questions like, “what are you looking for here?” or “who would you like to meet in this town?” This is a very text adventure/interactive fiction thing to do, one that’s been largely abandoned in modern RPGs because, essentially, it asks too much of players who are accustomed to quickly selecting options from a list, as Roadwarden itself normally does. Initially I found this off-putting but after I saw it a couple of times, I opened a notes file on my phone to keep track of interesting names and objects. It was fun to feel like a detective, but the experience wasn’t entirely successful because, like in so many text adventures, it was annoying to have to guess which exact word it wanted me to use. Will ChatGPT rescue this game mechanic? We’ll see…
It took about seven hours for me to complete my regular difficulty run of Roadwarden. Judging by the achievements I unlocked and what I’ve read of the story online, I saw just about half of the story, which means there were entire quests I didn’t begin and whole environments I didn’t see. Like I said, I feel I had a complete experience, but the game is clearly designed to reward multiple playthroughs. I have mixed feelings about this. I’m not a professional reviewer; I don’t have the time to play Roadwarden another two or three rounds, but I worry that I’m shortchanging it because I haven’t seen everything. Then again, we’re overdue a conversation about how games should respect players’ time rather than demanding ever more.
Undead workers? Nothing could go wrong with that.
Yet I suspect Roadwarden would’ve been better if it were either:
Bigger, with more open world gameplay inside a properly simulated ecosystem and trade economy, more sophisticated character attributes, etc. OR
Smaller, with more help on finding and completing quests, and less time spent simply trying to feed yourself and make money.
The game’s extreme difficulty at the start is a consequence of a highly compressed power curve playing out within a relentlessly hardscrabble world. If you went bigger, you could extend the time limit and smooth out the curve. And if you went smaller, you’d have no power curve at all, focusing more on the great story and characters.
I find it hard to criticise it for landing in the middle. Roadwarden was apparently designed, written, programmed, and illustrated by a single person – an astonishing achievement and a recipe for unconventional design decisions. But it’s a shame the game isn’t a touch more approachable. Holding people’s hand isn’t so bad. That’s how you pull them into your world – and Roadwarden has a hell of a world.
Follow-up
A reader suggests Season’s overwrought writing (covered last week) is because it was originally written in French and then translated directly into English. “I can also say it’s very, very common to hear this kind of really cerebral language in French. not so much in English, right? but the French really don’t seem to give a shit. 😄” The studio behind Season is based in Montreal, so perhaps…
Originally posted on my newsletter, Have You Played?Sign up for free!
In Season, you bicycle through beautiful landscapes, documenting the world as you go by taking photos, recording audio, drawing sketches, and collecting mementoes for your scrapbook. Eventually the scrapbook will be stored in a museum vault to survive an impending, tumultuous changing of the “season”.
So, what is a “season”? Well, that’s the problem. As far as I can tell, it’s a period of a few decades or maybe a century or two, with a theme that encompasses the world – so there’ll be a season of peace, then a season of war, and then something else. When seasons change, everyone’s memory gets wiped so people forget what happened yesterday and start living in an entirely different way.
But buildings and monuments survive, and so do things in museum vaults too, which means it’s not actually true that everything gets reset because what’d be the point of the scrapbook otherwise? Of course, it’s not like people forget everythingeither, otherwise what would happen to kids, and how would people keep farms running, and wouldn’t all the power plants blow up? And indeed, you meet people who tell you about events from earlier seasons, which is nice but seems contradictory.
The more I try to explain how seasons work, the less they make sense. If that annoys you, you won’t like Season; and if it doesn’t, you might love it.
You can probably guess where I fall on that line.
Which is not to say I disliked everything in the game. As I travelled through Season’s landscapes, I was touched. I helped a family facing evacuation choose what to take with them; their possessions were all piled up in a field, in a floor plan of the new flat they were moving into. Deep in the woods to the east, past an avenue of trees strewn with lanterns, I came across an old artist’s sculptures. She asked me to photograph them so could see them one last time, unmuddied by her fading eyesight. When I showed her my scrapbook, she was pleased her art might live on past the season.
That’s Season at its best, reminding us that it’s worth making space and time to document memories.
