Sunday Newspaper Roundup

Five Sunday updates begin with the first lie-in in a month. No trips to visit family, no waking in unfamiliar beds, and no waiting for hosts to get up before breakfast: the writer sleeps on their own particular mattress, then eats toast and scrambled eggs at a time they choose. After breakfast, they return to bed with a fresh cup of coffee and read the week's best writing at their own leisure, then pass it along.

Background: border waits, Papers, Please, and the DMV scene

Papers, Please grew from the time developer Lucas Pope spent in immigration queues while travelling in Asia and the US. In that experience, every interaction with a border officer becomes a test of defining yourself, verifying yourself, and proving that your existence is recognised. The writer notes that many people can relate to that feeling, but Micaela Deitz's essay for Deleted Saves gives Papers, Please a sharper emotional edge.

Deitz writes as a trans American without correct documentation who was kept moving, uncertain, and afraid by a government that controlled the tempo, rhythm, melody, and length of their life. Rest came only at the state's command. At a DMV desk, Deitz hoped the woman behind the desk, described as a maestro de jure, was not transphobic or crushed by the rules and regulations of bureaucracy. Deitz handed over documents, including a passport, with shaky hands and said the passport and license had different genders, but that the license was the real one. The worker nodded but seemed not fully to hear; her brows furrowed as the words clicked, and her line, "These are different?", came out as a statement that sounded like a question.

The roundup also includes the writer holding up a limp piece of paper, then slapping it against a knee to show its structural integrity.

Development process: one hour inside Gunman Contracts

The Sunday roundup then turns to Gunman Contracts, a new VR game played by a contributor described as Graham, or Smith, writing for Jonk. The game stumbles into many familiar VR problems. The writer jokes that John Wick has never died because a belt clipped through the floor while crouching blocked access to a gun, and that Jack Reacher has never died because a head straying too close to an Ikea Strandmon footstool caused reality to phase-shift into a living room. Jim Wicker has never died either, the writer adds, but in this game an offhand trying to remove an empty cartridge from a gun keeps snapping to the handle with finger-nipping magnetism like a Switch 2 Joy-Con.

The writer says they experienced all of those frustrations, and more, in an hour of Gunman Contracts, yet still does not think the game is bad. The complaints are limited: it is a little unoptimised, and its ragdoll physics feel a little weightless. When a brief moment of synchronicity with the software appears, the sequence becomes a headshot on one goon, an explosion caused by shooting a gas canister, and a deliberately thrown knife into the chest of a third target. For that moment, the writer feels like John Woo.

Latest developments: E-Day, The Coalition, and a bonus near end of October

Eurogamer's Connor Makar spoke with developers at The Coalition about their prospects following the release of E-Day. As a first-party Xbox studio working on a first-party game in a series that could be treated as a flagship for the console, the team naturally expects to be laid off as soon as the game launches. The roundup frames that expectation as what Xbox does now.

The concern is deepened by a bonus scheme. Metacritic bonuses tied to a game's critical reception have been an established practice at game development studios for years, and the stipulations involved are described as standard. An internal email verified by Eurogamer confirms the existence of the bonus and its relatively typical nature.

One aspect has become worrying because of ongoing Xbox cuts: to be eligible for the bonus, developers must be full-time employees at the time of the payout. Studio leadership have communicated to The Coalition developers that the payout date should be near the end of October, according to one source.

That timing creates uncertainty for people who have recently left or been laid off. Juan Vaca, for example, was recently laid off by Xbox and is therefore no longer employed at The Coalition, but may still technically be on payroll when the late October payout happens. Eurogamer understands that, despite concerns, those recently impacted, such as Vaca, will still receive their bonuses if the game hits its targets.

What remains unclear, however, is what happens to current staff bonuses if those developers are laid off immediately following the release of Gears of War: E-Day, as some now fear. As of now, it is still uncertain whether these developers would receive their Metacritic bonus.

