January 5th

Welcome back readers.

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks! While I always take one week off around the holidays, this year I was persuaded (by myself) to extend that holiday to two weeks on account of catching COVID (Curator’s note: Do not recommend! Wear a mask!). Now that I’m back on my feet, I’m ready to return with a catch-up issue accounting for submissions we’ve received over the last three weeks.

Additionally, if you haven’t already done so, check out our humongous year-in-review issue. Once you’ve done that, consider joining our Discord and dropping a thanks to Kaile for their hard work in putting that gargantuan issue together.

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

Tales from Gamindustri

This issue we’re starting with a wide range of articles and commentaries about The Industry–development, press, past, present, back, over, historical, ahistorical, monolithic, plural.

• NOESCAPEVG PRESENTS GAME OF THE YEAR | DEEP-HELL
  Kaile Hultner offers a brief postmortem on Concord and to a greater extent the executive cowardice that sends games like this (and their developers) out to die.
• Ireland is primed to be a video game development hub, so why hasn’t it broken out? | Shacknews
  Lexi Luddy examines a lack of consistent government support and byzantine tax credit regulations as some of the primary obstacles to Irish developers gaining more traction at international industry events.
• Reading Games Writing: Forgotten Gems: Shadow Complex by Peer Schneider | Steven’s Substack
  Steven Santana uses IGN’s softball coverage of an Orson Scott Card-attached game to make observations of the website’s flattening, toothless editorial direction.
• The Gentrification of Video Game History | Medium
  Felipe Pepe counters the flattening US-centric industry model of videogame history, highlighting the ever plural histories, distribution models, and communities of gaming around the world.
• You do not gotta hand it to MiHoYo | Azhdarchid
  Bruno Dias takes issue with the uncritical tack western games press takes with gacha, and the reductive caricaturing of low-income players that often accompanies that tack (Further Reading – Skeleton’s piece on gacha).

“I think it’s right to think that video games belong to everyone. I think however that we should consider what genuine inclusion looks like. One of the contradictions inherent to predatory F2P is that while they are often the only games that low-income players can access, they are also actively hostile to those users.”

Communities of Play

Something noted in Felipe Pepe’s article above is that communities form around games and play everywhere–whether at conventions or the carceral state. That’s the focus in these next two selections.

• Pain 2 Glory at PAX Unplugged 2024 | Unwinnable
  Luis Aguasvivas recounts highlights, cool games, and community at the PAX U tabletop gaming convention.
• The Nintendo Video Game Having a Renaissance in a Missouri Prison | Prison Journalism Project
  Byron Case documents the play community that has emerged in a Missouri Prison around Harvest Moon (Further Reading – Keri Blakinger talks to men playing Dungeons and Dragons on death row).

“People in line at mealtimes discussed the health of their animals. Afternoon workers en route to their prison jobs disclosed locations of the elusive Stones of Truth. Prisoners sitting beside one another in the dayroom, tablet screens aglow, narrated their moment-by-moment progress at harvest time. A gaming community had been established.”

Jumpscared

We’ve got a bunch of different angles and approaches to horror games in this next section, including formal analysis, allegory, metanarrative, and more.

• Too Afraid to Go Deeper: Creating Pervasive Dread Through Blended Design Structures in Subnautica and Subnautica: Below Zero | Game Studies
  Monica Evans performs genre and design analysis to understand horror and dread in the Subnautica games.
• Making Horror Fun! – MiSide Review | Gamesline
  Scott B plays the subversion of the subversion of the ahistorical horror dating sim.
• Mouthwashing the Pretense Away with Allegorical Horror  | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative
  Jeremy Signor unpacks misdirection and the mundane in Mouthwashing‘s interpersonal horror (Further Reading – Franny’s recent review of Mouthwashing).

“Whether Jimmy and Curly experience the horror sequences or not is beside the point. They are for the player ultimately. They reveal what happened in a more elemental way than just telling or showing the events. And they also artfully communicate a character’s state of mind and, well, character in ways that simple retellings just can’t.”

