January 2021

Welcome back, readers.

I hope this roundup finds you well, wherever you are.

This Month In Videogame Vlogging is a roundup featuring the best videogame criticism to be made using a video format from the previous calendar month.

Plague Time

To begin with, these two essays consider how the coronavirus pandemic makes us reinterpret plague settings in videogames which themselves predated our particular crisis.

• Plague Art: Making Sense in the Midst of Death – Yaz Minsky (27:44)

  The experience of playing Pathologic 2 during the pandemic informs Yaz Minsky’s consideration of how shifting contexts affect the interpretation of art across time. (Autocaptions)

• Dishonored in 2021 is a Different Kind of Grim – Writing on Games (12:18)

  Dishonored’s portrayal of class struggle in a world stricken by plague foresaw some of the now-familiar ticks of our own, observes Writing on Games. (Manual captions) [Contains embedded advertising]

Looking for Something

The following four essays are interested in how games engage the player’s detective impulse with fragmented and parallel quests for meaning.

• Paradise Killer: A Game About Rejecting Convenience (GOTY 2020) – Pim Is Online (14:30)

  Pim argues that Paradise Killer succeeds in the rare task of getting the player to do things the hard way for their own satisfaction. (Manual captions)

• Searching for Disco Elysium – Jacob Geller (23:54)

  Jacob Geller turns to Italo Calvino’s novella Invisible Cities to understand the different ways Disco Elysium allows the player to come to know its fictional city-setting, Reveschal. (Manual captions) [Contains embedded advertising]

• Disco Elysium, Roleplaying Heaven – Curio (39:23)

  Eric Sophia observes how Disco Elysium’s nuanced roleplaying system reflects Harry’s social inaction back through the player’s choices. (Autocaptions)

• The Pursuit of Happiness in Coffee Talk (Feat: Game Professor) – Red Angel (36:00)

  Red Angel and Game Professor extensively analyse the structural roles of the characters in Coffee Talk. (Manual captions)

These Messy Processes

Here are some pieces that were difficult to categorise elsewhere, but collectively they deal with the indeterminate zigzags from A to B, the happy hazard-a-go’s, the malicious failures.

• Prepare for 1995’s Descent! Children of DOOM Episode 5 – Errant Signal (22:12)

  Chris Franklin remembers the ups and downs of “cool-if-flawed experiment” flight/FPS, Descent, contextualising its strangeness within the gradual standardisation of shooter design. (Autocaptions)

• Meta Microvideos – Matthewmatosis (33:14)

  In vignette style, Matthewmatosis discusses the historical and creative forces that influence how (games) criticism is produced. (Autocaptions)

• PornHub’s Failed Gaming Site: Nutaku – Alexandra Orlando (16:10)

  Alexandra Orlando takes a critical look at (giant porn company) Mindgeek’s attempt at setting up an adult games platform. (Manual captions)

Completion Statuses

At the end of things, these two videos consider (sort of, from very different angles) the meaning and merit in completing games.

• Who finds the Glitches used in Speedruns? – Lowest Percent (15:45)

  Gymnast86 looks at the combination of accident, deliberation and collaboration that has gone into the discovery of some significant time-saving glitches in the speedruns of various Zelda titles. (Manual captions)

• Completing Games (and why I barely do it) – Razbuten (16:32)

  Razbuten considers the pluses and minuses of achievement implementation and extra-narrative tasks, and how these affect a player’s understanding of what it means to finish a game. (Manual captions) [Contains embedded advertising]

That’s all for the first video roundup for 2021! Hopefully I’ll be back in good time with another batch. In the meantime, please keep sending us your TMIVGV recommendations.