It’s an incredibly pretty game. I found myself jumping off my bicycle every thirty seconds to photograph yet another beautiful new vista, yet another stunning sunset, concept art made flesh. The game is constructed for those moments, the rise of a hill and the curve of a cliff revealing photo ops with the most immaculate vibes. It’s like if you asked Midjourney AI to make a game in the style of Firewatch and Journey. It’s almost tooperfect, a little too conventional in its Instagrammable beauty, but few would complain about that.
Wandering through your home town
If the designers stopped there, that would’ve been enough. But the game’s website also promises we’ll “contemplate and make difficult choices that could affect how the story ends,” “collect memories, make recordings and piece together the secrets of the world of Season,” and “meet a diverse cast of characters, each of whom has two precious things to share with you: the stories of their lives and a moment together at the end of the season.”
Given that I imagine most players who’ve seen Season’s marketing will only remember its amazing vibes, it’s puzzling why they felt it was necessary to add so much extra stuff. Let me list the things you do in this game:
Ride your bicycle. It feels great. On the PlayStation 5, you pedal by squeezing your controller’s left and right triggers, their resistance varying based on slope and speed. We should have more cycling games like this!
Take photos. This is nice. I never used any of the filters or focus settings.
Record audio. You point your microphone at an audio source for a few seconds, which records an entire clip. It’s fine, but unlike taking photos, you rarely encounter things worth recording, which gives it a perfunctory feeling.
Collect things. Letters, postcards, trinkets, that sort of thing. It’s OK. There are way too many of them.
Add those things to your scrapbook. You already know whether you like this kind of thing, but regardless: you have to do it. A lot. And each time, you need to select and position and resize those things.
Talk to lots and lots of people. There are a surprising number of people and they all have plenty to say. It’s not great. More on this later.
…and make decisions for them. Don’t worry – it makes no difference!
Unravel a mystery. Ummmm… what?!
This is a surprisingly interactive game for something I thought would be about cycling along coasts and mountains and taking photos! Story-driven exploration games (“walking simulators”) usually have far fewer things to do; Firewatch is almost entirely about map-reading and using a walkie-talkie. Why so simple? Well, it’s hard enough to make even a single mode of interaction feel good in a game, let alone half a dozen.
Season could’ve easily been a game only about cycling, taking photos, and talking to the occasional person. Instead, I felt pressured to Always Be Scrapbooking so I could fill up my literal “memory meter” (or whatever it was called) and unlock extra insights, stopping me from getting immersed in the world.
The first of many scrapbook pages
Now, you could say: ignore the scrapbook! But taking a photo of specific vistas and objects unlocks additional (and occasionally vital) information as your character comments on what she sees; the same for recording audio or collecting things. This, combined with various scrapbook-related puzzles, turns the process of documenting into an unpleasantly gamified chore.
And there are so many things to photograph ad collect that aren’t beautiful. Season tells its story through innumerable posters, plaques, letters, graffiti, billboards (“environmental storytelling”), all of which you’re compelled to laboriously interact with and read in order to progress, or at least understand what the hell is going on. Environmental storytelling can easily become repetitive in a game that doesn’t know what players have already seen – designers placing posters and graffiti and billboards all saying the same thing to make sure absolutely players get the message in case they don’t see them all – and that’s exactly what happens in Season.
Talking to characters feels just as clunky. In most conversations, you have to press a button to play the next spoken line, even if that means pressing twenty times in a row while someone relates a story. Not only is this tedious, but it results in weird pacing; if a character is going to say twenty uninterrupted lines, why not just have each line play automatically, one after the next – you know, like in real speech?
I could excuse all of this if the writing were good. It’s not.
Season’s writing strains for sincerity with every word. It tries so hard to be profound, but it’s just po-faced. To be clear, I am not against profundity! Profound people are some of my best friends!
Much profound
But if you’re going to make players sit through a ton of reading and dialogue with nothing to do, it needs to be as well-written and as well-acted as anything else we can spend time on. Instead, players have to sit through someone literally recounting their dream, famously the most boring thing to listen to.
Here’s some of the writing:
“I try to divide the things I see between two categories: permanent and impermanent. But the division breaks down. The difference is just a feeling.”
“The land curves, we curve it, and are curved by it in turn. Along the way I hear and smell and touch and listen.”
“What is a symbol but a word without a sound?”
“I hold tight to the feeling of being almost lost, barely lost, wandering without conviction. If I could talk to dad I would tell him this feeling in detail.”
