February 18th

Welcome back readers.

Today’s around-the-site news is that our monthly roundup of video crit is back! Kaile has served up a cool baker’s dozen picks for your audiovisual perusal, so go check it out!

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

Organizing Principles

As has frequently been the case this year, our opening section engages with the ongoing layoffs crisis in the games industry, but this week I am also happy to include writing on labour organization–all the more critical to see at this time.

• ‘I’ve Never Seen It This Bad:’ Game Developers Explain the Huge Layoffs Hitting Riot, Epic, and More | IGN
  Rebekah Valentine reveals patterns of unsustainable development practices and leadership failures through conversations across the industry.
• No matter what happens next, unionizing at ZeniMax worked | Polygon
  Autumn Mitchell documents the ongoing labour organization efforts within the Microsoft subsidiary.

“We felt sure that if we did nothing, then nothing would change. Things might even get worse, and the only way forward was standing together and standing up for one another.”

Flip the Script

In what I see as a natural complement to the previous section, let’s now look at games beyond the restrictive lens of capital and towards something more sustainabile on both sides of the screen.

• From Esports to Open Worlds—Why Is Dominating Nature Still our Favorite Game? | SSENSE
  Whitney Mallett sees our exploitative relationship with nature mirrored and reproduced in our game worlds.
• Building a Different Kind of Video Game Festival | Container Magazine
  Matteo Lupetti offers critical takeaways from Italian games collective and festival Zona Warpa.

“We think it’s time to seize the means of game making, spread the knowledge about the increasingly approachable tools we have and stop seeing games and video games, software and hardware as industrial products we can only consume as fast as possible while waiting for their next iteration. Inside the Warp Zone, an old game is modified and becomes a new game and an old console is a musical instrument: they are creative tools.”

Coming up Next

I was happy to see Eurogamer run a whole week of articles covering the demos being showcased during Steam’s Next Fest. Here are a few picks highlighting interesting games on the horizon.

• Narrative RPG Cabernet gives morality systems a vampiric bite | Eurogamer
  Lottie Lynn contemplates consequences in a life unending.
• Star Trucker – who needs a mountain vista when you’ve got the whole of space? | Eurogamer
  Matt Wales climbs into the cabin and adjusts the mirrors for a long haul.
• The best way to explore in Europa is by defying gravity | Eurogamer
  Liv Ngan explores a whimsical moonscape and wonders what happened here.

“When I looked at that looming figure of Jupiter in the sky, I felt like maybe I could fly with Zee to the surface of that giant planet too.”

Textual Content

Our next two picks this week unpack thorny tensions on how sex and relationships are structured and authored in games.

• The Industry Is Divided On How To Write Video Game Romance | Kotaku
  Kenneth Shepard puts creatives in conversation, looking at storytelling approaches ranging from more defined characters and sexualities to more free-form “playersexual” designs.
• Queer Porn Games Just Don’t Do It For Me | cohost
  Callisto Jupiter-Four asks who actually has the agency and privilege to write unsafe erotica–often not queer creators! (content notification for brief mentions of rape)

“Queer games want to be safe. They want to be kind. They want to be gentle. And I understand why that’s the case. Our lives often feel unsafe, unkind, and callous, and it can be nice to play pretend that we’re in a world that isn’t like that for an hour or two. And, more, when sex is such a focus of the ways the world is out to fuck us, making a safe space can be critical to letting people enjoy themselves. But that’s not the only response people have to the queer condition. Some of us need things to be rougher, more cruel, more dangerous. Some of us want to be the one making the world unsafe, for an hour or two.”

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Now for some design-minded writing, with a focus on difficulty, pathfinding, and wider industry contexts.

• Prince of Persia and the High Price of Pants | Remap
  Patrick Klepek talks to designer Tom Guiraud about getting the challenge in Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown‘s platforming sequences just (sadistically) right.
• It’s Not About Yellow Paint | Kayinworks
  Kayin sees the pathfinding problem of game design as a consequence of an overly competitive, fast-moving market trending towards increasingly frictionless experiences.

“It’s not about yellow paint, it’s about the fact the modern AAA space has forgotten how to have a dialog with the player. It has forgotten how to enrich and has instead decided to only try and wow. Most players don’t even notice. They’re so far behind in their backlog that they want content that can go down easily, not because they’re not capable, but because they’re overwhelmed. Culture moves so fast.”

Bounding Boxes

These three selections all unpack pointed text-to-world comparisons between recent games, genre, and power structures.

• The Call is Coming from Inside the Courtroom | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello examines how the Ace Attorney games highlight the absurdities of real-world legal institutions and power structures.
• Revenge and Faith in The Last of Us Part II | No Escape
  Bryn Gelbart navigates faith, family, and the role of suffering in the worldview of The Last of Us Part II.
• Solace State and the Return of Bio-awareness in Cyberpunk | Uppercut
  Phoenix Simms unpacks the ways in which Solace State embodies a more affective turn in cyberpunk stories.

“Like Citizen Sleeper and Paradise Killer before it, Solace State is part of a new tradition of games reorienting cyberpunk themes’ focus back to the sanguine and emotional human body and its inherent, threatened autonomy. These titles force us to consider how our bodies are not just passively acted upon in a techno-dystopia, but dynamically reacting to that world state right down to the level of our cells.”

Flashback

Now let’s look at games and practices that are either materially anchored in or call back spiritually to days of yore.

• You Know, Game Stuff | cohost
  Crushed chronicles EGM’s brief, anemic crusade against the “nongame” in the late 2000s.
• Star Wars Arcade for Sega 32X has got it where it counts, kid | Destructoid
  Zoey Handley looks back at an ambitious arcade downport for a moribund stopgap hardware platform.
• Helldivers 2 Feels Like A PS3 Game In A Very Good Way | Kotaku
  Alyssa Mercante attributes some of the success of Helldivers 2 to its ability to evoke a sense of seventh-gen nostalgia.

“Helldivers 2 isn’t a $70 AAA shooter with advanced water physics and a litany of customizable weapons; it’s a goofy, scrappy, somewhat clunky $40 good time, like a college party with shitty beer from a stolen keg. Eventually, someone’s gonna go through a table (or dive-to-prone off a cliff), and it’s gonna be awesome. We need more games like that in 2024 and beyond.”

Critical Chaser

I have definitely told people before that if I wait a while and revisit a game, it’s like, “Woah new game!”

• Raptured Memory | Into The Spine
  Heather Labay dwells on memory and forgetting in the original BioShock.

“I never remember that Atlas will betray me or that the Little Sisters will save me. I don’t remember the mad characters I will meet, the disquieting recordings I will find, or the ghosts that show up unexpectedly, their horror stories played out for my benefit.”