July 21st

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

Art

Our opening section this week engages and re-engages with the conversation on games-as-art, looking at both broader industry contours and timely (timeless?) examples.

• Roger Ebert’s video game take is still haunting the discourse | Polygon
  Patricia Hernandez excavates one of the greater self-reflexive insecurities that continues to stalk the medium and industry.
• Sin and Punishment, Transistor, and Holding Onto Our Hearts | Bloomed Wings Blog
  I couldn’t find an author name to credit for this–it’s a celebration of rough art, connection, and human authorship in the strange worlds of Sin and Punishment and Transistor.

“While both games are old (Transistor turned a decade old just this year, while Sin and Punishment released in 2000, right at the end of the N64’s life cycle), their themes grow more potent. It’s part of why I have replayed both multiple times, and why I recommend them so highly. Both games have presentation that can easily scare away someone unwilling to just go with the flow; neither one gives a second to explain what the hell is going on. But letting them coast on that, letting them convey an actual artistry is what makes them work. They are undeniably human games. Not generated by algorithms, tweaked and shifted to create something unique.”

Experience

Next, let’s talk about different approaches to play, with discussions of mode, genre, strategy, anticipation, and more.

• Watching a video game is basically playing it | Polygon
  Ashley Bardhan extols the virtues of gaming as a spectator sport.
• Ravenloft Strahd’s Possession: Something to sink my teeth into | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi luxuriates in some peak 90’s DOS D&D digital dungeon crawling.
• Navigating Without a Map | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner longs for Destiny 2‘s meta to loosen its grip just enough to allow a freer rambling of its mythic science fantasy landscapes (curator’s note: Kaile works for CD).
• Boundless Appetites | Bullet Points Monthly
  Yussef Cole juxtaposes the FromSoft faithful and the triple-A hype cycle.

“The promise extended between FromSoft and its players isn’t unlike the one “Kindly” Miquella makes to his own faithful. A beautiful vision, something different, something new; a fairer game, signifying a fairer world. But the promise is frail, and easily broken. The faithful want to trust it, they yearn to follow it. Just as everything else in the AAA games space reliably disappoints players, surely a FromSoft joint will come along and provide salvation. How bitterly they wring their hands and gnash their teeth as they repeatedly melt under the final boss’ area-of-effect attacks. Like a dominatrix who’s thrown away the safe word, the game bends us over and takes strips off our flesh as we struggle and mewl.”

Click to Play

I know I’m being a little cheeky grouping Clickolding in here (or am I?), but I’m pleased to have another full section this week dedicated to adult games, porn games, sex work, and games that just want you to think about all that stuff.

• WickedWhims: A Conversation about Adult Content Creation and Responsible Adult Mods Design in The Sims Franchise | Technoculture, Art and Games
  Aurélie Petit sits down with Sims 4 modder TURBODRIVER in an extensive conversation on technicals, logistics, ethics, sexual diversity, sex work, and much more.
• Clickolding is one of the most interesting 40-minute games I’ve ever played | Video Games Are Good
  Nate Hermanson reckons with Strange Scaffold’s latest inovative, provocative half-hour thriller.
• Coming Out On Top: A Ten-Year Retrospective | cohost
  Davis G. See looks back at the critical and creative history of a gay VN with a lighter tone and a different approach (content notification here for mentions of sexual assasult in other VNs).

“Part of the issue was that Coming Out on Top was breaking new ground, and so it had to be everything for everybody, an impossible task. With the benefit of hindsight, we can recognize it simply as a gay game with a focus on beefy jocks.”

Delta C

These next two critical examinations make productive use of time and perspective to re-evaluate approaches to history, politics, and adaptation in and across key games and series.

• Can You Kill the Dog? | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello contemplates Supergiant’s shifting philosophies on adapting the rougher edges of Greek mythology across the Hades games.
• Was BioShock Infinite good? | Polygon
  Cameron Kunzelman moves through the “was” of BioShock Infinite‘s view on American history to get at the why and the how.

“Levine said that “whenever somebody’s certain I get very, very nervous.” This is an admirable trait. I hope we all strive to move and change with the times we live in, and to recognize that the project of human community is not solved. The issue with Infinite might be that Levine and the team he led welded his deep, real, felt uncertainty about the world with an allegorical storytelling method that doesn’t leave too much up for debate.”

Critical Chaser

We missed the critical chaser last issue, so here’s a double feature to close out the week.

• Game Enjambment: Ghosted by Pac-Man | Sidequest
  Katherine Quevedo drops a little Pac-verse on love and loss.
• To Be Worthy of Who You Love | Into The Spine
  Kyle Tam muses on love deferred in Persona 3 Portable.

“He tells me that he treasures the time we spent together, but that he doesn’t believe he’s worthy of me yet. Because I’ve changed his life, who he is, and one day, when he becomes the man who deserves me, the one who is worthy of my love, he’ll confess for real this time.”