December 1st

Welcome back readers.

Some announcements before we get started this week! First things first, we’ve opened our submission window for our year-in-review. Check this announcement post for details, and if you’d like, join our Discord–it’s the most direct way to put your submissions on our radar.

I’d also like to plug a game development project about the 1948 Nakba, currently being crowdfunded by Palestinian game dev Rasheed Abueideh. I think it’s worth your time and consideration.

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

Revolutionary Ideas

This week our opening section spans thoughts on antifacist games crit, decolonial and antifascist design practices, revolution-as-theme/setting in games, and more.

• November Roundtable: Revolution | Sidequest
  Melissa Brinks and Cress discuss the affordances and shortcomings of revolutionary themes and ideas in popular games.
• Ruminating on an Antifascist Games Criticism | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner expands and focuses the conversation on practical and material considerations for antifascist games writing (Critical Connection – GwG’s five theses for antifascist games crit).
• Mexico 1921: A Deep Slumber Provides a Snapshot of Post-Revolution Mexico | Gamers with Glasses
  Nicanor Gordon brings the framing and composition of Mexico 1921‘s engagement with post-revolutionary history into focus (Critical Connection – Kaile Hultner on photography in Umurangi Generation).
• RE-MASTER: Prototyping Decolonial Fighting Styles in Video Games | Container Magazine
  Tobéchukwu Onwukeme and Mark Mushiva lay out the means and stakes for the decolonial recuperation of Eddy Gordo (Critical Connection – Nicanor Gordon on Antiblack stereotypes in FF7 Rebirth and beyond).

“Eddy Gordo exemplifies how video games, like other media, perpetuate colonial-era tropes by reducing complex cultures into marketable, surface-level symbols. What if you could rework or re-master Eddy Gordo into something that truly honors the anti-slavery and anti-colonial roots of capoeira?”

Well Played

Now we turn to playstyle, strategy, playing within the rules, and playing outside of them.

• Control: Taking back control | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi uses Control to talk about the virtues of assist mode, and the willingness to play a single-player game on your own terms (Critical Connection – Flora Merigold on cheating and modding in soulslikes and beyond).
• Frostpunk 2 review: I became a dictator because everyone was so goddamn annoying | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Sin Vega gets whited out in the authoritarian bureaucratic bowels of Frostpunk 2.

“The problem is that in shifting from survival to realpolitik, Frostpunk 2 becomes a management game about leadership, but it doesn’t give you enough means to actually lead. It’s telling that as soon as the game unlocked the ability to simply round up both radical factions – the Stalwarts were responsible for 85% of our deaths, but the others were trying to turn all women into breeding slaves, children into soldiers, and doing eugenics on the “weak” – I did it immediately and won the game.”

Sickos’ Corner

It’s me, I’m in the corner, looking up train controllers on ebay.

• Somehow this Japanese cult classic brings intense arcade action to… train driving simulators? | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill presents a primer on Densha de Go! for budding virtual train likers.
• 044: Angel at Dusk | canon fire
  Amr Al-Aaser plays a good-ass shmup.

“In such a niche subgenre, games are often tempted to split the difference between aiming for die hard shooter fans and new audiences, satisfying neither. Angel at Dusk manages to somehow make a game that’s baroque, bizarre and welcoming to everyone. Its cheeky humor never falls into irony, and its earnest exploration of its horrific world stays compelling throughout. It’s full of contradictions that make it cohesive.”

Real Time

Our next two selections focus on the passage of time and its influence on favourite franchises, industry rituals, and our changing relationships to both of these things.

• Rewatching the 2004 Spike TV Video Game Awards, a bizarre time capsule | Polygon
  Maddy Myers recounts how a 20-year old game award show has both aged very badly but nonetheless compares favourably to the Keighleys in many ways.
• Dragon Age: The Veilguard and the Regression of BioWare’s Values | VGBees
  Moira Hicks finds Veilguard to be hollow and toothless (Critical Connection – Jessica Orr on Baldur’s Gate 3 and Dragon Age: Origins).

“It makes sense that the employees at BioWare would like to produce a game that expresses their own values, and the reaction of right-wing shitheads to even the most basic inclusion of trans people in their games proves the necessity of the exercise. Games writing can allow for player agency while also expressing the studio’s values— the decade between Inquisition and Veilguard also saw the release of Disco Elysium, which allows for the player to both make abhorrent choices and experience consequences in-game for those choices. My problem with the writing in Veilguard is not that it is corny. Some of my favorite writing in the game is encountering Lucanis’ upscale, European grocery lists— this is corny! The problem is that the writing is not mature enough to allow for player expression as simple as being wrong.”

Critical Chaser

I thought this was cool.

• The Archivist’s Dream | nbsp1618
  Non-Breaking Space offers a narrativized account of a live-play exhibition of John Company 2E from GenCon 2024 (Critical Connection – Elizabeth Sandifer on ideology and simulation in John Company and other tabletop games).

“By most accounts it was mere words that led to the unrest in Bengal. Yet rumors abound about whether the young Ellsworth may have performed acts beyond his position with the daughter of a local leader. What is clear is that the influence of that particular leader was grossly underestimated, and whether they were words or acts, the people of Bengal would not submit while the young Hastings was governing.”