Today I am going to talk some more about linguistic treasures hidden in seemingly ordinary texts. Let’s start where we left off when illustrating the matter of rhythm:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
        by the former
                   prisoner’s
                               energies.”

Have you, perchance, noticed anything extra? Alright, I’ll spoil you the fun:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
        by the former
                   prisoner’s
                               energies.”

Hidden in plain sight, eh? This technique, when one or several letters (sounds, really) are cunningly repeated throughout the phrase, is called alliteration. And this, too, is a very powerful tool. (The ancient Brits, or Icelanders, would even have said magical. No, seriously: in ancient Iceland a properly written alliterative verse was universally taken to hold magical power.) Anyway, this is an aspect that definitely must not be lost in translation.

Funny thing is, a lot of such examples can, theoretically, be chalked up to coincidence. We even had a minor argument with another colleague of mine over this line:

“Elucidate Enlightenment from an Earlier Era”

‘Oh come on,’ she said, ‘The letter E is just statistically the most widely used letter in the English language!’ Alright. Possibly. (Especially given the fact that the actual sounds here aren’t all the same.) Just possibly.

But there comes a point where you can’t ignore it anymore: Alexis Kennedy really loves his alliteration, and that’s a fact.

“I could curl up in the cold beneath the silent statue’s shadow, and see what surfaces in sleep.”

There’s just no way this can be a mere coincidence!

By the way, the desire to preserve these alliterations had been one of the driving forces behind that Great Gatsby translation that I at first found so unorthodox. The book’s translator did their best to preserve these precious phonetic treasures – and it often meant choosing a specific-sounding word (say, a ‘seismograph’, rather than a generalized ‘machine’) over a correct one.

And, needless to say, no machine-translating generative AI is savvy enough to spot and preserve alliteration. It really does require handcrafted translation!

But now – a fly in the ointment. Turns out, different languages have varying degrees of tolerance for alliteration. The English language loves alliteration. Be it marketing slogans, politicians’ speeches, or titles of Jane Austen novels, English is full of these consonances. Not quite so in Russian. Here the effect is usually regarded as sounding funny, and relegated to children’s books. So an aspiring skald must temper their love for alliteration with prudence and temperance.

Thanslating Alexis Kennedy really is a balancing act!

And with this… see you next week for more tales from localisers’ crypt!

First, a… warning? This is going to be a series of longish weekly (?) posts with no TL;DR takeaways. But we are confident that the core Alexis Kennedy audience doesn’t mind a bit of reading.

But I seem to be forgetting my manners! An introduction is in order: my name is Boris, and whenever I say we, I mean me and my colleague Mikhail. We are a two-geek team of Alexis Kennedy aficionados dispatched by Riotloc (of Baldur’s Gate 3 fame) to help Weather Factory localise Book of Hours into Russian. (Because OF COURSE a team whose forte is handcrafted localisation of narrative-rich videogames is bound to have its own chapter of the Alexis Kennedy fan club!) 

So, what can I say? Book of Hours is, without a doubt, a unique gig. At a minimum, unique in terms of how we go about localising it. As funny as it may sound, with Alexis’s prose we often find ourselves spending inordinate amounts of time on a single sentence, writing, and rewriting the translation – only to realise a couple of days later (usually during a lunch break or a family dinner) that there is a still better way to phrase it (which we HAVE to write down that very instant!).

I recently asked Alexis whether his writing routine looks like Mozart effortlessly transcribing his music, or like F. Scott Fitzgerald endlessly rewriting his masterpiece until it reads just right. He quoted Hemingway by way of an answer: ‘I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit. I try to put the shit in the wastebasket’.

By the way, it is no random thing that I mentioned Fitzgerald. I vividly recall an episode from my Translation Studies where we were given different translations of The Great Gatsby and told to argue which of them was better. I distinctly remember poring over one such translation genuinely wondering why on Earth did the translator make so many lexical departures from the source material?

The answer is, there are more things to meaning, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your strict literal translation orthodoxy (or something like that; sorry, Shakespeare mate). Things like flow; prosody; visuality; alliteration. The Great Gatsby had them in spades, and, translated literally, would have lost most of what made it so, so beautiful.

Well, thus appropriately humbled, I try to go about reading Alexis’ prose in a more nuanced manner, always on the lookout for things beyond mere literal meaning. And things beyond mere literal meaning there are!

Take the following description:

“There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot – something coiled like a serpent, but stiller by far.”

Seems straightforward enough, eh? You can probably Google Translate it into another language, and the meaning will be there, right? Right?

How about we arrange the phrase’s presentation a bit differently:

“There in a smoothed hollow at the altar’s foot –
something coiled like a serpent,
but stiller by far.”

Unless you are a chatbot, by now it should be pretty obvious that this looks suspiciously like poetry. Not strictly haiku verses, no – the same principles apply to things like rhetoric, speeches, etc. This particular technique is called a descending tricolon: when the phrase is arranged in lines of decreasing length.

Here’s a famous example from Churchill:

“(Never in the field of human conflict)
has so much been owed
by so many
to so few.”

There is also a reverse, or ascending, tricolon. Churchill once again:

“Now this is not the end.
It is not even the beginning of the end.
But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”

So, with that in mind, one will probably think twice before treating the following line of Kennedy’s as mere prose:

“Here, impossibly preserved, enfolded in the scars inflicted by the former prisoner’s energies.”

Let me arrange it for you:

“Here,
impossibly preserved,
enfolded in the scars inflicted
          by the former
                       prisoner’s
                                   energies.”

And this isn’t us philologists discussing arcane minutiae of the English language. These are incredibly potent tools that help poets, writers, and politicians charm their audience. To lose this aspect of a text would make it powerless, neutered. It simply won’t do.

And this is where we break off. Next time I will continue with my story of the eldritch horrors that lurk beneath Alexis Kennedy’s prose (kidding). Stay tuned!

Stories are my jam. I make narrative games, I co-host a narrative podcast, and I studied English lit at university before I got a proper job. But I have different feelings for lore, the pickles in my narrative hamburger. A few lend some much-needed piquancy to an otherwise undersexed sandwich. Too many is like flushing your tongue down a vinegar loo. So I’ve developed a simple guide to establishing the lore content of narrative games: they’re Hobbits, LOTRs or Silmarillions.

The Hobbit is an approachable, plot-driven story with mass appeal. It entertains childrens and adults and relies on simple mythic touchstones: a quest for treasure, a slumbering dragon, a great evil bad guy. You don’t need lore to read The Hobbit. If you have insider knowledge of the Silmarils and the origins of wizards and the Ring, that’s great. But you can just as easily appreciate out-tricksing trolls and escaping wood elves in wine barrels without it. The game equivalent is Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch: well-made, much beloved and entirely self-sufficient.

The next level up is The Lord of the Rings. It’s bigger than The Hobbit and has more words with Capital Letters. It’s no longer ‘dwarves live underground’ – now it’s ‘Aragon son of Arathorn is the true heir to Isildor’s throne, and that’s why he can heal people with his hands (sometimes)’. The narrative spends time explaining the world and how it came to be. Characters’ motivations are linked to history and world events. There’s extra lore available but it doesn’t get in the way of the story – it’s tucked away in footnotes and appendices.

