Here are the Sunday Papers.

A Sunday taxi run to Gatwick for overseas relatives, paired with the usual papers post, sets the scene for a week of reading that ranges from billionaire-hunting shooters to the language of game development outsourcing, the limits of simulation, and a museum squeezed onto a 1989 handheld.

Background: The Artist Shooting Humanity Into Billionaires

Artemis Octavio's interview for Stop Caring with multimedia artist Jeremy Couillard centers on Soul Injector Commando, an FPS about shooting a sense of humanity into enemies modeled on real-life billionaires. Couillard described researching the names that appear in the upper corner each time a target is "injected," along with the job each acquires after receiving a soul. He Googled many of them for fun, and noticed streamers playing the game doing the same. That research was the point: many of the people he looked up are arrested, dead, or under indictment, and almost all are criminally involved in something.

Development: The Team-Size Discourse and the Language of Outsourcing

The past week's discourse on gamedev team sizes was sparked by a GI.biz post about Star Wars: Galactic Racer and its "core team" of 75. Couillard's interview aside, that conversation was clearly an inferior rehash of the Nic-sparked Expedition 33 discussion from last year. It did produce a thoughtful Game Developer piece by Bryant Francis on whether a new language approach is needed to fit recent developments in outsourcing.

Done right, the model diversifies financial risk and preserves what works about triple-A development without keeping everyone under one corporate entity. Done wrong, it produces a game development class system, where creative direction and funding flow in limited directions and those not at the center struggle to keep doing the work they love. The problem is organizational, not something good copyediting fixes. But organizations begin with language, and the language used to define the work will define the future of video game development.

Analysis: When Games Fail on Intent, Not Sales

Writer and former Double Finer Harper Jay considers when games fail in the "intent and aspirations" sense rather than the tedious "sales and Steam player counts" sense. Manhunt's investment into stealth simulation is not insignificant, especially for the time. Even with the conceit of a snuff director engineering these scenarios, it wants you to understand there is a world. It behaves largely as expected: the rules are mostly the rules of the real world, and a brick falls because there is "gravity" and makes "noise" like a normal brick.

But the game has rules: do X and a guard will do Y, and exploiting this is key to progress and high scores. Hit a wall, the mook says the thing, he walks over. That is the rule, at least so far. Except this guy doesn't move. It is not meta-textual commentary or an undercutting trick on the player; he is just not programmed that way. Raising it in the game club confirmed something was up. The simulation fails, the artifice is too obvious, the funhouse is on display a bit too brazenly. It is endearing in the way all jank can be, but it is "off."

Latest: A Game Boy Museum on a Game Boy Cartridge

Eurogamer's Robert Purchese meets the man who put a Game Boy Museum into a Game Boy cartridge. Presenting the collection online for modern computers and devices is relatively straightforward; cramming it onto a cartridge for a device made in 1989 is an entirely different matter. Pflug discovered immediate obstacles: the Game Boy is "a spectacularly bad e-reader" due to the limited 255 "blocks" it can show on screen. That is not a lot when several blocks are used for every letter of text and the museum is primarily text-based. As Pflug notes, reading a museum on a Game Boy turns out to be a game of inches.

Offbeat Close: Timothy Dexter and the Punctuation Sheet

The week also brought an education in eccentric American moneyman Timothy Dexter (1747-1806), whose preternatural luck in seeing bumbling investments succeed was matched only by his zest for unhinged wordsmithing. The introduction came via Edwin, mad with fury after years of commas being edited into his articles, who sent Dexter's punctuation sheet supplement, included in reprints of one work: "Nowing ones complane of my book the fust edition had no stops."

As told by Public Domain Review, Dexter's life reads like literary fable: a Trimalchio reborn in New England, whose wealth afforded him everything but the respect he really desired. Self-educated, he served as the elected Informer of Newburyport, Massachusetts, tasked with enforcing laws regarding the slaughter of deer. Each week he synchronized his vast clock collection, and the device that ran truest, or "behaved best" in his words, was baptized with a grandiose title. He kept a court of confidantes, including a personal poet laureate, Jonathan Plummer, whose name perhaps reflects the man's talent with verse: "Lord Dexter, like king Solomon, / Hath gold and silver by the ton." Also in the circle was the upper-class Lucy Lancaster, daughter of a formerly enslaved African king, who provided both council and mitigation: "If Dexter loaded a gun to shoot some one, Luce was sent for."

A search for something BioWare-related to include turned up nothing better than Edwin's eulogy, even if the first draft needed some commas. Music for the week alternated between Clutch's gigantic, dive-bombing Wasted Lands and a SilvaGunner remix of Unbeatable's best song.