September 15th

Welcome back readers.

Thank you once again to Julián Ramírez for providing the fish(ing) pic!

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

Inside Insights

I try to avoid putting single pieces in their own categories, but this time around that’s just how it shook out! We thus open this week with an in-depth lookback from one of Valve’s co-founders.

• The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside | Medium
  Monica Harrington recounts running the promotion and brokering the deals that made Valve the company and platform it is today.

“With steel in my voice, I told the Sierra team that they were not pulling marketing dollars from Half-Life. They were going to re-release it in a Game of the Year Box, and they were going to support it with huge marketing spend or we were going to walk away from our agreement and tell the industry that had fallen in love with Valve how screwed up Sierra really was. At the end of the meeting, I was shaking. We were vulnerable, the partners were barely speaking, and life at home and in the office was tense.”

Astro Bolts

Our next two picks place genre elements in historical context, looking both at predecessor games and the circumstances of production.

• Astro Bot embraces the spirit of ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’ | Polygon
  Nicole Carpenter thinks through the ingredients Astro Bot mines and remixes from its platformer predecessors.
• Famicom Detective Club and Horror Games Thrive on Taking Risks | Paste
  Phoenix Simms situates the development of Famicom Detective Club and Silent Hill to make a case for horror as a historically creative, risk-taking genre in games.

“Horror games by the inherent subversiveness of the genre inspire the people who want to work with them to remain agile and open to invention, both in regard to the subject matter of their works and the platforms they host these unique experiences on.”

Caravan SandWitch

We had two writeups come in this week on an intriguing new game from a French developer. Would love to read more.

• Caravan SandWitch: Stretching the boundaries of “wholesomeness” | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner contends with a compelling game that seems a strained fit for an increasingly dubious marketing label (Curator’s note: Kaile works for CD).
• Caravan SandWitch and the Reduncancy of Combat in Open World Games | Press Play Gaming
  Chris Lawn had a good time with Caravan SandWitch‘s light shakeup of genre ingredients.

“As is made clear by the subsection of the genre SandWitch is playing in, the removal of physical violence is not a binary when it comes to conflict. Rather, other forms of friction can drive play in lieu of bloodshed; narrative can and does provide a struggle to overcome, while a puzzle- and navigation- centric approach can engage a player just as readily as any hack and slasher.”

Let Them Cook

Admittedly there isn’t a ton that ties these next two selections together, but both use their object texts to position larger observations on art and culture.

• ‘Venba’ and the Cultural Memories I Wish I Had | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold muses on Venba, cooking-as-culture, and the severing and repairing of intergenerational bonds.
• Ideologies Kinda Feller | Bullet Points Monthly
  Ed Smith invokes Soma to ask what kind of Art Enjoyer are you–and also what kind of art videogames broadly try to be.

“There are mechanics and systems in Soma—there is a way that it has to be played—but in combination these help you to access, and in turn illuminate, the personal drama within and between its central cast. Similarly, videogames by form might seem ideal for creating and effectuating systems, and in turn, recreations or shadowplays of ideologies, but not only are these representations of ideologies often limited or absurdly utopian, videogames are also, by their nature, are also, potentially, capable of capturing and making illustrations of the personal, the human, the individual.”

Tile Map

Now for a pair of spatial meditations, taking different games in different directions.

• Divinity Original Sin 2: These surfaces run deep | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi has a sicko’s epiphany about damage floors, power fantasy, and RPGs in Divinity Original Sin 2.
• Signalled Space | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello draws upon the contradictions of tourism to make sense of Elden Ring‘s semi-diegetic, liminally alone-together public space.

“In The Consumption of Tourism, a 1990 paper by sociologist John Urry, he writes that “[some] places are designed as public places.” Thinking about how each of these places was designed, the Rollright stones were presumably designed to be public, but whether they were also considering the lone reflector joined only by the evidence of other people is unknowable. In Elden Ring, though, this is a clear part of FromSoftware’s intention.”

Critical Chaser

No pullquote. Enjoy.

• The Guide to a Game That Doesn’t Exist: On Plastiboo’s “Vermis” | Los Angeles Review of Books
  Patrick Fiorilli receives a work of speculative fiction about not just the imaginary game it posits, but about the genre of guidebooks as a whole.
• How to Monetize a Blog
  House of Links.