LOTRs are Diablo and Assassin’s Creed. You can read a bunch of extra stuff in collectable codices and some bits make more sense if you’ve played the earlier games, but broadly speaking, it’s more about the moment-to-moment experience. Did you know that Azmodan, Lord of Sin, originated from one of the seven heads of the great dragon Tathamet? For most Diablo fans, he’s just that spider-lookin’ tubster you fight at the end of Act III.

But some people do care about the great dragon Tathamet. For them, there’s The Silmarillion.

How do you know if someone’s read The Silmarillion? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you. Silmarillions are the hard-core games, the Dark Souls of narrative, the ones whose openings take two hours and are called ‘Prologues’ and give you a headache because they try to funnel ten years of narrative design through a grommet the writer’s bored into your skull. They’re your Tyrannies and your Tides of Numenera, who boast of word-count and whose forums are full of nerds arguing over which war nine epochs ago most influenced the UI. The lore is front and centre. The introductory FMV is a Dadaesque display of proper nouns and references you don’t understand and at some point there’s definitely something on fire. You’re here because the Throng of Boo were destroyed by the treachery of Ka’al the Deceiver as he rose to power in the Third Age of Meep. (If tooltips aren’t working in your edition of this blog, please email Alexis to complain.)

Ironically, there is no ring to rule them all with narrative approaches. Some people bloody love a wiki’s worth of worldbuilding. Others are driven to drink. But whatever your preference, it’s helpful to know what you’re getting into – no one likes surprise pickles.

“BOOKS ARE THE MEMORY THAT DOES NOT DIE.”

– Inscription above the door of Hush House

As Lottie and I work on BOOK OF HOURS, we’ve become better acquainted with the long and layered history of Hush House, the library where the game takes place. Lottie’s worked on recapturing the House’s look and feel over its many eras – Roman shrine, Dark Ages monastery, mediaeval abbey, baronial seat, institute of learning, and finally (whisper it) a highly select reformatory prison. I’ve been digging into the history of its inhabitants.

Resources on Hush House’s history are hard to come by (and no I can’t just make it up, good heavens). Fortunately on a recent research trip I happened across a 1930s tourist pamphlet produced by the rector of Brancrug Village.

I do take issues with some of Reverend Timothy’s scholarship. He passes over the details in the death of the sixth Baron Brancrug – did he leap, did he fall, was he pushed? – and he’s clearly a bit of an Eva Dewulf fanboy. But then, aren’t we all?

HUSH HOUSE – A Visitor’s Guide 

by the Reverend Timothy MacDonald

(price fourpence)

Dear Visitor,

I would like to welcome you to Hush House, one of the unexpected treasures of our Cornish coast. I have set aside considerable time to research the thousand-and-a-half years of its history, and I am pleased to share the fruits of my researches with you.

The history of the House is complicated, and can be bewildering to the ‘uninitiated’! To ‘ease you in’, I have identified five distinct periods or ‘phases’ in Hush House’s history.

Access to Hush House is by appointment. Please inquire at the Rectory. I regret that tours are not possible at high tide, on Church holidays, or while the Moon is visible in the sky. All proceeds from the sale of this booklet, or donations to tours, will be donated to the St Rhonwen Trust for the Advancement of Education.

DAWN PHASE

In the sixth century, the Abbey of the Black Dove – sometimes called also the Abbey of the White Crow – is established as a double foundation of monks and nuns, surprisingly common in those Dark Ages. 599 A.D. is traditionally celebrated as the date of the Abbey’s foundation, although I believe the island church of Our Lady Beneath – regrettably unsafe to visit due to flooding and subsidence – dates from the third century. 

The Abbey was subject to Danish raids on at least two occasions in the ninth century, although the raiders are also recorded as mercenaries quartered here against the incursions of Egbert of Wessex. One raider apparently becomes a brother of the Abbey under the name Thomas, and later rises to become Abbot. Abbot Thomas evidently finds it difficult to leave his savage past behind, and dies in circumstances too violent for me to describe here. “Live by the sword, die by the sword”!

SOLAR GOTHIC PHASE

The splendid Abbey Church we see today – St Brandans – dates from the eleventh century. The Watchman’s Tower and its fortified gatehouse were built in wood as a protection against Saxon rebels after the Conquest. They were later rebuilt in stone, after the Abbey gave shelter to a tree brought from Normandy by the new Earl of Cornwall. The tree is said to flower white, black and red in consecutive springs. Perhaps if you keep a sharp eye out, you can identify one of its descendants!

Its substantial expansion in the thirteenth century was funded by an endowment from Eva de Braose, a noble lady of the Marches whose husband was hanged under undignified circumstances. The Solarium and Chapter House date from this point. St Brandan’s is by now established as a centre of learning and healing, and no doubt they were of assistance to Lady de Braose in some manner.

The Winter Tower, later called the Long Tower, dates from 1322 – curiously, the same year as the collapse of the tower of Ely Cathedral. The Tower stands alone in the gardens, and is fortified to no obvious end. I have examined what remains of its frescoes and I believe it was built in dedication to the Sun Before Dawn, according to the pre-Reformation solar traditions.

The Barber’s Tower was constructed in 1450 to house the healer Natan of Regensburg – as a sanctuary or perhaps a prison, since Natan is a learned but a Hebrew gentleman, and his people are regrettably unwelcome in the Kingdom of England at this time. The Crucible Tower dates from a little later. The fire of 1929 has left this tower unsafe, and I recommend strongly against close inspection.

BARONIAL PHASE

In 1537, as part of King Henry’s reforms, John Tregonwell is appointed to investigate St Brandans. He uncovers evidence of indulgent, corrupt and scandalous behaviour. The monastery is dissolved and the isle of Brancrug granted to Hendrik Dewulf, one of Tregonwell’s captains, formerly a Guelders mercenary. Dewulf is clearly an uneducated and violent man, and he suppresses a local rebellion with intemperate brutality. One story tells of a local oracle who places a curse on Dewulf in revenge: “There will be no seventh of his line.” Dewulf has the man dragged before him, tells him “There will be no second of yours,” and unmans the oracle with his own knife!!

Nevertheless, the Dewulfs grow more temperate over time. They treat the Abbey Church with respect, and their seat, Brancrug House, is the core of the other buildings that grace the Isle today. Thomas Dewulf, the second Baron, is nicknamed Baron Silence by the poets and playwrights of London – this I believe may be the origin of the later Hush House ‘moniker’!

Thomas restores the Watchman’s Tower and builds an observatory there in 1576 – with some foresight, since the Great Comet passes in 1577. His son Giles runs away with a Bristol girl, although he and his father are ultimately reconciled. The Bristol girl, named Hafren, has the pale hair and eyes notable in the later Dewulfs.