“The scale of the old world grew beyond human proportion, maybe beyond human feeling. The parking lot will never die.”
On a letter:
Passers-by, I’ve shared my mixed feelings on a certain new organisation. These are my potential perspectives. What is your perspective? I left some paint around. Make a mark. Give another view.
On a plaque by ruins:
These Atmospheric Ruins Has [sic] been designated a symbol of THE UNFATHOMABLE NATURE OF THE PAST. What is this? A bridge? Some kind of aqueduct? Who built it? Why did it fall apart? We don’t know but we’ll live beside this hulking structure for the rest of our lives.
It’s all like this. Designers: if it’s too hard to write well – and it is hard – just cut the words until you can manage it!
Case in point: the old artist in the woods. After you’ve photographed her sculptures, you can show her other photos you’ve taken across the valley and she’ll tell you a tale about them. She was able to do this for over twenty of photos, and are just the ones I took in a quick playthrough! There is a reason most games don’t let players do this: it’s because it’s very hard to write good, believable dialogue in such high quantity.
And now we reach the most confounding part of Season – its politics.
Mild spoilers!
Once, there was a golden season. Then there was a season of war. The war eventually ends when a monk, sick of all the killing, prays to put all the soldiers to sleep. Then a new season begins.
This is a child’s view of the world. It would make sense in a fantasy, but the world of Season is closer to our reality. It’s a world of trucks and TVs and hydro dams and motorways. It wants to say something important to us, but it can’t even take war seriously. It’s a world where people talk of “internationalism” and of a golden age (for whom?), but never about why these things happen, just that war is bad. I don’t need Season to give me a manifesto, I want it to give me a point of view, yet all it’ll show me are platitudes and pretty pictures.
The world of Season, which is so crucial to its functioning, feels less like a real place and more like an amalgam of cultural influences scrubbed of their real-world significance. Here, Japanese shimenawa ropes appear next to Scandinavian architecture, while men in Stasi-like uniforms casually dictate behavioural rules via propaganda posters.
…The game is enamoured with ideas of community and culture, but in appropriating real culture and removing it from context, it robs itself of its own message …Season [is unwilling] to paint the world in anything but the broadest strokes (“Internationalism was breaking down”) and [a] penchant for flowery but meaningless language.
Instead, Season asks us to uncover a mystery involving experiments with magical crystals that absorb memories. It’s so confusing and drawn-out that it shatters the game’s chill, contemplative vibes.
Spoilers over!
Season reportedly had a very hard time in production. A year before launch, the studio’s creative director was accused of screaming at, belittling, and groping employees, their behaviour enabled by the CEO (they were both reinstated a few months later). Perhaps the disjointed dialogue and various bugs I encountered were the result of these problems. But I suspect Season’s bad writing, confusing plot, and overstuffed mechanics were there from the start. And I’m not alone; a lot of playersdon’t understand the most basic and important parts of its story.
And yet most of them enjoyed the game! So it is fair for someone to respond: well, Iliked the writing, I wasn’t bothered by the mechanical issues, I loved the art. That’s fine: most reviewers liked it too, Hetfeld notwithstanding. I would bet good money on it being shortlisted in awards like BAFTA’s Game Beyond Entertainment and Artistic Achievement categories. And having sat on those jury panels in the past, I wouldn’t be surprised if it won.
That would be a shame. It’s far from the worst game I’ve played. Even as I write this, I wonder if I’m being too harsh, if its art and sincerity don’t redeem its failings. But I can’t get over my disappointment in its writing, in its story, and in its execution.
Season could have said so much more by doing so much less.
PC, Xbox, and Steam Deck $19.99 on Steam and Xbox, free via Xbox Game Pass 15 hours long
Originally posted on my new newsletter, Have You Played?Sign up for free!
Pentiment is the closest you’ll get to playing Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose – which is to say, investigating a murder in a medieval monastery (hell yeah!). The game is set a few hundred years later than Eco’s book, when the Reformation is about to tear the Catholic Church apart, but it’s just as thoroughly researched.