Latest developments: Google AI overviews, media layoffs, and Hollywood flops

Over the past month, games media has seen a string of layoffs. The roundup points to Google's continued push into AI overviews as one of the main reasons: the format strips work from websites and pastes it at the top of search results, reducing the revenue sites would have earned from visitors. Sites that leaned hard into Google as their primary source of traffic are suffering the most.

Many writers now being laid off from those sites were told in previous years by the business people who owned the sites that they needed to optimise their work for Google. Those optimisations, the roundup notes, turned out to make the work easier for Google to harvest.

With gallows fascination, the roundup reads Malin Hay's essay for the LRB on Hollywood flops, many of which were the result of an executive chasing a fad. No producer wants sixty crew members to go to hospital, and no studio wants to finance a film that brings in zilch. Robey argues that the money-grabbing instinct can be counterproductive: before their downfall, films that flopped were often dreamed up erroneously as sure things by some backstage calculus derived from everything box office is meant to teach us.

Robey's decision to order the chapters chronologically gives a sense of the fads that came and went in Hollywood over the course of a century. In the silent era, audiences favoured grand historical epics and weepies, which led to fiascos such as Queen Kelly.

Spoiler warning: Queen Kelly's plot is discussed. In the film, Gloria Swanson plays a convent schoolgirl seduced and disgraced by a Teutonic prince. The production was scuttled by the defiant overspending of director Erich von Stroheim, who, in Swanson's words, fondled and dawdled over the tiniest minutiae but failed to notice that the talkies had arrived. Swanson footed the bill, and Queen Kelly never got a commercial release in the US.

Latest developments: West Denton underpasses and Kiwanuka's recovery

Earlier this week, Mark shared the work of a local artist writing messages on the walls of underpasses not too far from his home. The messages are low-stakes gossip, including "Rita Ora has the Lidl Plus App" and "Anneka Rice builds forts with the cushions in B&M". Radge Magazine tracked the artist down for an interview.

Asked what possessed them to start spray-painting British B-listers in radge predicaments onto the sides of buildings, the artist said they are from the area and that West Denton is not being ruined by the work; if anything, it improves it. The artist told the interviewer to stop nonsense, adding that people have been at a loose end since Vanessa Feltz's show was cancelled by Channel 5. They used to spend time wreaking havoc during her phone-in segments until the press got wind and pulled the plug, which the artist called a bit of fun.

The roundup finds the local Facebook group pleasing: members act up in arms over the messages while playing along, like a neurodivergent Batman carrying a sordid secret. One reply to a busybody says there is no idea what possessed the writing, that it would not bring anyone closer together, and that it was absolutely ludicrous. The writer calls that exchange a rush and frames the whole thing as tongue-in-cheek fun that brightens people's day on their cruel commute. The roundup also jokes about Annie Lennox getting a boiled egg in her meal deal, hoping she makes a few bob and does a bloody good job. The artist insists the locations are not being ruined because they are already filthy, dirty, and stinking.

In a profile for The Guardian last month, Jason Okundaye interviewed musician Michael Kiwanuka. Little had been heard of Kiwanuka since he pulled out of a festival in July last year. In the piece, Kiwanuka revealed that he had suffered from a stroke and was still deep in recovery. This week's music pick is the RAK Studios session of Love & Hate, listed as Michael Kiwanuka - Love & Hate (Live In Session At RAK Studios / 2016), available to watch on YouTube.

Current stage: waiting for October, recovery, and local mischief

The current stage is a set of parallel waits. Papers, Please and Deitz's DMV essay keep returning to the moment when documents either confirm a person or expose them to uncertainty. Gunman Contracts is still in the one-hour trial-and-error phase, where VR glitches can spoil the fantasy but a clean sequence can briefly make it work. The Coalition's situation is pinned to a payout date near the end of October and the unresolved question of what happens to current staff bonuses if layoffs follow the release of Gears of War: E-Day.

Games media is still absorbing the effects of Google AI overviews and past-month layoffs. Hollywood's flop history offers a long-arc lesson in executives chasing fads, while West Denton's underpass messages, Annie Lennox meal-deal jokes, and Kiwanuka's 2016 RAK Studios session mark the present week's cultural updates.