The third Baron, Walter, remodels much of the interior of Brancrug House. Many of his innovations have been lost beneath later work, but you can still admire the Grand Ascent that unites the House’s various levels. Walter supports King Charles in the Civil War, but in 1648, Walter’s son Bryan is hanged for treason that same King’s men. Walter’s heart bursts with sorrow, and his son post mortem receives special dispensation to be buried with his father. You may see their gravestones to this day, just to the west of the church.

In the 1650s, The fourth Baron, Musgrave, ‘the Lamb Dewulf’, restores the Winter Tower as a residence for Julian Coseley, the scholar and antiquary, who assists with the cataloguing and expansion of the library. Musgrave’s son, Gideon, is wickedly nicknamed ‘the Motley Baron’ for his odd and brindled appearance, and so the Motley Tower – once the Barber’s Tower – wins its name.

The sixth and last Baron is Valentine, an eccentric gentleman who builds the Gullscry Tower to house his aviary-collection. When Valentine falls to his death from the tower top, his daughter Eva inherits the estate at the age of nineteen.

Educated visitors will already know the name of Eva Dewulf, the Pale Lady, who cuts quite the ‘figure’ at court! Alas she is engaged to a rapscallion named Abraham Wheelock, who abandons her at the altar. Eva returns to Brancrug to recover, and is not seen at court again. However three days after her departure, Wheelock’s body is found on the beach near Gravesend. His face is so badly pecked by birds that he is only identified by his belongings. These include a waxed pouch containing a letter addressed to Wheelock, whose contents seem to show he is a spy in the pay of the Austrians! I suspect the matter has been ‘over-egged’, but Lady Eva no doubt would have found it all something of a relief.

Lady Eva never marries. She opens her library and draws visitors from across Europe and beyond. Some of these visitors are selected by peculiar and exacting criteria to attend sophisticated feasts in her Hall of Division. Others are drawn by Lady Evan’s reputation for scholarship – including the notorious Franklin Bancroft, whose deep friendship with Eva inspires wicked gossip.

THE CURIA PHASE

In 1759 Lady Eva’s heir, Captain Sebastian Dewulf, is drowned in battle against the French at Quiberon Bay. Lady Eva comes to a tragic end, and the Dewulf line ends. Brancrug House is all but abandoned, and the caves beneath the island become a smuggler’s haunt. 

But in 1785, a group of scholars acquires the deed to the Dewulf estate, establishing the ‘Curia of the Isle’ as an institution for the preservation of knowledge. Ambrose Westcott, Kitty Mazarine, Solomon Husher – all these names

[water-stained and unreadable beyond this point]

A grumpy Russian model found himself ‘trapped in a 21st-century Kafkaesque nightmare’ as he reluctantly sang, danced and pouted his way to viral popularity on Chinese social media. Vladislav Ivanov – A.K.A. ‘Lelush’ – was trying his damnedest to get voted off Chuang 2021, a Chinese reality TV show following 90 contestants as they go through ‘boy band bootcamp’. It’s Pop Idol meets Groundhog Day. Or a millennial update of Brazil, where Michael Palin has dyed hair and it’s confusingly set in Hainan.

Lelush was a last-minute addition after being scouted by the producers. He quickly realised he, erm, hated singing and dancing, and didn’t want to be in a boy band – but leaving the show on his own recognisance would have triggered a significant fine from his contract, which he couldn’t afford. So he tried his best to be really, really bad at everything, hoping he’d be voted off. Instead, he accidentally connected with a bubbling Chinese subculture and rapidly became the face of ‘sang wenhua’. Composed primarily of teenagers, ‘sang wenhua’ rejects traditional expectations of overachievement, perfectionism and self-sacrifice in favour of fatalist Gen-Z ennui. A beautiful, sullen twenty-something refusing to engage with a reality TV show they also can’t escape is their perfect mascot.

Lelush – who I’m relieved to say was finally voted off after three gruelling, but really very funny, months – got me thinking about subculture in games. For most people on the planet, games are still an odd, nerdy pastime for boys who like computers, board games and wizards. Marketers are always telling me to use a ‘female’ angle for pieces because I’m still a ‘woman in a man’s world’. And so far, nothing the industry has produced has reached the water-cooler mass-market popularity of Marvel films or Game of Thrones. Pokemon Go nearly managed it, but not quite.

This is all at the macro-level. Look a little closer and you have hundreds of gaming subcultures, from relative normies who play the latest tycoon game on the train, to eleven year olds making ‘obbies’ (obstacle courses, for the uninitiated) for their friends in Roblox, to activist devs using their games to change the world, to the attractive influencer selling her bathwater to adoring fans. It’s a fun game deciding what the ‘face’ would be for each of these communities, and these are just a handful of major ones which leap to mind. Art is always reacting against what came before, so subcultures are constantly evolving, every generation peering slightly suspiciously at the one which came before. The one thing we all seem to have in common is that gaming isn’t just a hobby, it’s a lifestyle – and that’s why we see such a vast array of identities within it. The full spectrum of humanity’s reflected here, not just consumer spending.

So where does this leave us, and poor Lelush? Now he’s escaped Chuang, Lelush is embracing his new identity as the Slacker King by becoming an influencer, promoting mobile games to his 500,000 Weibo followers. And perhaps we gamers should embrace our position in the great cosmic hierarchy, too. Maybe we do like wizards. Maybe we aren’t mainstream. And maybe that’s okay. I’d just encourage you to look outside of games sometimes: the best art and culture draws from a wide variety of sources, not just others like it. The world is wide and full of beauty. And, apparently, boy bands.

Tabriz
January 1866

My dear nephew

What a surprise and a pleasant one to hear from you. My warmest congratulations and wishes to your new wife, except that it is a year since the date of your letter and so I suppose no longer new. I hope indeed by now you are blest with children. Alas I must refuse your kind invitation though with the deepest regret. But your other question, I will answer. I will try.

You speak kindly of my gallantry and less kindly of my desertion. Yes I acknowledge the word.

Forgive me the shame of it which you must carry. There is another History no doubt where I continued in the Empress’ service and I think of it sometimes with regret. But you see my sword was broken that day…

So much to explain and I must choose my words carefully. I wrote to your mother that my horse took an unlucky ball from a Khusgai musket. This was not altogether honest. The truth is lesser, and greater.

We numbered barely a hundred (the squadron being somewhat below strength) and the Khusgai eight times that. And my nephew if you think the Persian is to be disregarded against the Irishman, or the musket against the rifle, let me rid you of that thought today. Captain Forbes had taken them for cavalry in the morning mist and they were not, they were of a Guard Regiment, the finest of their infantry, and they stood ready in a square with bayonets fixed against us. But we were all of us in fine spirits and impatient, and Captain Forbes saw that in the mist they had come unstuck from the greater Persian force and were not supported. Here was glory and when he ordered the charge we cheered.