This is definitely not an allegory for video game development at all
It’s also beautifully illustrated, with the entire game rendered as an illuminated manuscript, with cut-out characters trotting through richly-coloured buildings and gorgeous landscapes. Your character, Andreas Maler, is an artist working at Kiersau Abbey in Bavaria (now Germany), and spending the rest of his time in the nearby town of Tassing. It’s his in-between existence that gives him the unique ability to investigate the murder.
At this point you probably have three questions:
Sounds worthy (games are art, I know!) but is there anything to this other than cool art?
Do I need to like Umberto Eco to get this? Because I don’t know that much about the Reformation.
What is it like to play, and specifically, how boring is it?
To which I can say:
Yes! The writing is excellent and it has things to say about frustrated ambition and the construction of history and the grief of life that goes beyond the usual video game “it’s sad when someone dies” tropes.
Not really. I have read and mostly forgotten The Name of the Rose, and more recently researched medieval pilgrimages and indulgences (which play into Pentiment somewhat), and I still didn’t get most of the historical details until they were explained, which they usually are, and even if they aren’t, it doesn’t matter that much because you’ll figure it out from the context providing you’re not just skipping over all the text.
Now that’s where it gets interesting.
Pentiment is a walking (slowly) and talking (to literally everyone) game. How do you figure out a list of suspects? You talk to people. How do you know who was where and when in the run up to the murder? You talk to people. Talking talking talking. Everyone has a lot to say, not just about the murder, but about their horrible neighbours, or the greedy abbot who’s stopping them from cutting down trees, or the arrogant shithead doctor who’s just moved in.
The good news is that the conversations are clever and funny and memorable, if always a little too long. You can’t say anything wrong in these conversations, let alone “fail” them (the game as a whole is unfailable, which is the way I like it), but your choices can reveal more information or change people’s opinions of you, altering events later on – but again, never putting you in a place where you can’t progress.
Then there’s the walking. Oh the places you will walk! You’ll walk through the abbey’s dormitories. You’ll walk through the forest to gossip with the charcoal burner. You’ll loop around the winding pathways of Tassing, trying to remember which houses you’ve already visited. And every time you move between locations, the game “flips” between pages of a book, which is charming the first time it happens and tedious the next thousand times. It’s not great, and it worsens the malaise whenever you’re at a dead end.
Always be Sexting
So, it’s not unlike your classic graphical adventure game. There is a slight wrinkle in that there’s usually a ticking clock that gently limits the amount of time you can devote to special activities that reveal more clues (e.g. eating a meal with suspects, helping with chores, going on a hike, etc.); but in practice you have near-unlimited time to scour the town and abbey and run down every conversational avenue with every human for all the non-special-activity-related clues you can get. Which, I think you’ll agree, is quite boring as soon as you start having to backtrack and figure out who it is you haven’t already talked to.
(Not all story-rich games do this! Inkle’s 80 Days and Heaven’s Vault are cleverly designed to eliminate the need for backtracking.)
I suppose the designers might argue your laborious movement around town is meant to make you feel a part of the world, which seems reasonable until you realise Pentiment, like practically all games, plays tricks with space. Sometimes it takes ten seconds to walk past a house, other times it takes ten seconds to walk a mile. This compression of space keeps the game from being even more of a slog. So if you’re already compressing space, why not allow players to compress it even more, with a world map that lets you teleport between locations? We’re already living in a book here!
The tragic thing about this is that it’s all unnecessary. Not just from a game design perspective, in that Pentiment could make it a bit clearer who it’s worth talking to and where it’s worth exploring (the game’s nigh-on unusable “journal” certainly doesn’t help), but from a player’s perspective, in that there’s really very little benefit you gain from doing all this walking and talking.
Because – and this is a slight spoiler, but one in service of getting you to actually play this damn game – you can’t win Pentiment. It might seem like you can ace the investigation just by working and walking harder, but you can’t. The trick of the ticking clock is to make you think that if only you made a different decision you could’ve cracked this case wide open. That makes Pentiment a commentary not only on our futile search for certainty in a world that cannot deliver it; not only a game with characters who are haunted by the belief that they are responsible for every ill they’ve touched; but also an unnecessarily tiresome game to play.
So I am telling you, if you play Pentiment, do not try to talk to everyone. It’s not worth it. You will end up knowing what you need to know anyway. The important things will happen, don’t worry.
There are three more things to mention.
