March 28th

Welcome back, readers.

First things first, I will once again link this extensive and detailed resource if you would like to find out more about how to support Asian-American communities near you.

That’s it for updates this week! Hope you enjoy this week’s selections.

This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Less as More

Our opening trio of selections this week all to some extent discuss a minimalist approach to design, be it in storytelling, online platforms, or elsewhere. Each in some way pushes back against a tendency towards overdesign, oversaturation, or overexplanation in contemporary games and media.

• In Praise of Negative Space in Video Game Storytelling | Into The Spine 
  Raven Wu explains how less can sometimes be more when it comes to thoughtful narrative and artistic design.
• It is all a horrible dream | In The Lobby 
  Cole Henry thinks through questions of camera, perspective, and expository storytelling in The Evil Within 2.
• Square’s PlayOnline Game Launching Service Showed Us a Better Internet Is Possible | Paste 
  Dia Lacina reminisces about a simpler, more intimate online platform and community from a more optimistic era.

“There’s an earnestness to PlayOnline that’s missing from the web now. And I guess maybe that’s because it’s missing the “web.” It doesn’t exist here. This is a cyberspace portal that never concerned itself with what was beyond. It had games, email, and chat. What more did you need? No, it was less cyberspace and more cyberplace. This was a haven in a vast agglutination of internet services. And who knows, maybe it could still be.”

Passwords

Our next two selections diverge wildly in their subjects: cultural tensions in gaming and the puzzle-platformer Lode Runner, respectively. But both are united by a careful scrutiny of the language we use–even take for granted–to describe games, play, and the cultures built up around those things.

• The Idea of the Gamer | Eric Stein 
  Eric Stein, in participation with No Escape‘s reading club, begins unpacking the opening movements of Amanda Phillips’ Gamer Trouble.
• Lode Runner [1983] – Arcade Idea 
  Art Maybury unpacks some of the most commonplace language we use to describe games and gameplay experiences to arrive at a more meaningful description for what it feels like to actually sit down and play some Lode Runner.

“Fun can not be produced as a sure thing at industrial quantities, a state of sheer joy can not be maintained for hours on end, much as an industry would like us to believe they can sell us that. Lode Runner [1983] has one hundred and fifty levels.”

Environmental Angles

These next two authors each situate their respective subject games–one pretty old, one as-new-as-it-gets–in the context of material-world tensions of climate change and environmental exploitation.

• Monster Hunter Rise Review: Polish in Precarity | Paste 
  Waverly remarks upon the latest Monster Hunter‘s gameplay improvements while keeping in mind the ecological harms that inform not just the game’s premise but its material existence.
• Super Mario Sunshine reminds me of Mauritius, my own Isle Delfino | Eurogamer.net 
  Mahin Kesore breaks down Super Mario Sunshine‘s environmentally-themed narrative and ties in the real-world impacts on Mauritius of an oil spill disaster.

“The tropical island setting, the happy inhabitants, the holiday destination feel. How could I not think of Mauritius? I return to my very own Delfino Island of a home country every other year – apart from last year for the obvious reasons. And this is where it gets spooky. It may be a stretch to say that a decades old Mario game predicted exactly what happened in Mauritius last year, but the more I look into it…?”

Design Antecedents

Next up we’ve two fresh perspectives on design, looking at tabletop inspirations and the localization process, respectively.

• Loop Hero Shows There’s More to Tabletop Than Deckbuilders | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative 
  Jeremy Signor takes a look at Loop Hero‘s diverse constellation of tabletop-derived mechanics and ideas.
• STORY OF SEASONS: Pioneers of Olive Town Localization Blog #2 – XSEED Games 
  Lori Snyder breaks down some of the processes the localization team for the latest Story of Seasons went through to find the right voice for each character in English.

“So, as a second-generation son from a bilingual family, I wanted Emilio to speak Spanish to a certain extent as well, but he’s a little more hesitant with his code-switching. If you’re not familiar with the concept, it’s when you switch between two or more languages during a conversation with others who are familiar with the same language. Bilingual friends and family will often do this. I do this a lot, and wanted to explore this with our cast to a player-accessible level. I wanted there to be meaning in Emilio’s code-switching.”

Fail States

Each of our next three featured authors seeks to examine some kind of critical fault or flaw in their subject game or series. These flaws span failures of design, narrative, theming, or understanding how to make characters and relationships work.

• How racist storytelling in the Tomb Raider reboot games buried Lara Croft’s queerness | Gayming Magazine 
  Bella Blondeau evaluates the mishandling and misrepresentation of Sam Nishimura.
• Death Crown’s death march to nowhere — KRITIQAL 
  Nate Kiernan is drawn to strategy game Death Crown‘s slick style but finds its conceptualization of Death underwhelming.
• A Hopeless State | Bullet Points Monthly 
  Ty Galiz-Rowe identifies a fundamental lack of vision at the heart of The Medium‘s inability to imagine growth past trauma.

“The Medium seems to understand that what we experience can make us monstrous, but not how we can put in the work to overcome that darkness within ourselves and others. Our parents and our pasts may make us who we are to some degree, but we are not slaves to them. Our trauma, our pain, doesn’t have to be our curse.”

Play in Perspective

Play in quarantine is a common theme in these next two pieces, but that description is too reductive, too simplistic. In both cases, the play experience reveals something to the authors about their lives on the other side of the screen.

• Maquette | The White Pube 
  Gabrielle de la Puente describes a DIY, controller-passing experience of playing puzzle game Maquette together.
• Story of Seasons let me reimagine my homophobic, rural childhood | Gayming Magazine 
  Kylie Noble contemplates Mineral Town as a queer rural utopia.

“I used to be fiercely opposed to marriage and family. In Story of Seasons, I discovered a longing, I never knew I had. After many “lost years”, of suppressing and denying my lesbian self, and a range of grim to traumatic experiences dating men, this lockdown feels especially hard. My virtual wife, and queer life, in Mineral Town, provides a way to live the future, I long for.”

Critical Chaser

We close out this issue with a letter addressed to one two of Bloodborne‘s central characters.

• Lady Maria | Unwinnable 
  Melissa King, Bloodborne.

“One of you lost your way and gave your humanity up for power. A corpse protecting another corpse to the undeath.

The other? Well, you had no shot at humanity in the first place. An object first and foremost, a servant second.“