Welcome back, readers.

Not much doing around the site to discuss this week, so we’ll get right to the heart of the matter with thirteen new cool and interesting critical works about games!

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

Milestones

Our opening section this week looks at moments and patterns in the always-multiple, always-incomplete histories of games ad gaming.

“Remember the NES’ utter dominance of the 8-bit era? Or the terrible video game crash 1983? I don’t and unless you’ve lived in America you don’t either; but you’ve no doubt been repeatedly told about the importance of these epochal events even though they are about as relevant to PAL gaming history as fierce playground arguments over the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga are to anyone reading this outside of Europe. This repeated belief that a retro collection’s complete so long as it includes both the US and Japanese versions of a title reduces the gaming history of all of Europe and many other countries (Korean and Brazilian localisations can involve anything from simple name changes to full sprite edits) to somebody else’s mildly interesting footnote, a pedantic aside to bring up before we all get back to discussing “what really happened”.”

Mythos

Next up, world-building, myth-making, lore dives, and the symbolism that stitches it all together.

“I can appreciate how Superbrothers wants to tell a story about what happens when a guiding myth connects with the present. JETT’s detailed approach to science fiction is a good fit for that, and I appreciate how much time is spent on airlocks, protective suits, and the hazards of exploring a new world. The minutes spent moving in and out of ground control to the surface of the planet and into Mei’s Jett are evocative. These details allow for humanity in a story with a grand, cosmic scope. Myth, as usual, is the middleman, the interpretive layer between the two.”

Metroid

Stories of and around Samus past and present build out our next segment.

“Intellectual property and its enforcement, and not piracy of digital content, has made the internet less free and open, constrained creativity, caused the price of access to content to go up, created artificial obsolescence in physical products like the PS Vita, and even exacerbated a pandemic’s toll on the world. It does not need defending.”

Making

Words of advice from seasoned experts on writing and building, games and worlds.

“Fundamentally, you want to create characters, story beats, and setting elements in relationship to the premise or idea you’ve started with.”

More

In our latest Critical Chaser, a forgotten game lives on, but the possibilities it once represented fade from view.

  • Flowers for the Void Cow | itch.io
    Cynan-Juniper Orton eulogizes a time when games like RuneScape evoked a wider horizon of possibility in game worlds. Part of the Forgotten Games Essay Jam.

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