The first is that Andreas isn’t a cipher. He is a person with a history and relationships, some of which you get to define (in a way that matters very little, so don’t sweat it), and some of which you don’t. It’s a little heartbreaking to play as this talented, frustrated, unhappy, well-meaning man who doesn’t quite know what to do with his life. I realise as I write this that Andreas sounds like a bit of an asshole, which is true, but also true of so many young people throughout history, and the game captures that reality and the inevitable shattering of that reality very well.
This makes so little difference to the story!
The second is that while everyone talks about how good the game looks and how each person’s dialogue is animated and rendered in a different font based on their style of speech, which is a cute trick, it’s the writing that’s the real achievement. There are so many words in this game, but very few that are wasted. Pentiment is not just a book-ass game, it’s a grown-up-ass game, in a good way. It will help you see people from the medieval period as people, not as gullible simpletons.
The final thing is that Pentiment has three acts, each lasting about five hours of play. Each act is quite different from the last. If you are getting a little tired of the game, don’t worry – things will change a lot once you sort out your current investigation.
Mild spoilers below!
My spoiler policy: most games take so long to play that we do them a disservice by not talking about everything that happens in them. If I can persuade you to try a game by spoiling parts of it for you, then I will.
Acts 2 and 3 involve major time jumps, which reveal the consequences of the events you’ve just played through. These are not the consequences of your actions – it’s not that dynamic a game, you don’t get to play a completely different act 2 or 3 if you do really well in act 1 – but you get to see how the people of the town and the abbey and their children and grandchildren respond to and remember the things that went down earlier.
It’s not unusual for games to force you into a difficult choice and then ignore it. What’s pleasing about Pentiment is how it embraces this sleight of hand.
It says: your choices are never as important as you think they are.
It says: you are part of a community and you swim in vast tides of events that you cannot possibly change.
It says: you can’t min-max life because you will never have even a fraction of the information you desire.
It says: even so, the little things you say, maybe they will change how people grow up and think about you.
All of this sets Pentiment’s choices apart from many games’ absurd trolley problems where players are presented with literal “save your friend or save humanity” dilemmas, which may be dramatic but are completely overdone.
It’s really those later acts that make Pentiment worth playing, because it’s as much a game about what a community chooses to remember and believe in as it is about solving murders. It’s a game about the construction and telling of history, and how storytelling and, yes, artistry plays into that.
Spoilers over!
Pentiment is the kind of game that gets glowing reviews by English major journalists who adore the fact that they finally get to combine their passions. It is also a game that is quite annoying to play. But you should be assured its annoyances are shortcomings of design, not story.
And while it’s easy to criticise games for their rough edges (believe me, I’m going to do that a lot in this newsletter), what I find exciting about Pentiment is what I find exciting about video games in general: they’re a work in progress. TV is polished to a sheen these days, so easy and satisfying to watch, with the perfect length and perfect technology and storytelling conventions everyone’s grown up with for 30 years. One day games will be like that but until then, we get to live through the time when they’re still annoying to play but weird and surprising and new. Pentiment may be the first ever game that has told this kind of story before. Don’t tell me that’s not exciting!
I want to avoid being an uncritical booster of games in this newsletter. It’s not as if the industry’s survival is reliant on me saying nice things. So believe me when I say that Pentiment is worth playing, if reading lots of text and investigating a medieval murder appeals to you (and if it doesn’t, stay away!).
It is an unusual labour of love, and one that I won’t quickly forget. Just don’t try and talk to everyone!
Have You Played? is an experiment in taking games seriously, but in a fun way. Tell me what you’d like to see more of! And if you liked it, share it with your friends. Sign up to the newsletter for free!
I’m trying to talk myself out of writing a newsletter about games. There are many reasons why this would be a bad idea, not least because people are asking whether there’s a future of video games journalism at all, but I can’t get over the fact that I found so few newsletters about the most profitable, most popular, most innovative form of art and media and entertainment today.
There are plenty on the business of games – everyone wants to tell you the minutiae of Microsoft’s attempt to buy Activision Blizzard. And while there are countless excellent podcasts and YouTube explainers out there, they’re not for me. I just can’t sit through an hour talking over gameplay clips or three hours of someone dissecting the mechanics and clothing of Cyberpunk 2077. That’s not a knock on those videos, it’s a commentary on my impatience and my preference for reading rather than watching non-fiction. If you like them, I salute you!
