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tThanks to the distinctly Scottish weather over the holidays, my family and I ended up celebrating Hogmanay at home instead of at the party we had planned to attend. My youngest son’s little friend and his parents came over for dinner, and when the younger members of our group started losing control around 9 pm, we threw them a little midnight Animal Crossing countdown party.
The last time I played Animal Crossing was in the middle of lockdown. Taking care of my island paradise helped me cope while I was imprisoned in a two-and-a-half-room basement with a baby, a toddler, and a teenager. (I was far from the only one: The National Video Game Museum compiled a file of people’s Animal Crossing experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it’s clear that it was a lifesaver for many). Our guests had brought their Switch family, and we set up the kids with their little avatars so they could join the new animals. Party of the year.
They spent about 10 minutes happily hitting each other with mosquito nets before joining the other inhabitants in the plaza with a giant countdown clock in the background, the island’s raccoon magnate, Tom Nook, offering party poppers and sparkly top hats. I was visited by a sudden and fascinating memory of New Year’s Eve 2021, which I spent on my couch, alone but not alone either, because I was with my friends on Animal Crossing, watching the same countdown clock tick. My little boy had just started walking and his short, stocky legs were wobbly. Turning away from the screen, I saw him joking with his older brother, excited to be up so late. It felt surreal.
Watching my kids discover and experience video games has often felt a little surreal to me. They enrich or even overwrite my previous memories of the games in question, such as playing in New Game+ or a new save file. Last year around this time we all started playing Pokémon together, the Switch remake of the red and blue Game Boy versions that I myself had played to death in 1999. Now Pokémon isn’t just something I love. as a child but one thing he loved through my children Super Mario 3D World now feels like a totally different game, with its four-player mayhem and sibling bickering. Games are transformed by their presence, their reactions, the differences between how they respond and how I do.
Recently, my youngest son wanted to try a Zelda game, and the only one we have appropriate for his age is the Switch version of Link’s Awakening. I got angry. When he was a baby, my youngest son was terribly ill in the hospital, and I spent long hours at his side in the ward trying to keep my terror at bay by playing Link’s Awakening, while my headphones failed to drown out the urgent beeps of the machines. It recovered, but my associations with that game remain bleak despite its summery atmosphere and outrageous cuteness. I swallowed my reflex anxiety and handed the controller to my son as soon as we found Link’s sword buried in the sand on the beach. It was a healing moment, watching him throw it at spiky urchins, stone-spitting octopuses, and plump, pig-like spearmen, healthy and whole and with an expression of mischievous delight.
Video games were, for my parents, distant and mysterious, and they viewed them with some suspicion (but, most importantly, they never disdained them). I invited them in, I tried to show them the worlds I saw on the other side of the screen and, although they watched me with interest, I was like a visitor from another country, showing them photos of some place they had never been, trying to explain my feeling of wonder. With my own children, I am more like a tour guide: I know this territory intimately and they are excited to have me guide them through it.
Later, when our tastes diverge, I’ll presumably be the tourist at their games. I’ll feel like I did 10 years ago when my friend’s 12-year-old son showed me his Minecraft server, full of collaboratively built automated gadgets. (He is now an engineer). For now, though, Animal Crossing has taken hold. I created a family island for my kids to take care of, then pulled out the old yellow Switch Lite that housed the island I holed up on when they were little and we were cut off from the world during lockdown. It is a magnificent island, the product of hundreds of hours of gentle work, but it has languished since the times of the pandemic; I have been afraid to return to that place and all its found memories. But my children are desperate to visit. Can you help me make new ones?
what to play
For decades, programmers and developers have done a long running joke I couldn’t get Doom to run on unlikely things, from calculators to refrigerators to ATMs, but it’s still been a while since I’ve seen this ubiquitous 1993 shooter in a new light.
In Doom: The Gallery Experienceyou wander the halls of a gallery with a glass of red in hand, contemplate pixelated recreations of Renaissance, Greek and Egyptian art, and collect snacks to fill your cheese meter. Its developers describe it as “a work of art designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings.” It’s short, but it certainly brightened my first day back at work in this gray January.
Available in: You can play it in your browser through itch.io
Estimated playing time: less than 30 minutes
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what to read
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The New York Times published Video games can’t afford to look this gooda long, thoughtful interactive look at the many existential questions about how games are made, with ever-increasing budgets and unnecessarily high-fidelity graphics.
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The conversation about free to play and “gatcha” games were once universally reviled. It is now often suggested that criticism of these business models ignores the reality of the majority of people who play them, people in parts of the world where console games are unaffordably expensive. Developer Bruno Dias argues that it is false to avoid criticizing these pay-for-play models: “We should not consider that these companies satisfy a need but rather that they exploit an inequality.”
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Video game researcher and archivist Felipe Pepe believes that the US-centric way in which history of video games is presented erase gaming experiences from millions of people in other parts of the world – the stories of home computers, LAN houses, unofficial mods and gaming cafes.
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A scoop of Game files Stephen Totilo, who discovered previously confidential numbers in a Activision Court filing: Reported development cost for Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War totaled $700 million, except marketing. It’s the largest gaming budget ever reported.
What to click
Question block
Today’s question comes from David: “What would be your favorite video game character’s favorite game?”
My favorite video game character (that I didn’t create myself) is Kazuma Kiryu from the Like a Dragon games. He’s spent a lot of time playing old Sega games in the arcades of virtual Tokyo under my supervision, but I think he would. love Animal crossing. It would appeal to his sense of responsibility and do-gooder tendencies, and would be an escape from the violence of his real-world lifestyle. I don’t consider him much of a gamer (the guy was born into a Yakuza family in 1968, when they wouldn’t have had an NES), but I can imagine him solemnly watering flowers and customizing furniture, as a break from rearranging bad guys’ faces with his fists.
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