GYGO Variety Hour: This One’s a Weird One

Welcome back to Get Your Game On Variety Hour! We’re somehow light on Variety Hour news this month (or I’ve just been really cozily curled up under my rock recently), so the roundup is going to be… especially eclectic today, let’s say. Buckle in for some Internet Archive updates, some TTRPG rounding-up, and finally, some links to more traditional new-release and current-event-type news, I suppose.

The Atrocities Just Don’t Stop (Even When They Say They Will)

Ongoing ceasefire talks don’t mean Israel has stopped killing people in Palestine, and a ceasefire itself won’t mean everything is fixed. That said, a ceasefire will save lives in the short term, and this link page includes several resources to help you continue to put pressure on reps in the US, the UK, and Canada. Regardless of the status of the ceasefire, continuing to encourage institutions—states, cities, universities, companies—to divest from Israel is a powerful way to push for Palestinian liberation beyond the immediacy of the past year’s violent onslaught. And, as we do every week, I encourage you to sign up for Sidequest’s own Zainabb Hull’s Crips for Palestine newsletter, which delivers short lists of digital actions you can take to support Palestine.

What’s Going on With the Internet Archive?

This may be old news to folks following the case seriously, but if you’re like me and, uh, have not been doing that, here’s what’s up:

In March 2020, the Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library, removing lending restrictions for the digitized books in its archive for the duration of the national emergency. In June 2020, a coalition of major publishers headed by Hachette Book Group sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement. The Internet Archive closed the National Emergency Library—i.e., reinstated lending restrictions—early, but HBG’s suit claimed that the Internet Archive’s default lending policies also constituted copyright infringement for reasons that this Wikipedia article will frankly explain better than I ever could. The suit bounced around the courts for several years, as any case is wont to do, and in March 2024 a judge ruled that the Internet Archive was indeed guilty of copyright infringement.

As a result, the Internet Archive has agreed to pay the plaintiffs—the largest book publishers in the United States, and some of the largest book publishers in the world—a fee, and removed 500,000 books by those publishers from their archives. They’re still able to lend out other stuff, but 500,000 is an almost unimaginably huge number that fundamentally affects the Internet Archive’s mission to “provide Universal Access to All Knowledge [sic].” The Internet Archive has appealed this decision, and as of late June 2024, had presented oral arguments to the US Court of Appeals. Supposedly, a decision could come “as early as” fall 2024.

Now, why does this matter for gamers? Well, the Internet Archive doesn’t just do books. Due to the rapid evolution of console and handheld technology, video games are in particular danger of becoming lost media. The Internet Archive’s digitization and archival strategies are well suited to prevent the total loss of games in particular, but game companies are notoriously litigious. If Hachette and company are successful in their copyright infringement bid, game developers (particularly those who generate the most profit and have the most power) will have an additional weapon in their arsenal to prevent the archiving and sharing of games that publishers have no interest in maintaining.

The danger of losing games media doesn’t just apply to games themselves: the Internet Archive has historically stored digital archives of games magazines… including old Nintendo Power magazines, which Nintendo has already had pulled from the site. In an age of shuttering of online games journalism outlets, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is often the only way to access articles on sites that have been otherwise stripped from the internet.

Those in-Beta TTRPGs You Forgot About

I’m a known Dungeons & Dragons hater and indie TTRPG liker, which means sometimes I go on the hunt for a game to fit a really specific conceptual niche and come up with the perfect thing!… that is deep in beta and only sort of playable. Here are a couple that are now out of beta!

Songs for the Dusk is a rather gentler re-imagining of Blades in the Dark’s Forged in the Dark core dice and stress mechanics. Players still rack up stress instead of losing hit points, but maxing out a stress bar results in the player acquiring a removable “Quirk” (as opposed to Blades in the Dark’s more permanent “Trauma”). The setting of Songs for the Dusk is also gentler: rather than toiling in a Fallen London-esque dark fantasy industrial town, players explore a hopeful post-apocalyptic science fantasy world, with several of the game’s mechanics focusing on building a new community.

Stewpot is an old favorite of mine that has recently completed a wildly successful crowdfunding campaign for a beautiful, fully fleshed out physical release! Stewpot is a GMless game where players embody retired adventurers who have settled down to run a tavern. Over the course of play, which takes the form of several TTRPG minigames, these adventurers let go of their identities as hard explorers and relearn how to put down roots.

Girl by Moonlight is perhaps my longest awaited game on this list: I first found some small references to in-development Google Docs in 2017, wasn’t able to include it in my anime-inspired TTRPG roundup in 2021, and had frankly given up by the time Maddi Butler and I wrote our Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury game roundup in late 2022. But it’s finally here! Girl by Moonlight uses Forged in the Dark core mechanics to offer players four carefully tailored “Series Playsets,” each of which models a different magical girl genre—from Sailor Moon to Paprika to The Vision of Escaflowne.

And a bonus: the Lancer core rulebook got a hardcover reprint recently, with extremely sick cover art by Peyton Gee. If you’ve been wanting a physical copy to reference, now’s your chance!

In Other News…

Speaking of the Wayback Machine… Game Informer has been so brutally shuttered that writers and readers can no longer access old articles. The site URL (www.gameinformer.com) no longer leads to anything but a link-less landing page.

The Global Game Jam has announced its 2024 scholarship recipients and (separately!) unveiled an Indie Studio Supporter program for indie studios.

My “favorite” streamer (I only ever watch one streamer) and their partner are doing a “cool summer of streams!” Kat Brewster (or katbamkapow) and Jack de Quidt are what I can only describe as “experimental streamers,” by which I mean that in addition to occasionally playing a real video game, they also steam things like “typing the name of every animal they can think of,” “organizing KB’s Zotero library,” or “exploring Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights as if it’s an RPG world map.” Their streaming schedule can also be called, uh, experimental, but 7:30 Eastern on a weekday is a frequently recurring start time.

Summer Games Done Quick 2024 has come and gone. I missed it entirely, but archives are now up on the Games Done Quick YouTube page. I hope everyone had fun!

2024’s online-only Game Devs of Color Expo will be held from September 18–21, 2024. I either forgot this existed or only just learned about it, so I’m reminding you, too!

Anna Anthropy, creator of fascinating, mini and micro indie TTRPGs, has released The Hole in your House, a deeply unsettling micro game that fits on a business card (Note: Anthropy advises that players “with anxiety or prone to compulsive behaviors should proceed with caution.”)