Sunday’s Papers

Background: A Sunday Column With a Recurring Headache

The Sunday Papers format is simple: a weekly roundup of writing highlights, framed by whatever physical ailment the author is nursing. This installment opens with a familiar complaint—a wedding attended on Saturday, an acute case of Old Person's Back, and the pivot from recovery to blame assignment. The suspects: a swivel chair, a mattress, a re-boxed PC monitor, a sofa, and light walking. The reading begins from that untrustworthy chair.

What follows, though, is less a random assortment than a thematic cluster. Four of the five pieces circled the same territory: how games and the industry around them handle power, violence, labor, and the stories they tell themselves about all three.

First Stop: Final Fantasy XVI and the Limits of Visual Flavor

Mazen Haggag, writing for Deleted Saves, examines Final Fantasy XVI's attempt to incorporate Middle Eastern and North African cultural influences. The verdict: Dhalmekia, the base game's only non-white nation, is all surface and no substance.

The details matter here. Dhalmekia is a desert nation of craftspeople whose wealth derives from trading artisan goods across Valisthea. Its towns follow fantasy-game convention by each specializing in something: Tabor has its tanneries, Dravozd features an entire questline about smithing, and Dalimil's main attraction is its hot springs, surrounded by shops—a carpet shop, a shisha stall, stores selling herbs and spices, a brass ornament shop, a bakery. Haggag notes that this variety tells a visual story about how the town grew, thanks to travelers drawn by the hot springs and a populace making the most of the opportunities available.

But the criticism lands precisely where it should: while objects and accoutrements on display add visual flavor, that flavor never extends to the people who occupy the country.

Second Stop: Armored Core 6 and the Unequal Ethics of Violence

Lilith, writing for Gamesline, takes on violence—violence in games, games that scold you for violence, the both-sidesing of violence, and the empowerment of violence—largely through the optics of a big stompy mech.

The argument is sharp. Armored Core 6 understands that violence is not glamorous. Death is ugly, arriving in screams and gunfire; war is filled with people who don't get a moment for a catchy one-liner before dying. But depending on the route, that same violence can be cathartic. Lilith's framing: the aesthetics of death and violence are loud. Blood is bright. Some emotions are too loud to whisper. A story where a violent regime is overthrown by the downtrodden is not the same power fantasy as one where you uncritically protect the status quo. Both stories are violent, yet that violence is not equal.

Third Stop: AI Research and the Applications of Capital

Dr. Michael Cook, an artificial intelligence researcher and occasional RPS contributor, contrasts the optimism of earlier AI work with what big tech has warped it into. The anecdote he offers is damning in its ordinariness: a paper he reviewed—one of about a dozen identical papers he's reviewed this year alone—whose core contribution was simply that the authors asked an LLM to do a thing. They took a product built by a private company, asked it to do something, and reported that it did it, with no evaluation.

Cook's conclusion is measured but bleak. It's fine if this is AI research now; times change, words change. But he finds it impossible to reconcile with the world he got excited about two decades ago. So much of AI research now consists of using the products of a handful of companies to claim they can do something—and if you're lucky, they might ask another LLM to evaluate the results. The research investigates the applications of capital, not the expansion of our understanding of the world.

Fourth Stop: Xbox Layoffs and the Tarot Deck of Death Cards

Nathan Brown's Hit Points newsletter, on the Microsoft layoffs, earns a meta-note as "roundupping on easy mode"—but also as one of the best, funniest, most elegantly furious newsletters in games.

The substance: no one is fooled. There's a certain logic to folding the Halo team—which has spent a lot of money and a lot of time to make pretty much the square root of fuck-all—into Activision, whose well-oiled Call Of Duty production line knows how to actually ship things. But the column's judgment is that no one outside the Xbox C-suite believes any of this is good or will work. The Xbox tarot deck these days consists solely of Death cards. Shuffle them all you like; it's nice to feel busy. Just don't expect anything to change.

Fifth Stop: Nevermind at 35, and the Words Nobody Discussed

Niko Stratis, writing for Paste Magazine on Nevermind's 35th birthday, provides the collection's emotional center. The piece is not really about the album's sound but about the silence surrounding its lyrics.

Stratis recalls that nobody really talked about the words; they only warned about what they meant. Baptist neighbors called them satanic, evil. Stratis learned that personal feelings—feelings that felt at home and reflected in Cobain's lyrics—were bad. Sinful, like pride and murder before them. His mother didn't think much of the lyrics until Cobain died by suicide, at which point his sinful lyrics became desperate warnings. Nobody talked about why he was sad, why he was so happy but alone, ugly but okay. Nobody talked about mental health, or the weight of the 1990s—a decade often remembered as many things, but to Stratis always a little dark. Brown wallpaper and dark carpet in the living room. Nights that seemed to find more hours to be dark. All the words Stratis didn't have for why Nevermind spoke so deeply—why it became his favorite record to an annoying degree once its unknowable form became tangible to him in a way it would never be for anyone else.

Also Worth Noting

Not writing, but linked anyway: People Make Games' report on Bobby Kotick's press-targeting lawfare, a two-year investigation primarily by journalist Mikhail Klimentov.

Music for the week: the Control Resonant OST, with particular fondness for whatever the fuck this is.

Where This Leaves the Week

Three of the five featured pieces—Final Fantasy XVI's hollow cultural representation, Armored Core 6's unequal violence, and Xbox's Death-card shuffle—are about institutions that present surfaces while withholding substance. Two others—the AI paper mill and the Nevermind retrospective—are about what happens when the words beneath the surface go unexamined. The week's reading, taken together, keeps arriving at the same question: who benefits when the flavor never extends to the people?