It was foolishness on foolishness and I have not told you yet of my own foolishness and yet all those were glory also. The Empire wished to keep the Shah from Herat (which was under our protection) but not to defeat him (for we needed him against the Russians). So we were fighting but not for victory. Then Capt. Forbes’ decision to charge them. And your uncle at the head of the charge with his sabre – I wish I could say it flashed in the sunshine as I brandished it but the mist, the mist. And the mist of course saved us or their muskets would have ended our charge untimely, but it deadened the sound of their fire so we knew not how close until we were on them. Suddenly your uncle sees their shakos and their fierce frightened faces and their bayonets like a fence of knives loom up before him, and poor Menander seeks to swerve aside but it was altogether too late. What am I to do but try to pull his head straight and have him jump that fence like any other.

Well it ended badly for us all and it might have ended worse. Menander crashes down upon their ranks and he is pierced all through by their blades and I think he is dead by the time I haul myself from beneath him. By the Light that was divided I pray it so for he deserved better than I gave him in the end. As I say I haul myself out, and my left hand is crushed, but the other fellow on whom we fell is worse, Menander has broken his neck and he is lying all wrong. My right still serves to swing my sword and when another comes at me I give him what he merits but it is all my luck again, for as he falls and I draw the sword back from him I see that it was broken too by Menander’s fall.

There I am then in the very ranks of the enemy but my brother-soldiers cutting at them too and the square beginning to break, so the Persians have other things to worry about than me. Still lamed as I am with barely a sword worth the name I have very little confidence in my situation. The chaos when cavalry crashes upon a square is like a wave upon a cliff only if the cliff was flesh and stones the wave upon it. There is no part of my world or theirs that is not furious blood…

Now comes the part that you can credit or not, as you choose.

The tag-end of the story you will have heard is almost true. Lt Malcolmson saw me fall and he fought his way through and he lent me his stirrup and we came free and by the time he had seen me safe and turned around again the action was all but done and the Khusgai casting down their weapons. Those few who lived. Of those eight hundred, we took only twenty alive. A famous victory.

Nephew I hope you had too much sense ever to credit it. One hundred against eight hundred. A man on a horse cutting his way through lesser men as if they were wheat, to save his brave comrade. We both were decorated for it – decorated to the highest degree. What else could they do?

But every lie is truth’s shadow. There is always a shape they share. I learnt that later in the Labyrinth. So Lt. Malcolmson – I still call him that though it was never his name – rode indeed to my rescue. But what he rode was nothing like a horse, even a cavalry-horse. Something more terrible – something above all more golden –

Nephew, make a fist of your hand. Muscles move beneath the skin. So powers move beneath the skin of the world, at impulses equally invisible, but greater. A light seen only in sleep; words spoken first by fire. Even the shattering of a sword. In the land where I nearly fell, they used to call that the Shahpur’s Lesson.

That is part of why Malcolmson unmasked himself that day, and the other part is between him and me. Later he took me West on a kind of pilgrimage. I cannot tell you where. (‘Mercy is found only in shadow,’ and there are too few shadows on this letter.)

But you have bound me to speak to you of my desertion, so I will tell you this. In a place far from Carlingford where you will read this, Saul the Illuminate consecrated a church Invictine. Beneath that church one lies sheathed in black corundum, neither Long nor mortal, neither man nor woman, neither real nor imagined. I have seen what is written on his shining skin. And so I can never return to Carlingford.

My nephew, I have said that the powers of the world are moved by secret impulse, but the converse is true also. The fingers move the hand which moves the soul. This is a secret I do not yet entirely understand but I have learnt to call Illumination.

If you have inherited your mother’s good sense, you will leave the matter here. But it is always the women of our blood who are wiser. So perhaps you are as foolish as me. And so I will say a little more.

The Khusgai that we slew. On their standard they bore a silver hand. We took it as a trophy and it graces now the standard of my regiment. I still write that – I will not strike it out – but of course I cannot no longer claim that honour. It graces now the standard of the Poona Horse. If you ask to see it I think they will show it to you – if you use Malcolmson’s name and not mine. It is older than the regiment, old I think as England. But no older. There is a lesson in it.

Greatest among the powers who illuminate is one called Watchman. He it is who says ‘Mercy is found only in shadow.’ But he does not say that mercy is nowhere found; and shadows lie long at the Labyrinth of Lions.

Yours ever

your uncle

Arthur

Did you know that Agatha Christie is the best-selling fiction writer ever? Nuts to Dickens and Tolkien and J. K. Rowling. Murder’s what the public want.

Detective fiction remains hugely popular, but it’s never taken off in games. There are notable exceptions like L.A. Noire, and AAA RPGs often include a quest where you determine whodunnit from a pool of NPCs. But generally, detective games are few and far between, even though the genre flourishes in books (The Thursday Murder Club is the fastest selling adult crime debut in history), TV (find me a channel that doesn’t screen multiple police procedurals and Scandi-noirs) and film (Knives Out made nearly eight times its budget, spawned a sequel, and saw universally positive reviews).

So why do games shun the good old murder mystery? Detective novels usually work on two planes. There’s a colourful plot propelled by a brilliant investigator who’s always one step ahead. Then there’s the reader, who competes with the investigator and tries to guess the murderer before the book reveals them. Games can’t keep those planes separate. Players become the detective, propelling the game themselves and removing the competitive mental gymnastics you get from a book. Most players aren’t Peter Wimsey, so the game probably won’t move along at the exhilarating speed it would in a ‘scripted’ novel. And you don’t have the same certainty that you have everything you need to solve the crime – there’s always a possibility you missed some clue or took the wrong dialogue option somewhere, or simply that your reasoning differs from the game writer’s.

This is why the best detective games aren’t simulators or RPGs but simple puzzle games. They pare back their mechanics to an absolute minimum, giving players the necessary space for the whodunnit guessing game. The Return of the Obra Dinn, for example, doesn’t require the player to be Sherlock Holmes. It requires them to be an insurance claims investigator and walk slowly around. It’s about as far as you get from whizzing through Dartmoor at midnight being chased by a phosphorescent dog or discovering a sensational murder in a first-class carriage of the Orient Express. You look at things for a long time, and then you choose a name from a drop-down menu. But as Poirot himself says: “It is the brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely.” And that’s what makes Obra Dinn so brilliant: its primary mechanic is the player’s mind.

Another detective game, Her Story, also relies on the little grey cells. It doles out dopamine every time you type something relevant into a search engine. You only know what to type in by deducing things from the previous round of videos you’ve watched. I applaud her excellent 90s fashion sense, but the lady in the video is your competition, trying her best to thwart you. Her Story’s all about connecting the dots yourself, but all you actually do is sit there watching video clips.

Detective fiction is enduringly popular, but it requires people to think and the book to let them. Games don’t always trust their players. They’re worried they might miss an item (give it a glow!), or a cut-scene (make it unskippable!) or, worst of all, get bored (QUICK! ANOTHER MINIGAME!). Detectives need space for their little grey cells – and it takes a brave game to provide it.

Many Wireframes ago, I wrote about the upcoming launch of Steam China and what it might mean for developers. Now it’s live! So let’s compare predictions with reality.