So here’s my pitch for a newsletter:
It’d be for the general audience and for experts. Think Aaron A. Reed’s 50 Years of Text Games or Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: accessible to total novices, thorough enough for industry veterans. No academic jargon unless absolutely necessary!
It’d avoid breaking news and industry talk. Too much of games discourse is around how much money they make.
It’d focus on recent games I’ve played, like why Pentiment’s story works so well but its design makes it so tiring to play; or the utter vacuum at the heart of Season’s gorgeous settings.
1000-3000 words per week. Long enough to get into specifics, not so long you give up halfway through.
It’d be cool to get guest contributors, whom I would pay.
What I find most exciting about games is their incredible number and variety. The barriers to entry and distribution are lower than ever. But even after making games for twenty years, I still find it hard to wrap my arms around everything that’s going on. I want to learn about the amazing games people are making, but existing games outlets, with their focus on breaking news and reviews, aren’t doing it for me. And while there’s no lack of great games writing in the world, much of it is highly specialised and written for experts.
I want to write something I’d like to read: a newsletter that helps me understand what matters in games today, from someone with direct experience. Something that takes games seriously – which means being serious about critiquing them. But it’d also be fun to read!
Why not continue writing on this blog? Unfortunately, people don’t read blogs as readily as newsletters! They don’t spread as well and they don’t get anywhere near as much feedback or engagement. I’d still write here on non-games topics and try to copy stuff over.
What about something even longer-form, like a magazine or a book? Well, I already write a monthly column for EDGE magazine, which is lovely, but it takes weeks for my words to get in front of readers and I don’t get a lot of feedback from them, either. Books are even worse. And they’re both too big a commitment.
I’m not promising to write this – I’m pretty busy right now! But I love writing, and I love writing about games; I just wrote a book critiquing gamification that the New York Times liked! I especially love writing for general audiences.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Isn’t that what Don Draper said in Mad Men? Don’t tell me, the truth won’t measure up to how I remember it.
The truth is we remember too much nowadays. There’s no room for Rashomon when cameras are watching from every corner. We only need to blink and we can see the past as it really happened. Every joke that fell flat, every stumble, every roll of the eyes, it’s there in our permanent record. And don’t even try erasing your records, because there was another camera just over your shoulder.
But for those of a certain age, we remember when we couldn’t remember. In the small years of the 21st century, you could go for minutes, even hours, without making the faintest mark in digital records. It was perfectly normal to have simply forgotten a meeting or an obligation. Imagine that! The downside was that you would forget the peaks as often as the troughs, and with only your imagination to hand, those peaks would be eternally shrouded in fog.
Let’s imagine that your heart’s desire is to pierce that fog. You wait for the perfect moment on a clear day, you unpack an expensive camera with a powerful telephoto lens mounted atop a sturdy tripod, and you step back very carefully. The camera opens and closes its shutter, and you have the very best photo you can take of your peak – a peak that, yes, is a pinch sharper, a touch more detailed than you first remembered, but still dispiritingly grey and misty.
So you load the photo into image editing software and you click (because that is what we did in those days, clicked) a button labelled “Enhance”. If I asked you how this button worked, you might bluster something about “artificial intelligence” or “content-aware fills” but if you ever did know, you honestly can’t remember now. Your answer is very different when I ask what this button does, because its results are very clear: it strips back the fog to reveal crags and cliffs and sprays of ice and snow that were once obscured. It makes the photo look better. It is full of detail.
If you were to travel back to that peak on a day so bright and hot that the fog has burned away entirely – and why would you, because now you have a very fine, fully-enhanced photo – and you were to compare that photo to what you could see with your own eyes, you would be shocked. Reality is different from your photo! The overall shape of the peak is the same, absolutely, and so are the gross details like the ridges and cornices, but the smaller crags and ridges and trees in your photo, they’re nowhere to be seen.
Except you never revisit that peak. You can’t. You just keep the photo, a photo that teeters on the precipice between real and invented, but as far as you know or care, a photo that is perfect, and perfectly real. Just like you remembered it.
What really happened when you clicked that button? How were the details filled in? It’s quite simple. The software compared your photo’s features to others it had seen before, and it found a match with other peak-like features. It then filled in the fog with a hybrid of those peak-like features, not unlike the reverse forensic linguistics developed in the forties. It would be unfair to dismiss this as fakery. We can instead say it is controlled hallucination.