Genre Exemplars

I’m being a little more broad in my grouping here, but each of these next picks resonates in some way with the larger idea of genre, whether by examining the features or examples of particular genres, or unpacking the concept itself.

• The Centennial Case Is A Good Piece Of Shinhonkaku Mystery Propaganda | Mimidoshima
  Kastel plays mystery game The Centennial Case and finds much to appreciate in its perspective on history as an identity-forming process.
• Shiren the Wanderer’s simple graphics disguise a systems-dense roguelike full of the emergent stories I love the genre for | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill revels in the stories told through Shiren‘s devious and delightful roguelike systems.
• The Best Dungeon Crawlers to Delve into this Holiday Season | Paste
  Dia Lacina catches you up on the crawlers, blobbers, and rogue-esques worth your time and attention.
• The unexpected modern renaissance of point-and-click adventure games | PCGamesN
  Miri Teixeira chronicles the recent and robust revitalization–and evoluton–of adventure games (Further Reading – Vidyasaur’s examination of Escape from Monkey Island‘s position in the adventure games canon).
• Genre-Queer | TIER
  Phoenix Simms dwells on the intersection between Menhera culture, mad/crip advocacy, and genre and thematic fluidity in videogame storytelling.

“In spite of Heisei’s flashiness and surreality, the game is at its core a lyrical expression of the failings of their society to support and include people like Heart. Like Menhera vent art and fashion, Heisei is an expression of people who don’t fit ideal and convenient categories or roles for productive participation in a change-resistant society.”

In the Loop

Ok, you got me. I’m being excessively cheeky here and drawing a theme between Joey Schutz’s critique of gameplay loops and Kimimi’s review of a Sonic game with loops. Moving away from that ridiculous framing, each of these next pieces does a different kind of design analysis, breaking up games into their constituent components to better understand their successes and shortcomings.

• ‘Metaphor: ReFantazio’ is Good, But It’s Missing Something | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold finds Metaphor to be a well-polished Atlus RPG nonetheless missing a core of substance its predecessors have (Further Reading – Matt Horton’s critical review of Metaphor).
• Sonic 3 & Knuckles: Storytelling through spindashing | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi reviews the hedgehog and echidna at their zenith.
• The Case Against Gameplay Loops
  Joey Schutz considers form, structure, adaptation, and repetition in a discussion of whether games might be better without so much, well, looping.

“If our gameplay loops are just facilitators of content, it’s no wonder their games are left hollow and inert. It’s no wonder we stop playing them. Why bother if everything that awaits us is just fluff, filler, sound and fury? If we’re just hamsters spinning wheels?”

Queer and Trans Futurities

This next pair of articles are really gratifying trans and queer analyses, respectively, on Heaven Will Be Mine and Legacy of Kain.

• Gravity = Culture: Trans Liberatory Potentials and Limitations in Heaven Will Be Mine | Game Studies
  Niamh Timmons investigates trans(humanist/gender) liberation as a theme in Heaven Will Be Mine while also highlighting its attachment to settler colonial frameworks.
• ANOTHER TOSS OF THE COIN – SOUL REAVER, 25 YEARS LATER | Bump Combat
  Erin Donegan reflects on the queer chaotic rebellion of the original Soul Reaver.

“When the Elder God spits venom about his hatred of the Vampire, it is because they exist outside the wheel of death and rebirth that the Elder God sits over. “Kain’s abominations trap the essence of life”, as the thing itself puts it. It is not that Kain is a mass-murderer who has crafted an empire on the bones of humanity that seems to bother the Elder God: it is that Kain exists outside of the reproductive hierarchy that the Elder God embodies. Raziel can kill all the humans he likes throughout his journey – there exists an enclave of human survivors that you can find and slaughter or spare as you wish without comment from the game – and the Elder God won’t care: he just wants the stain of vampirism, this way of life that is incompatible with the Elder God, to be wiped clean from the world.”

Critical Chaser

This week we close with some poetry.

• I Have Fought Midnight Shadows | Videodame
  Latonya “Penn” Pennington offers some verse on Persona 3 and grieving the loss of a parent.

“I have fought
midnight shadows
but wake to
golden mornings.”