November 24th

Welcome back readers.

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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.

Stalking Ruins

This week we’re opening with a spread of selections that span digital warzones, survival games, and the role the games industry plays in propping up American imperialism in the Middle East.

• The blood on our Controllers – The Complicity of the Game Industry in the Palestinian Genocide | YouTube
  A collective work, but organized by Hippolyte Caubet, this video examines the role of the commercial games industry in normalizing the dehumanization of Palestinian and Arab communities and nations, and charts a path for the industry out of this complicity.
• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 Review: A Horrible, Beautiful, Worthy Successor | Paste
  Dia Lacina can confirm that we are so fucking back.
• COLLECT WATER TO SURVIVE | DEEP-HELL
  Skeleton treks through a digital warzone that bears only superficial semblence to the real thing.

“Pictures of Gaza now will eventually be studied (or more then likely; mined) for information when the next round of concept artists that run away from a studio to join one are tasked with creating the most realistic simulated warzones ever seen: pop culture makes a myth-industry where the only hunger is from bad taste, but we’ll surely have emotional contact with whatever version of events comes to us on a console over the next decade of culture war fall-out. An exhausting time to be alive, eight hours turns into a long time between runs to the wasteland.”

Follow Us on Bluesky

Next up, let’s look at intersections between the industry and social media, networking more broadly, and influencers.

• What are game developers getting out of Bluesky? | Game Developer
  Bryant Francis talks to developers about whether Bluesky can be a viable new town square for game devs.
• Why It’s So Hard To Trust Video Game Recs Right Now | Inverse
  Shannon Liao weighs the impact as games publishers turn torwards influencers to promote their products.

“This new form of marketing leverages the relationship that influencers have built with gamers, who may respect and value these creators’ opinions and recommendations. But at the end of the day the relationship a gamer has with a game is a personal one — that can only be influenced so much.”

Top of the Class

We came across two pieces about teaching feminist game studies, with discussions of pedagogy, accessibiity, craft, and more.

• Mending the ‘Magic’ Circle: Crafting Feminist Pedagogy in Game Design | MAI
  Anne Sullivan & Anastasia Salter introduce crafters’ approaches to feminist game studues.
• Revising & Revamping a Feminist Gaming Class | MAI
  Ashley P. Jones develops a feminist pedagogy for designing and delivering a game studies course across two interations.

“My goal is to explore how both uncontrollable variables, such as the setting and the students, interact with controllable variables, such as the course design, to produce a novel experience of feminist teaching in game studies. Using feminist pedagogy and feminist game studies, I will explore my own experiences teaching a games and culture course through a feminist lens as I grow in my own pedagogical experiences and with the course design itself.”

Instruction Manual

Our next two sections focus on single-game analyses. These first two are for older titles, looking at legibility, enounter design, and more.

• Arisa no Bouken ki – Review | Dungeon Trawler
  Elephant Parade tucks into a charming, well-put-together RPGMaker 2000 game from an influential composer.
• On Camouflage and Leveraging Common Knowledge | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative
  Jeremy Signor thinks though legible, teachable game design with a good example from UFOSoft’s 1980s back catalogue.

“Getting players to understand your mechanics without the need for too much tutorializing even for non-gamers is something of a golden goose for video games right now. But the task becomes vastly easier when you base your core mechanics in common knowledge, something people already understand so they’ll feel right at home in the game immediately.”

Tables and Figures

Now let’s look at a couple of contemporary titles sharing design minialism, a handcrafted feel, and narrative play.

• Phoenix Springs’ Journey to Nowhere Is Worth It | PopMatters
  Luis Aguasvivas singles out stylish, streamlined, Phoenix Springs as an adventure game to take note of in a year full of good ones.
• The Abstract Detail of Miniatures | Gamers with Glasses
  Don Everhart delights in the dioramic design of Miniatures.

“I like the way that the art and mechanics of Miniatures reminds me of other media. It opens the game to interpretation and is a good example of what a focused effort can accomplish. Like some other 2024 releases (Phoenix Springs, for example), there’s a handmade quality to its digital art. Its small moments of interactive surprise don’t suffer from repetition, and it’s not overly elaborate. Miniatures is a game for people who appreciate the details.”

Ink Ribbons

Here we’ve got some more survival-horror-oriented picks with both remakes and original works accounted for.

• Sorry We’re Closed Is A Stylish Survival Horror Game About Heartbreak | Inverse
  Robin Bea plays a survival horror game with strong enough writing and style to make up for its combat shortcomings.
• Alone in the Dark: Everything and nothing | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi wades through a horror remake that makes neither a lasting impression nor a strong case for itself.
• There Was a Soul Here … | Bullet Points Monthly
  Astrid Anne Rose situates Silent Hill 2‘s embiggened second lap amidst the more risk-averse industry that produced it and a critical culture less well-equipped to recieve it.

“I think of the conclusion of Final Fantasy VII Remake, where the weight of intervening time, audience expectation, and artistic legacy actually, physically materializes as villainous specters to force the game’s plot back onto the track it took in 1997. Like the SH2make time loop, this is a metafictional sleight-of-hand hoping to pass muster as something new, sating the audience with the mushy, rotting fruit of branching timelines and fan theories. But deep down, there is no new direction. The choice has been made. There is nowhere to go, and nothing has changed. You get what you already got. We’ve been here for two decades.”

Frames of Mind

This section explores inner worlds, philosophies of mind, trauma, grief, and more.

• Confetti’s Cozy Corner: Alice Madness Returns – confronting nonsensical reality within a fractured wonderful mind | Gayming Magazine
  Milady Confetti takes a reparative look back at Alice Madness Returns.
• Exploring Minds Through Interactive Entertainment | Superjump Magazine
  Jacob Self wanders through philosophies of mind in Pentiment, Psychonauts 2, and Everything.

“Much like the manuscript that Andreas toils to make, Pentiment is a shining window into the ideals and beliefs of those who created it, a way to walk the streets of their inner cities, so that we too may marvel at its unique architecture.”

Critical Chaser

Closing out the week with a bit of dragon appreciation.

• The Sims has a great history with dragons | Polygon
  Nicole Carpenter delves into the surprisingly robust dragon lore and mechanics in The Sims 3.

“The Sims 4’s Cottage Living expansion felt like a turning point for the game, at least from a storytelling perspective; it gave me a reason to pull my Sims out of their houses and into the world to do small favors and storylines built into the game. I see the return of dragons in The Sims 4 as a way to build on that progress — a way for developer Maxis to flex its narrative tools while providing a wildly different fantasy playground for people to iterate on.”