June 30th

Welcome back readers.

Thanks for stopping in. It’s pretty late in my local time zone, but we’ve got chill conversations running ’round the clock in the Critical Distance Discord. Come hang out!

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

Rolling Start

To start things off this week, we’ve got a set of pieces examining some of the bigger-picture questions around the art that goes into and comes out of our entertainment media.

• It Has To Be Good | Alex Russo Stuff
  Alex Russo chases craft in Roller Coaster Tycoon.
• what was the AAA game | Hailing From The Edge
  Zach Alexander presents a vibes-oriented ontology of Horizon: Forbidden West (curator’s note, Zach is a member of CD’s board of directors).
• Against Slop | The Baffler
  Noah Caldwell-Gervais implores the media we consume to justify its position as art by trusting its audience enough to mean something.

“Games that give dramatic weight to every part of the experience feel particularly special, and particularly necessary. The hunger for better games is not just for more content, endless content; the hunger is for meaning. Time discarded within a game is not time wasted if that meaning comes through, if the sense at the end is that something of value was accomplished. When the only meaning is that I used to have twenty dollars and now I don’t, then the medium’s potential is squandered. The image of the dead-eyed, hunched-over gamer letting garish colors and a cacophony of beeps and bloops wash over them is ultimately not a stereotype or an indictment of the players so much as it is a reflection of an industry that, even in its creative prime, struggles to conceive of its audience as capable of more than that.”

Notes of Trauma

Here we’ve got a pair of authors tackling the treatment of trauma in recent individual games.

• A Story Part Told | Bullet Points Monthly
  Jay Castello delves into Hellblade II‘s treatment of trauma and empathy.
• Sucker for Love: Date to Die For – a Review in Three Songs | Gamers with Glasses
  Tof Eklund puts the poast in post-Lovecraft in this critical review of an intriguing visual novel.

“If Rhok’zhan is the Elder Goddess that Lovecraft could never have imagined, Stardust is a direct repudiation of Lovecraft. Not only is fear never her strongest emotion, she faces fear of the unknown, and even fear of becoming something unknown, with curiosity and hope. Possibly more important than any of that, Stardust is Black.”

Party Starters

Next we’ve got a genre-specific section, unpacking productive tensions in RPGs (or even more narrowly, Square-Enix RPGs).

• A Portable Saga – Final Fantasy Legend I and II | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt juxtaposes the hardware-constrained minimalism of the earliest SaGa games with their experimental challenge.
• The 10 Most Embarrassing Things in Kingdom Hearts | Paste Magazine
  Perry Gottschalk’s listicle format belies a meatier critical throughline.

“The reality is that this series deserves better than half cobbled ideas, cheap emotional pulls and broken narratives—purely because of its fans. Devotees look at works like Days as smarter than might be because it’s all they have in light of a series that does not hold their best interests. That’s the most embarrassing part of Kingdom Hearts.”

Technological Trends

Here we’ve paired a couple of articles anchoring their objext texts in the historical and technological processes that shaped them.

• The Rise and Fall of the Virtual Pet | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski relates the fortunes of the virtual pet genre to the changing technological and social paradigms of the Internet.
• The Journeyman Project | The Digital Antiquarian
  Jimmy Maher tells the story of a studio with a different take on the adventure genre.

“Presto rejected the surrealism that was Myst’s hallmark; they wanted to take you somewhere you could really believe in. Their execution of their ambitions was often imperfect, but no studio was more wedded to the idea of games as coherent fictions during the 1990s. The body of work that resulted from their commitment is among the most distinctive and memorable of the decade.”

Old Game Plus

Now for a slightly ecclectic association–each of these next three articles focuses on a game that’s been held back in some way by the financial or legal machinations of the industry. To different extents, in different ways, they each live on through the communities that champion them–more often in spite of the efforts of their publishers.

• The tragedy of Friday the 13th: The Game | Eurogamer
  Liv Kennedy looks back at a charmingly janky co-op horror game that didn’t get the full chance it deserved.
• 5 Years Later, Mario Maker 2 Reveals a Quiet Battle Between Nintendo and its Fans | Inverse
  Patricia Hernandez looks back on the joys of Mario Maker and its community while bemoaning Nintendo’s ever-conservative curation of its own IP.
• How Alice: Madness Returns Found New Life on Social Media After American McGee’s Departure | IGN
  Ashley Bardhan explores the enduring, intergenerational fan culture around the Alice games.

“”If there’s one thing I want people to take away from playing [Madness Returns],” says Jessilyn, “is that working through trauma — no matter how hard or stupid it is — can be worth it.””

Double Take

These are our design-focused picks for the week, looking at camera work and controls, respectively.

• Always in the Eye | Bullet Points Monthly
  Grace Benfell uses the single take as an entry point to complicating the relationship between games and cinema.
• Tomb Raider Is For Squares: How Grids Defined the Original Classic | Paste
  Madeline Blondeau extols the virtues of tank controls by situating them in their time and place.

“While my rock-climbing days were a short few years of my youth, I still remember the frustrating, gradual process that came with learning a new wall or bouldering route. Core Design replicates this methodical, joyful agony in its mechanics, with climbs that require thought and planning before each step. Players can’t just leap and wait for the game’s net to catch them. Every action is deliberate—even saving.”

Play in Transition

Our next two picks highlight trans play experiences from different angles.

• Celeste And The Beauty Of Transgender Realisation In Video Games | TheGamer
  Ashley Schofield charts a personal play journey to gender euphoria.
• Why Are Trans People So Good at Games? | Paste
  Hope Pisoni speedruns the msq to defeat dysphoria.

“It’s 2024. I finally figured out why it felt like something was off, like something was wrong with me. Unidentified gender dysphoria is a tricky beast. It hides in plain sight, in places that are obvious in hindsight but confounding in the moment. It’s a never-ending voiceless cry that, despite its near-silence, still drowns out the world around you. How do you find self-worth, self-purpose, in this state?

Well, you get really fucking good at videogames.“

Critical Chaser

Here’s a cool one. If you’re like me and rate your French as “stumbling”, the author has linked a translation on the same page.

• Saddle – Inktober 2023 | Nico Moisson
  Nico Moisson teases out the peculiar gendering between horse games and games-with-horses (French language submission).