In short, we all got to roleplay William Gibson: most of what we thought would happen did. Steam China hosts 53 games (0.2% of Steam’s international offering), all of which have gone through the official Chinese review process. It hasn’t – yet – cut off any localised games in the international store from Chinese players. But we didn’t expect Steam China to launch without forums, workshops or other Community Hub options, and I still think we’ll see access problems to Chinese audiences later down the line.

But what does this mean for indie developers? It’s not something we need to worry about now, but it’s a future we should plan for. We translated Cultist Simulator into simplified Chinese and released it asynchronously on mobile and PC in 2019. Cultist was never officially available to Chinese Android users (because the Google Play Store is blocked) and the iOS version was removed from the Chinese App Store this year (along with 30,000 other games that weren’t officially approved). But China still made us around £272k profit in two years. It’s such a large audience that even a tiny slice of the pie is worth having. 

“Outwit the Authorities,” this says. Hubris LOL.

China’s also a market hungry for variety. Chinese players like Cultist partly because they don’t see games like it. We haven’t a snowball’s hope in hell of passing China’s content regulations: among many other problems, games can’t portray ‘the supernatural, such as cults’, so Chinese gamers don’t see many games specifically about the supernatural, such as cults. These limitations will likely work in many indie developers’ favour, meaning we have a large, keen audience who want to buy our games – even though it’s difficult to reach them.

Steam China, I think, is a good thing for indies who localise. We might not get on the official Chinese Steam store, but there are several features which link the international and Chinese versions. Chinese games bought from Steam China appear in international Steam’s library, for example, so there’s a clearer route than ever for interested Chinese gamers to Steam’s international offerings. And right now, even though Steam’s international version isn’t officially available in China, there are huge numbers of Chinese players buying games through it anyway. We saw a nearly 400% increase in Chinese players since we localised – it’s a grey area, but the gains are worth the attempt.

To paraphrase a famous Confucius proverb: it doesn’t matter how slow you go so long as you don’t stop. Chinese gamers are hard to reach, and they may become particularly unavailable for a period of years, should Steam change how they currently operate alongside Steam China. But there’s a lot to gain by thinking about China now, and, I suspect, a great deal more to gain in the future. Keep the faith! Just don’t, er, make a whole game about it.

Nostalgia used to be a disease. A military doctor divised it in the seventeenth century to account for frequently miserable Swiss mercenaries with fever, stomach pains and fainting fits who yearned for the mountains of home. He thought nostalgia was caused by brain and ear damage from the relentless clang of Switzerland’s cowbells. Sadly, it wasn’t. Nostalgia’s a common, healthy human emotion: remembering the golden days of childhood and good things now past.

Games remind me of those Swiss soldiers. From the enduring popularity of pixel graphics to chiptune, it’s an artform obsessed with its past. Reddit is full of PC gamers opining about teenaged LAN parties. There’s serious hype about ‘Playdate’, a black and white wind-up Gameboy-looking console. Roguelikes are an entire genre of games defined by their similarity to a title that’s older than I am. You know what else is older than me? Syphilis. The past isn’t all great, people.

The Playdate console, by Panic

Nostalgia’s why we love a sequel. Games are particularly prone to them because we keep improving our graphical and technical capabilities, meaning games made even a decade ago can feel antiquated and drab. The classic titles everyone’s heard of but no-one under thirty has played – Silent Hill, Tomb Raider, Doom, Deus Ex – are still creatively brilliant but no longer meet the basic specs required in 2022. And it’s no coincidence that all of those games are the first in a long line of sequels.

But sequels set themselves a difficult task. It’s not just a return to Pallet Town we want, it’s the feeling we had when we were eight and chose our first ever starter pokémon. The beautiful Final Fantasy 7 remake is heralded as one of the best Final Fantasies in recent memory, but Square Enix updated the original turn-based combat, disappointing many who remember the old system. And games, like other art, is all about the feels. Recreating the emotions of a child in the cold, cynical heart of an adult is hard. Toy Story 3 manages it, but it’s a Pixar film with a $200 million budget about saying goodbye to childhood.

We’ve seen a classic nostalgic trip recently in Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk’s a fun genre, but it isn’t woke. It’s James Bond fanfiction written by nerds, all sex and chrome and male heroes and uzis. It’s also a lot of other interesting things – American fear of Asian success, socio-political commentary, the future of AI and humanity – but you can’t separate that from the neon-drenched neo-noir of a man with a gun. A lot of people expected Cyberpunk 2077 to give them the same thrill they had when they read Neuromancer in 1984. For many, it did. For others, it challenged their modern politics in uncomfortable ways. You can revisit the 1980s, but you can’t stop living in the 2020s.

The 1986 hardcover of William Gibson’s Neuromancer

Sid Meier said a game is a series of interesting choices. The problem with gaming nostalgia is we’ve made those choices already. You can make new ones this time around, but you’ll never feel quite like before.

You’ve probably heard the phrase “art imitates life”, recognising when art reflects society’s real-world interests and views. Think Banksy, or The Mummy 3 being all about how much China scares the US. But you’ve also probably heard the phrase “life imitates art”, where reality copies what art presents. Think body dysmorphia from Instagram or people being kinder because they watched a Tom Hanks film. Games seem divided on which way round the equation should go. Broadly, players go one way and developers the other.

In October 2020, Larian Studios released Baldur’s Gate 3 to general acclaim. By the end of the year it had an 88% positive rating on Steam and 29,000 reviews. Boxleiter maths would conservatively estimate that to be 1.5 million sales, which means it grossed £72,000,000 already – and it’s still in Early Access. But less shiny was the mild industry buzz around a Steam update a week after launch. In the post, Larian gently ribbed its players for choosing, on average, a generically handsome white guy as their player character rather than the more exotic options offered by the character creation system. “We gave you demon eyes, horns, and even tails,” they wrote. “We are sorely disappointed.” 

This was widely reported in industry press as a fittingly progressive dunk on white male gamers. A lot of those articles chose to run the story with a headline image of a generically sexy female character with heavy eye make-up, but that’s for another day. For now, it’s worth digging into why the most popular player character was, in Larian’s words, “the default Vault Dweller”.

From Larian’s point of view, it’s a shame that so many people weren’t interested in the creative range available to them. But the player character is just that: the player’s character. Given the option, most people like being a hotter version of themselves. This is why gyms, make-up brands and cosmetic surgery are multi-billion dollar industries. The majority of gamers are real white men, some of whom are probably not as beautiful as they’d like to be. So it’s unsurprising and benign that the most popular player character is a handsome, generic white guy.

Larian hoped players would follow the game’s lead and play a variety of diverse characters: they’d expected life to imitate art. Players hoped Larian would let them play the game in their image: they wanted art to imitate life. We laughed at those players, though it’s worth remembering that the reason we want diverse characters in the first place is so minorities can look in-game like they do in real life. It’s inconsistent to praise some people for wanting that and mock others for the same thing.

