The Sunday Papers: LARP Safety, Troupe Play, and MicroProse's Early Days

Rock Paper Shotgun's Sunday Papers roundup brings together writing about games and gaming culture from across the web. This week's selection spans live-action roleplay safety, collaborative narrative design, media industry concerns around generative AI, and a retrospective look at early British game development.

Chloe Mashiter explores the nested complexity of safety protocols in live-action roleplay, using The Castle as a case study. The Castle is set in contemporary England and focuses on a group living as a medieval court. Players inhabit three layers: the real-life person participating, their modern-day character, and their in-game persona as a court member. This layering creates distinct safety challenges. A player can behave ethically while their character behaves abusively within the game world. The Castle itself may maintain comparative safety while the in-world charade does not. Mashiter's piece examines how to navigate these overlapping realities responsibly.

Thomas Manuel writes for Rascal about Band of Blades, a 30-60 player game that spanned an entire school. The campaign demonstrates how troupe play and character-sharing can function as institution-building. By requiring players to experience events through dozens of viewpoints and empathize with many characters, the game generates narratives where people resist simple categorization as good or evil, loyal or disloyal, strong or weak. Manuel notes this approach fosters appreciation for diversity, requiring both rule-followers and pragmatists, both leaders and skeptics.

The roundup also covers concerns about generative AI in media. Futurism's Maggie Harrison Dupré and Jon Christian report on Brown Brothers Media, a firm purchasing established journalism outlets and transforming them into content filled with AI-generated material. The company has succeeded in capturing reader attention across major platforms while publishing content that would disqualify traditional journalists. In separate reporting, 404 Media examined unredacted court filings in which Microsoft and OpenAI executives made stark statements about generative AI. OpenAI's policy director Jack Clark wrote that the company was creating systems that substitute for cultural labor. Microsoft stated in policy documents that generative AI could significantly disrupt employment for people whose data trained the models, noting that LLMs destroy their supply chain. OpenAI called itself an existential threat to news publishers.

A retrospective from Where Were They Now, a blog revisiting offices of early British game developers, explores MicroProse's origins. The piece documents the company's official launch at the American embassy and notes the UK press held early suspicion toward the studio. The blog post includes references to early videogame journalism and the period before online comment threads.

The roundup also features a Jank.cool group piece attempting to play Wardog without spending money on gear. The article documents low-budget gameplay strategies, including driving as an Uber driver with zero-budget attire, delivering a helicopter crash survivor for income, and following other players to control points while avoiding snipers.

The Sunday Papers runs weekly and curates game writing from across the internet.