Just as we can hallucinate the details of a fog-shrouded peak, we can hallucinate events of the past. We do this all the time in our heads, of course. Who hasn’t mixed up their friends’ favourite movies or books, or remembered something than never happened? What I invented is a way to do this outside of our heads. It takes all the data you can supply, from your lace and other public and private sources, and it reconstructs any memories you wish to see more clearly.
That first wonderful dinner with your partner: you might remember the restaurant and the date. You have a vague recollection of what you spoke about and what you were wearing. But you want to see it again. So I look at the features of your memories, I compare them to your more complete memories and to the records and memories of similar people in similar situations. Then I use controlled hallucination to clothe you, to fill your plates, to choose the music, to scent the air. It’s not real, but it could be real. That witty line I imagine you said when your partner sat down – even if you didn’t say it, you should have said it.
The more you want to see, the more I will provide. There is no limit to how far you can zoom in. If you find contradictory data, who cares? I can incorporate that into the hallucination, if it helps. Or maybe you prefer what I’ve remembered for you.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I made something better.
I recently realised that while I subscribe to a lot of newsletters, very few of them are about games. And of the ones about games, most are written for industry professionals and cover the production and business of games. They’re less about recommending or critiquing games, which is what I’m interested in right now.
So I asked people for their favourite newsletters about video games – and here’s the list!
Note: Descriptions are paraphrased from the newsletters/websites themselves.
Game Reviews and Criticism
50 Years of Text Games(inactive): Traces a path through the history of digital games without graphics, by picking one game from each year between 1971 to 2021 and taking an in-depth look at how it works and why it’s important. Now a wildly successful Kickstarted book (which I backed!). Published monthly, free.
Clockwork Worlds: Austin Walker’s thoughts about games, movies, music, etc. Publishes infrequently, free.
Electron Dance: Words and films on gaming. Publishes a couple of times a week, free.
How Games Change the World: How video games are changing the ways we live, learn and interact with one another. Publishes monthly, free.
Pushing Buttons: Keza MacDonald’s look at the world of gaming for The Guardian. Publishes weekly, free.
Small Screen: An independent curation experiment by Campbell Bird, who has been covering mobile games since 2013. Recommends one game per newsletter. Publishes monthly or less, free.
Not newsletters but people sent them anyway:
Arcade Idea: An examination of a selection of canonical and interesting games going chronologically from the 1940s all the way up to the present. Publishes monthly, free with Patreon.
Critical Distance: Weekly roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days. Not reallya newsletter since I believe the website is the main way to read it, but you can get some updates via email if you’re a Patreon supporter (like me!) Publishes weekly, free.
The Digital Antiquarian: A historical chronicle of interactive entertainment. Again, not a newsletter but you can get updates via email if you support on Patreon. Publishes every two weeks, free.
Gamers with Glasses: A gathering place for scholars, developers, artists, and fans of video games and tabletop games. It’s a site for people who like to think about play. Publishes weekly-ish, free.
UppercutCrit: Devoted to punching up through high quality content that focuses on highlighting marginalized voices and great criticism. Publishes near-daily, free.
Mostly or Entirely about the Games Industry
Axios Gaming: Keep up with the multibillion dollar video gaming universe, from the hottest games to the most interesting studios and players, by Stephen Totilo. Publishes twice-weekly, free.
GameDiscoverCo: A regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s written by ‘how people find your game’ expert and GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless and his company colleagues. Publishes twice-weekly, free (a paid $15/month tier gets you an extra weekly newsletter plus other useful stuff; I am a subscriber).
Hit Points: On video games and the game industry, from writer, consultant and former Edge editor Nathan Brown. Publishes twice-weekly. £4/month, half of the issues are free.
Levelling the Playing Field: Level up your game development career with the lessons, processes, and tricks from Rami Ismail’s’s decade of successful game development! Publishes once or twice a month, free.
This is not an exhaustive list of newsletters, it’s just what people sent in, so if you aren’t included, don’t get annoyed at me!
Feel free to leave a comment with your own newsletter, preferably not mostly about the industry, please! Include a link, short description, how often you publish, and if it costs anything. I will try to update this list occasionally.
mssv 