This Week in Videogame Blogging

September 30th

by
Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

I want to begin with a confession: I’m tired. It’s been an emotionally draining news week pretty much regardless of what interests and channels you follow. I say this bearing in mind the privilege I enjoy in passing for straight, white, and male–even if I’m not quite any of those things–and can only defer to the folx out there who don’t have all of those advantages, and who have also had to endure this week’s barrage of headlines.

The biggest news story in games this week is, without a doubt, the shuttering of Telltale Games and firing of hundreds of its employees without severance, which has rapidly segued into the unconscionable prioritizing of its projects over its people, and–none too surprisingly–a lawsuit.

Naturally, then, there’s no shortage of games writing on labour practices this week, but I’d be remiss if I let that drown out the other things happening right now. Check out excellent writing on queer representation, spatial design, mental illness, and more. And, hey, if your week needs some lightening up, Pokémon is now 20 years old in the west and there’s quality some reflection to be had on that front. This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Labour

There’s an absolute deluge of writing around the web on Telltale right now. It’s going to take some time for most of the sober takeaways to make their way to publication, so instead of a roundup on all the most biting Telltale-specific takes out there, I’ve opted instead for a wider selection of writing looking both at the studio in particular as well as more general meditations on work practices in the industry. These seven articles, I believe, offer an aggregate look at the present conversation on labour in games.

“I don’t want to waste your time bragging — it’s not like Boyfriend Dungeon is the next Minecraft or anything, plenty of people have still never heard of the game — but I want you to understand:

  1. We worked hard, hoping a “blow up” might happen.
  2. But most of that work is invisible to fans & peers. From the outside it looks like we just sat there.
  3. We didn’t know if any of our efforts would work. Usually they don’t.
  4. And that’s totally normal.”

Cross-Generational Catching

With Pokémon hitting the 20-year milestone in the west, there’s been lots of reflective writing on the series. In particular, I was interested in these two contrasting viewpoints, each in their own way looking at the games’ evergreen accessibility and prioritization of a more casual, less-experienced audience.

“The quest to collect them all just didn’t speak to me anymore. There’s a moment of sadness there, sure, but there’s also liberation in the realization that not everything has to be for me.”

Political Spaces

I’ve come upon excellent writing examining the rhetoric of space in games nearly every week, and that trend continues today. This week’s three highlights look specifically at the political arguments evoked by the treatment of space in games.

“Players are positioned as villains aligned with capitalist hegemony, dispossessing land from longstanding communities and reflecting the systemic processes by which underprivileged neighborhoods are displaced by the arrival of outside wealth.”

Representative of the Medium

I continue to find hope and joy in the upward trend of both queer and gender representation on both sides of the screen in games. These four articles highlight a sample of the great work being done on those fronts.

“The model of the humanoid used in modeling nonhuman life forms, as is the case with my Mass Effect crushes, strikingly tends to appear like a certain kind of human. A human upright with proper stature, fine and narrow facial features, a slim frame, uses standardized English, overly able. Gendered in a binary, too, and if a woman oversexualized, and if a man hypermasculine.”

Historical Artifacts

Two excellent pieces of writing this week look at games as products of their time from opposite angles–the recent past and the far future. Much more productive than making the historical accuracy (*cough cough racism cough sexism*) of your favourite war-simulator the hill you plan to die on if you ask me.

“Will there still be people around who’ll appreciate, or at least try to understand, the seemingly timeless appeal of Dark Souls, Doom, Civilization or Super Mario in a thousand years? The only certainty is there will be major hurdles beyond purely technological ones to overcome if anyone is to actually play and engage with these games in any meaningful way.”

Mind and Heart

I want to see more games addressing mental health as well as affect–and more conversations about those games, especially when the games get it wrong. Here are four standout examples from this week.

“The beauty of the conversations gramma has with her customers is that not only are we learning about the problems of her customers as she does, we also learn about her problems by being reminded by her patrons. Her growing senility (an anxiety she asks a patron about) leaves a hole to be filled by the story and it does so beautifully.”

Just for Fun

It’s been a hard week in a lot of ways for a lot of people, so this time around I’m capping things off with two lighthearted articles. Enjoy!

“I recently left my apartment in northern California and drove a U-Haul full of my belongings to a new place in southern California. Although it’s a game that’s played by millions every day, I cannot recommend Moving.”

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