Is “big” multiplayer no longer the future?
Ed gets teary-eyed about good old-fashioned duels.
One of my favourite pieces of videogame writing is “Bow, Nigger”, an account of a fight with a noxious bigot in Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast multiplayer. Odds are you’ve read it or about it via Kieron Gillen’s much hailed, much derided New Games Journalism manifesto, which argues that writers should embrace the personal idiosyncrasies of their voyages within games, in order to create what’s effectively a mixture of travel journalism, drug fiction and “pub anecdotes with delusions of grandeur”.