September 29th

Welcome back readers.

Thanks for your patience these past two consecutive Monday Mulligans–this weekend I not only travelled, but walked several kilometers of trail in a silly cloak, photographed cool mushrooms, put one of my hands in Georgian Bay, and temporarily adopted a praying mantis. Highly recommended.

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

Primary Source

There are many interview-shaped pieces to share this week, with an equally wide spread of topics ranging from game development, project management, ethnography, magazine culture, and more!

• Is it “A Profound Waste of Time” to Like a Video Game Magazine? | First Person Scholar
  Luis Aguasvivas chats with Caspian Whistler about the aesthetics, encumberances, and enigma of producing a modern-day print videogame magazine.
• Patch Notes #4: Strange Scaffold rejected a ‘culture of hope’ to resurrect I Am Your Beast | Game Developer
  Chris Kerr chats with Xalavier Nelson Jr. to chat about rigorous project management and scoping as necessary counters to feature creep and the ever-moving goalposts of success in game development.
• Living alt-history election dreams — and nightmares — in The Campaign Trail | Polygon
  Jack Sheehan talks to the modding community using venerable browser game The Campaign Trail to map out alternative historical elections and challenge reality’s prevailing political narratives.
• ‘How far can you push this one idea?’: The UFO 50 team discusses the making of the most bonkers and beautifully weird gaming achievement of 2024 | PC Gamer
  Shaun Prescott talks to the team of archivists responsible for documenting and restoring the key works in the historic 8-year run of UFOsoft’s LX.
• The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball | The Atlantic
  Ross Andersen talks to sociologist Jason Jimerson about pickup basketball as ritual, as protocol, as social practice and performance.

“Jimerson told me that he thinks of basketball as “a third place,” apart from home and work. In a third place, the usual social hierarchies are suppressed. People feel comfortable being themselves around strangers, and relating to others. That’s why a good regular game is a beautiful and fragile thing.”

Now Playing

While there are lots of interviews this week, there are even more reviews, impressions, and structured thoughts-type pieces on new-to-recent and newly-available games crossing genres and modalities, with writers cataloguing joyful successes, frustrating failures, productive meditations on failure, and more.

• Why Do We Even Want to Be Space Marines? | Paste
  Dia Lacina finds the most uninteresting possible power fantasy in a game that seems to underutilize its own setting.
• Squirrel with a Gun is Nuts | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski revels in the chaotic fun of Squirrel with a Gun.
• So It Goes | SPACE-BIFF!
  Dan Thurot reviews Kurt Vonnegut’s abandoned military strategy game, recently restored and prepared for release.
• Wizardry Without Wonder – Reynatis Review | Gamesline
  Rose can’t find purchase in Reynatis’ mix of tired gameplay loops and underdeveloped storytelling ideas.
• Lorn’s Lure is the anti yellow paint game, a joyful and maddening exploration of sunken megastructures | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Edwin Evans-Thirlwell comes to grips with Lorn’s Lure‘s harsh, evocative first person platforming.
• The Poetics of Endurance | TIER
  Phoenix Simms plays a difficult game eliciting a gentler meditation on adapability and failure.

“what sticks with me as I continue to play OVERWHELM is that each player that picks up this game will have a unique emergent narrative of what experiencing overwhelm means for them. What pushed you to the brink, what pitfalls were too steep to consider transcending from overwhelm to overcome? Or, even if you’re thinking of the game in strictly mechanical terms, what aspects of Randomnine’s challenging system are incompatible with your play personality? As long as we’re willing to continue failing forward, our future may be uncertain but it remains open to us nonetheless.”

Playing with Power

Our next pairing examines the stories we tell in our media about power and hegemony, and our evergreen struggle to cast our imaginations beyond their borders.

• ON WHICH WE USED TO RELY | DEEP-HELL
  Karin Malady examines Godzilla’s dialogue with Empire through the years.
• The Esoteric Nihilism of YoRHa – Unwinnable | Unwinnable
  Vehe Mently maps Nier Automata‘s thematic arc to American neocon foreign policy.

“YoRHa wages an endless, unjustified war with the machines, exclusively to maintain a sense of purpose for the androids. In this way, YoRHa is not just Straussian, but superlatively neoconservative.”

Ephemeral Objects

This is a very loose collection of pieces that feel art-flavoured–meditations on interesting objects, postmortems on process, that kind of thing.

• Using desktop shortcuts for games makes me feel like it’s 2002 again | Polygon
  Zoë Hannah makes it a conscious practice to uncouple the exe from the storefront.
• Volega no.1 | ghoulnoise
  ghoulnoise offers up some fascinating notes on developing a conlang for JETT: The Far Shore through music.
• Jingle Cats | CD-ROM Journal
  Misty De Méo excavates a wondrous, adorable artifact.

“A video game is maybe the least likely kind of merchandise they could have created, and the genre of that game is even less likely. It’s easy to imagine that a video game based on the Jingle Cats albums would be a music game, or maybe a virtual pet game, but somehow it’s neither of these things. It’s more of a cross between a puzzle game and a virtual pet game. The player takes on the role of the caretaker of Jingle Cats House, with one important duty: the house’s nine cats have to get along. They have to be friends.”

Critical Chaser

Foucault’s Errand.

• Building my neighborhood in The Sims 4 turned me into a creep | Polygon
  Ana Diaz peers into the voyeuristic sicko zone of capturing your neighborhood in digital amber.

“The reclusive couple that lived across the street didn’t talk all that much, but when I saw the wife go out one day I went to our porch just to see what she looked like, so I could make a Sim modeled after her. She was wearing a basic blue athletic T-shirt, khaki shorts, and Teva sandals. She had brown, wavy hair cut just below shoulder length — it took me minutes to make her in The Sims 4.”