Reality, as ever, is complicated. Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, nor does it sit in an isolated dialectic with life. It exists in a boiling chaotic mess of influences and experiences and context. It’s vital to treat the world as it is: when we don’t, we get conspiracy theories and Brexit. Games are still overwhelmingly played by white men, and that’s neither apocalypse nor Utopia. We can encourage increasing diversity from our existing audience, as Larian has done, by offering diverse options and encouraging players to step out of their comfort zone. But art isn’t enough. If we want player characters to be as diverse as Baldur’s Gate 3 wants them to be, we need to diversify the playerbase. And that’s a long-term unsexy series of school talks and outreach and socioeconomic change and non-game-making-things that many of us don’t have the time to pursue. But unless we do that, change will be slow. We’ll make art for the audience we wish we had and scorn the one we do.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a brilliant man whose most famous theory, the Übermensch, has wrongly linked him to Nazi and fascist ideology. In reality, Nietzsche denounced both antisemitism and nationalism, and had nothing whatsoever to do with racial ‘master races’ legitimising Hitler’s genocide. It was his sister – curse you, Elisabeth – who contorted his meaning to justify a Nazi worldview. Nietzsche said lots of clever and non-Nazi things, many of which are handily contained in his masterwork, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But like everyone who talks a lot, he also said some stupid shit. Here’s one of them, from the same book:

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

Lottie, you might ask: as (*checks notes*) a woman, might you be a little peeved at this idea, and might you be responding emotionally to the suggestion that women are male toys? Well, I’d respond: you got me. But dangerous female playthings also makes me think of someone I’ve been spending a lot of time with recently – Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s femtagonist, Eivor Wolf-Kissed.

Eivor is the most feminist character I’ve ever seen in games. She achieves this in two ways: one, by being the protagonist, and two, by not being relevantly female at all. So unimportant is her femininity that it makes no difference whatsoever whether she’s a woman or a man, though you still get to style her hair if you like. Ubisoft even went so far as to let players swap genders in-game with no effect on the story. So what is it that makes Eivor such a cool woman, if her womanhood doesn’t matter? It’s the one simple idea that mainwave feminism has been asking for since women realised we were bored of cooking dinner and quite fancied having it cooked for us sometimes: equality, regardless of gender.

If you’ve read any of my columns before, you’ll know that I’m actually quite a girly girl. I reclaim the colour pink; I’m goo around kittens; I wear make-up and like shopping for clothes. But this is an identity, not a gender. We’re all a collection of character points which paint a face on the otherwise featureless egg of a human head. Of course, games has a host of female identities: competent, kindly hacker Alyx from Half-Life; Elizabeth, oppressed time-hopping daughter from BioShock; Morrigan, sarky goth sex witch from Dragon Age. But their characters are inextricably linked to being female. It matters that they’re women, particularly to them. So they’re great as characters, but they don’t quite reach the feminist heights of Eivor, who’s so beyond being defined as a woman that sometimes she literally isn’t.

Ian Livingstone was once unfortunate enough to be seated next to me for three hours on a train. He was politely surprised that I didn’t know who he was. But we had a brief meeting of minds over Lara Croft: I thanked him for making her, as she’s the reason I’m in games, and he apologised for making her, abashedly saying: ‘It was the nineties’. I miss the original Tomb Raider series, but as I investigate ancient caves, parkour along crumbling masonry and occasionally shoot the odd endangered species in AC: Valhalla, I feel like nineties Lara has a feminist successor to be proud of, who is a plaything, and whose axe-skills certainly make her dangerous. But she sidesteps the male gaze and Nietzsche’s fleetingly silly opinions. Long may Eivor reign.

The Snare of the Tree

LUCIDITY. ATTENTIVENESS. GENEROSITY. VITALITY.

What makes us glad we’ve played some games, and regret we’ve played others? What are the game design equivalents of ‘savoury’ and ‘sweet’? Why is a working title dangerous, what menaces lurk in model railway dioramas, and what is the Snare of the Tree?

First up, Alexis has released what I happen to think is his best non-game writing yet: a short, punchy treatise on what makes games savoury called The Snare of the Tree, and Other Perilous Seductions. He says I’m not allowed to say it’s a book about what makes games ‘good’, but it is certainly a book about criteria and response: how different people (developers, gamers, activists, scholars…) look at games, and if there’s one consistent, objective way of evaluating games when everyone’s coming to them with their own #beeeff.

Fear not: if this sounds like the difficult first essay English students are asked to write in their first term at university, it’s not. I can confirm it is (a.) short, spicy and extremely readable and (b.) thought-provoking without the density of French philosophy and/or decades-old Christmas cake.

Here’s an indicative extract:

“…The more a game allows a player to feel like they’re engaging with another human mind, the more valuable and exalting an experience it will be. And the best way to allow a player to feel that way is for them to engage with a game that embodies human qualities. The most obvious route to this is actual engagement with another human mind. […] This doesn’t mean multi-player games are better than single-player games. Single-player games have a steeper hill to climb. But despite increasingly sinister efforts from large tech companies, it’s not yet possible to distribute friends in a box, or to power them off when you don’t need them. And not all of us want company all the time. And there is of course a virtue in making art against challenges and under constraints…”

The Snare of the Tree is out now on Kindle and paperback on Amazon. The paperback will be coming to Etsy on its own and as part of a book bundle with Against Worldbuilding next week – just as soon as we get physical copies in. 🙂

AK and I elaborate on the best laid plans of mice and keyboard in a new Skeleton Songs episode, “A City Is Not A Tree”. Listen to us talk about Jack Cohen and Brian Aldiss’ fight over speculative xenobiology, how to avoid the perils of categorisation and diamonds, and simply to hear Alexis fake his own death. Literally. As usual, it’s available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube or a host of other places all findable at the bottom of this page. Enjoy!

Announcing: The Locksmith’s Dream

Now, ah yes – we have an entirely new game to announce! Well, it’s sort of a game. We’ve been talking about this behind the scenes for a while, and are spinning off a new business to manage it next year. But we can now officially announce The Locksmith’s Dream, a series of invitation-only live events coming in 2022!

Since these are live events, places are seriously limited. Many people won’t be able to get tickets, and many others wouldn’t be able to travel to the UK anyway (particularly if the pandemic rages on – we’ll deal with that as it comes). So we intend to offer a physical Lady Afterwards-like home edition for people to run their own private embassies of night. More on that when we have more concrete details to share.

What does this mean for BOOK OF HOURS, I hear you ask? Absolutely nothing. BOOK OF HOURS is happily underway and we’ll have an updated 2022 roadmap for you next sprint. You’ll see a lot more movement on that project next year, including an expected early alpha and public beta. This year has been, well, a funny one – next year, we hope, will be more focused.

For anyone waiting on their pre-order box of The Lady Afterwards, you can now track your box’s progress here. It’s looking like a ship date of (probably!) February 2022, but we’ll keep pre-order customers updated as suppliers finish the various components that go into each box, and email with a confirmed ship date once we have it. Thanks for being patient!

For everyone else, you can get your Christmassy mitts on The Lady Afterwards: Digital Edition here, on Etsy or a number of other places listed on The Lady Afterwards page. But if you really want a physical box – and I have to say, they do look pretty darn shiny when I pack them up – I’m delighted to be able to confirm that we’ll be releasing another batch of physical edition boxes next year. We’ll confirm the date they’re launching in advance so you can get the date and time in your calendar. They went pretty fast last time…

Hope you’re as excited as we are for BOOK OF HOURS, The Locksmith’s Dream and AK’s most excellent musing on the umami of games. We’ve a lot of dark, delicious things to look forward to. And it’s basically already Christmas. <3

Simon Baron-Cohen is a leading clinical psychologist who developed something called the ‘empathising-systemising theory’. Essentially, it suggests that the brains of those born male tend to be systemising (having an interest in and talent for understanding how things work) and the brains of those born female tend to be good at empathising (having an interest in and talent for understanding how people feel). To be clear, this doesn’t mean men can’t be deeply empathetic or that women can’t be brilliant engineers. It’s just a way of explaining broad neurological patterns observed in humans and what they might mean.

This theory came up recently because I’ve been playing Ooblets, the Early Access Epic Store cuteathon borne of Pokémon and Stardew Valley. “Manage your farm, grow and train your ooblets, explore strange lands, and have dance-offs!”, its blurb blurbs. It mashes the best parts of several genres together – farming, pets, customisation, ‘combat’ – adds a few of its own excellent improvements, and packages them up in a surprisingly ironic kawaii pastel world. One glance at it tells you it’s the yin to Dark Souls’ yang: cute, easy, relaxing, and more traditionally female than most other PC games.

My fiancé, meanwhile, is playing Conan Exiles. Its graphics are realistic, its combat frequent and violent, and the average breast size of female characters damns all to chronic back pain. “Survive in a vast open world sandbox, build a home and kingdom, dominate your enemies,” blurbs the blurb. Tonally, Conan’s a world away from ooblets and dance-offs, demonstrably geared towards traditional male preference. But thematically and mechanically, they’re a lot more similar than it appears. I don’t have to break my ooblets on a Wheel of Pain to make them dance on my team, but I do have to plant and water them on my farm until they hatch – a classic ‘tend and befriend’ mechanic. My fiancé doesn’t have to grow sweetiebeeties to grind into Froobtose to make cakes to give to people so they’ll be his friend, but he does have to feed his captive wild panther certain types of raw meat to make it do what he wants – a classic simulation mechanic. We’re both farming, building, capturing, exploring and engaging in some sort of combat. Our games just come with traditionally feminine or masculine veneers.

It’s obviously not true that women only like easy and cute games or that men only like violence and breasts. But games data does support Baron-Cohen’s conclusions: you’ll find a lot of male players of Football Manager (a systems-driven PC game about men’s football) and a lot of female players of Pokemon GO (a socially-driven mobile game about cute animals). It’s great that both types – and all the spectrum in between them – exist, catering for the full breadth of human interest. But the next time you pick up a game that strikes you as particularly feminine or masculine, pause to think about what you really do in it. Is it Dark Souls in a dress? That’s more common than you’d think.

The Financial Times comes with a magazine helping rich people solve a difficult problem. It’s called:

It’s a good audience match for the FT, but it made me wonder: what would games’ equivalent be? If Wireframe were to start printing Gold Master: the Gilded Game Dev’s Guide To Being Stinking Rich (working title) telling us how to spend our Epic exclusive millions, it would be almost entirely useless. Most of us, most of the time, would glance furiously at it, eject some biting witticism about l’art pour l’art and the cretinous consumer base to which we’re forced to pander, and pointedly smash it in the bin.

But every so often one of us would have just launched the Next Big Thing. Every so often it’d be extremely useful. A small number of us are FT subscribers in waiting, on the cusp of a Cuphead, one try from a Terraria, one punt away from a new PUBG.

When it comes to ‘making it suddenly big’, two games spring to mind: Minecraft and Stardew Valley. Notch is worth about $1.3 billion and has his infamous candy room in the most expensive house ever sold in Beverly Hills. Eric Barone is a comparative pauper with a net worth of $34 million, but you can find his age, height, weight and, er, girlfriend listed on a high-ranking wealth record site. So that’s a consolation for him.

Neither dev seems to know what to do with their money. Notch has spoken publicly about feeling isolated, hasn’t produced a game in nearly a decade, and has now deleted his Twitter account. Barone famously drove around in a broken Toyota Camry and has only this year bought a desk that isn’t an upturned cardboard Wii box. Please join my campaign to fund Wireframe’s new Guide To Being Suddenly and Surprisingly Flush Cos of Games (alternative working title). It’s the movement this industry needs.

There’s something less frivolous about this, though. Making games for a living is one of the few professions where overnight fame and fortune really is possible. It’s worth (however unlikely it may be) having a think about what you’d do if you wake up tomorrow with BTS tweeting about you, Pewdiepie begging for a game key and Gabe Newell asking if he can pay this month’s Valve payment in several installments. Netflix’s hot new reality series, Selling Sunset, is chockablock with techpreneur millionaires sandwiched between impossibly attractive Californian women and, occasionally, their poodles. So it really happens! Netflix says so.

But there’s something similar that will affect you, many times over, during the course of your indie career. Game dev is volatile. Desperate make-or-break launches, draining post-launch blues, constant Twitter drama, the ever-changing and unpredictable marketplace – and, of course, that addictive idea that maybe, this time, this is your great indie hit. Making games for a living is almost certainly going to throw you into situations you never expected. When it does, your best hope is to have a clear idea of who you are and what you stand for so you can weather the storm.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, feel free to go back to being unsympathetic to rich people. And look out for Wireframe’s new insert, Bank You Kindly: The Introvert’s Guide To Big Spending (third time lucky?) coming soon to San Franciscan hotel lobbies, Tesla dashboards and candy rooms near you.

Imagine a dystopian future where big corporations sue other big corporations over mobile games, where everyone and their mum is making a PC game, and where eSports makes more money than any of us despite nobody really knowing what it’s for. You’re a small indie dev stuck in the middle of all this. How can you stand out and get noticed, in this picaresque world?

One way is to offer people something they can’t get elsewhere: top-notch merchandise. Indie merch is a blue ocean – most devs don’t bother with it unless they hit a certain milestone of success (think Darkest Dungeon or FTL). But it can make significant money – we usually make £2-4k profit each month from our our shop. It opens doors to other opportunities like attractive giveaways, and it diversifies your revenue streams so you’re not entirely dependent on the whims of store algorithms, influencers or press. In all, we’ve made around £75k profit from merch – this couldn’t sustain our studio like digital game sales do, but it’s very helpful as a side-gig!

Your first decision is what sort of shop you want. This’ll depend on your interests, skills and financial situation. Do you want a dedicated website? An integrated shop page on your studio’s site? Or would you like to be part of a larger outlet, alongside other games? A dedicated website requires the most technical set-up and makes you responsible for all the stock and ordering, but it gives your brand exclusivity. An integrated shop page keeps traffic on your site and moves the burden of stock-keeping and shipping to your provider. But it limits you to bigger, expensive providers like Shopify or Fangamer. Being part of a larger shop – getting a branded section on Gametee or Indiebox or AwesomeMerch, for example – brings great consumer traffic alongside threatening competition: someone who’s come to buy a Skyrim hat probably doesn’t want your octopus mug. And if they have come for an octopus mug, maybe Subnautica’s one is nicer.

[ This wasn’t out when I wrote this article, but I’d like to give a shout-out to Studio Zaum’s physical pop-up atelier in London, alongisde their online shop. Anything Zaum does is worth watching, ’cause they’re a smart, inventive bunch. ]

The type of shop you opt for has major knock-on effects. It’ll decide whether you design and produce your own items, and what items you can make in the first place. Most big producers offer a set catalogue: this makes your set-up easy but your offerings generic, reducing that vital stand-out-ability. Your shop front also determines customers’ experience: do you want social proofing, with your merchandise next to Destiny and Call of Duty? Or do you want to be a hidden boutique gem, at the expense of looking small? I chose to host our shop on Etsy, because it has a good balance between brand exclusivity and high-frequency footfall from people who are likely to want what we sell: notebooks, grimoires, tarot decks. Hippy-dippy nonsense for the magically-inclined.

The last major piece of the puzzle is pricing. If you’re making something unique and luxury – something people can’t get elsewhere – a good starting point is keystone pricing: essentially, your price is double how much it cost you to make. I found this difficult to swallow at first (what a bad deal for consumers!) but it makes sense once you add manual labour, postage, marketing and the human cost of doing business to the cost of actually making the things in the first place. Sense check your prices against the price of other similar items on your chosen platform to avoid looking like a bad deal in context, and you’re ready to go. It’s a bit of a guessing game – I’ve guessed wrong in the past! – but your audience will quickly tell you if you get it wrong.

All of this might sound like a lot of hard work. And it is. But play your cards right and you’ll not only end up with another revenue stream to feed your business, but a treasure trove of marketing fodder (think of the competition prizes, or the Kickstarter rewards, or the variety in your communication channels). If you’re at all interested in new business models and doing what other people aren’t, step into the church of the merch and take a pew with me.

While under communist dictatorship in the 1970s and 80s, dissenting Czechoslovaks arrived at demonstrations, stood in front of the police and beat each other up with vegetables. This was to save police the trouble of doing it with batons, though it also protested a violent authoritarian regime without doing enough to get arrested. All hail the subversive surrealism of European liberals!

Not that this has anything to do with authoritarian regimes, but China’s games market is worth $32-38 billion and comprises 750 million players. It’s also a relatively blue ocean for western games, thanks to an infamously difficult approval process required to release there. Currently, western devs can localise into Chinese and bung their games up on a storefront, knowing a reasonable percentage of those 750 million people will use VPNs or other workarounds to access their unapproved title. But this is changing.

First to fall is the App Store. Over 20,000 games were removed from the Chinese version of the store at the end of July 2020 for not having gone through official government approval. PC developers reading this might not care very much, but we could soon follow suit. Steam China has launched but includes less than a hundred of 30,000 games available on the global Steam store. These are the only ones who’ve been through the official Chinese review process.

The prospect of a happy backlog of localised western games automatically imported to Steam China looks unlikely. Valve hasn’t said it’ll cut Chinese players off from the original global Steam site, but Apple didn’t say that either. It just suddenly did it.

China’s National Press and Public Administration department – the people responsible for approving games for Chinese release – recently made it even harder. Online multiplayer games now need separate Chinese servers so Chinese players only interact with each other. A single untranslated word of English is enough to fail. And only 5,000 games a year can now be approved, shared between domestic and international titles across all platforms. In 2019 only 12% of approved games were international, so we’re looking at around 600 games a year. To put that into perspective, Steam sees around 23 new games released each day. One storefront on one platform could theoretically fill an entire year’s multiplatform quota in a month.

This is all before you get to content restrictions. Some of the new guidance forbids ‘vulgarity, pulp or kitsch elements or other content that violates the core values of socialism’ (no Hello Kitty games for China). You’re also not allowed to cast the player in ‘the role of a thief or criminal’ (tough luck, Cyberpunk) or portray ‘the supernatural, such as cults, fortune-telling, ghosts, zombies, vampires, etc’. Reading this as the developer of a game literally called ‘Cultist Simulator’ with a governmental antagonist called the ‘Suppression Bureau’, I should probably revise my sales estimates.

Here is a game that will ruin your life. It’s called ‘Horse Face, Plate Face’. It hinges on the eternal truth that every human who has ever been either had a long face like a horse or a round face like a plate. Occasionally there have been unspeakable comminglings between the two tribes which result in Rami Malek, but he’s beautiful and Egyptian which is the genetic equivalent of the Konami code. He’s cheating. Almost everyone else you will ever see for the rest of your life will be an HF or a PF. You’re welcome.

Humans love a system. We’ve evolved to seek patterns in the world, from predicting the weather to knowing not to bugger about with fire. In modern society, there are patterns upon patterns: red and black, which originally told animals to stay away, is now the most popular colour scheme for selling high-end gaming laptops to bold and fearless men. Selling high-end gaming laptops to bold and fearless men is, itself, part of the pattern of buying cool-looking stuff because that makes other people like you. That’s then part of the system of capitalism, which is part of the larger Platonic system of never being satisfied with anything because there is an unreachable universe out there, where we aren’t, where everything is literally perfect. Thanks, Plato.

Games capitalise on our, er, patternophilia. They place a player in a mesh of systems and much of the fun is identifying and mastering them. What once was new and unknown becomes a satisfying feedback loop of stimulus and response, of understanding and control. Pokémon teaches you to recognise types and respond with super-effective techniques. Dark Souls makes you learn enemy tells and dodge or attack accordingly. Celeste expects you to recognise terrain and react with the right moves to climb it.

The problem with systems is once you’re in one, it’s hard to get out. Most of our pattern recognition takes place subconsciously: we often don’t realise we’re inside. And one major side-effect of liking patterns is not liking change. If we’re ever smart enough to see the systems around us, it takes bravery to overcome our innate human desire to leave that system be. 

Change is a break in a pattern. Change is impossible to predict. From the base of our ancient monkey souls, change feels frightening and wrong. There are clear parallels to the Black Lives Matter movement which swept the world last year. There are also parallels to games industry culture, to how we interact with people on the internet, and how important it is to learn to think for yourself. We all have an evolved tendency towards following the pattern and doing what everyone else around us is doing. But you need just an hour or two in Playdead’s brilliantly pattern-phobic INSIDE to see how dystopian that can be.

Look, all I’m saying is games are part of a co-optive genetic narrative which preferences the status quo, and we’ll never build Utopia until we learn the importance of individualistic critical thinking. Oh, and that I’m a horse face. H/t, fellow HFs!