January 26th

Welcome back readers.

The first thing I’m going to plug this week is an Itch bundle–this one is a big collection of TTRPGs and materials in support of the Trans Empowerment Project. Good games, good creators, good cause.

The second thing I’m plugging this week is, once again, our Patreon. Zach has an update on the site that explains our situation in greater detail, but in short, we’d like to move the needle from “treading water” to “room to grow”. Help us do that if you can, and if you appreciate the work that we do!

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

Story Time

Our opening series of highlights this week are all narratives about games and play, so pull up a chair and settle in for a tale.

• Can a Steam profile be a real memorial for a lost life? | Eurogamer
  Alice Bell contemplates authenticity, the digital self, and what someone’s play history tells and doesn’t tell us after they’re gone.
• The Gamergator rhetoric of historical accuracy has come back to bite Kingdom Come on the arse | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Edwin Evans-Thirlwell has it pretty much all summed up with the headline, eh?
• The hunt for truth in the legend of the F-19 | Eurogamer
  Robert Purchase goes all the way down the rabbit hole for this one (Further Reading – Ethan Johnson’s intertwined history of flight sims and the wider industry).

“You know, it’s hard not to be taken in by him, and by his enthusiasm. It is a great story. That it should all begin with top secret information divulged by a whispering Tom Clancy – who’s also not around to verify any of this – is not what I expected at all. It’s a story that evokes an era where people had secret conversations, when knowledge was a little less centralised, and where the gaps existed for stories like these to materialise. Who knows? Perhaps it is true. But every so often I catch little inconsistencies in what Stealey tells me and I begin to wonder.”

Crisis Core

Our next three picks examine the entanglement of games within our world’s many ills from different angles.

• The Hungry Lamb And The Remains Of Morality In A Famished World | Mimidoshima
  Kastel plays a Chinese-langauge VN reflecting on poverty, hunger, and the cycles of history.
• ¿Es ético divertirse en el Gold Saucer? | GamerFocus
  Julián Ramírez uses Final Fantasy VII Rebirth to highlight the conundrums of unsustainable entertainment media (Further Reading – Cress’ review of FFVII Rebirth).
• Take Video Games and Our Perilous Era Seriously | PopMatters
  Luis Aguasvivas presents an expansive review of Marijam Did’s expansive book about the industry’s pitfalls and potentials.

“Indeed, what propelled Everything to Play For into existence is a rallying cry: “We can either allow this vast cultural space to be eternally entangled in the awkward nets of conservatism and financialisation that will suffocate and deform both it and the players who touch it, or we can fight to rescue it.” As I read this, I asked myself, can the video game industry be rescued? Should we even try? Everything to Play For answers back with a resounding Yes!”

The Workshop

Here we’ve got designers talking design and craft, from both narrative and systems angles.

• Quality of Life | Kayinworks
  Kayin scrutinizes the give and take in experience when designers adjust their games in the name of QoL.
• Good game writing goes to heaven, bad game writing gets shared on the internet | Florence Smith Nicholls
  Florence Smith Nicholls makes the case for “interesting” games writing rather than “good” (Further Reading – Lily Valeen on making RPG writing a little more Interesting).

“So here’s my real hot take: focusing on immersion in video games is at the detriment of having them being appreciated as craft. Interesting games writing makes you pause and consider intentionality and authorship. Immersion, at least as its popularly used to refer to getting “lost” in a game, doesn’t leave space for the pleasures of engaging with the gameworld as artifice.”

Artificial Industry

These two pieces establish context and examples for the proliferation of large language models in gamedev and, what do you know, they still just make things worse than they need to be.

• The Most Dangerous Technology in Gaming Is Spreading And So Is Dislike For It | Inverse
  Robin Bea highlights a chasm between adoption of and enthusiasm for generative AI in the games industry.
• Did AI Ruin This Immersive Cocktail Murder Mystery? | mssv + Have You Played
  Adrian Hon reviews an interactive dining experience that goes off the rails (not in a good way).

“You could pay a writer £500 to do a much better job – but why pay £500 when you can pay nothing for a bad job that people won’t notice until it’s too late?”

High Score

Let’s switch gears now and look at a pair of reviews for games past and not-yet-out!

• Review: Double Dipping from the Guilds in Dungeon Inn | Sidequest
  Cress checks out a cozy management sim with a dash of factional intrigue.
• Star Trader: Falcom strikes back | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi digs in to the spacefaring Falcom odyssey, a worthy adventuring RPG strung together with some ramshackle shmup trappings.

“Exciting stories, sim-like detail, the messy reality of life amongst the stars… Star Trader is all of these things at the same time, and because that was made crystal clear before I’d gone anywhere near its discs the game’s constant swaying between two genres only ever feels seamless. This is a story that starts with a bold girl with tales of missing relatives and gods and ancient legends and ends with me shooting at something big and evil at the centre of the galaxy, like all good sci-fi stories should.”

Hit Me

This section pivots from play to player, as the authors work their subject games into their own narrative arcs.

• THE TEN WOMEN I’VE HAD TO BE | DEEP-HELL
  Skeleton distills a ludic personal history of femininity (content notification for discussions of sexual abuse).
• Just One More | Anxiety Shark
  Niko Stratis dwells on Balatro, the body, and the dance of addiction (Further Reading – Frank Lantz’s pharmakological approach to Balatro).

“I hit the final challenge, to beat the game Jokerless, that is to say learning how to only play the cards and never the jokers and beat a run and was harder than anything I had done before and relied on luck more than skill and it felt so good once, and it felt so good when I got close, and then it felt bad but I couldn’t shake it. Suddenly it had been an hour, and I still had the game in my hands. Then it had been two. It felt so good, once, I think, but now I wasn’t sure. Then it was the next day, and I was still playing, and then it was the next day, and I was still playing, and time seemed to become something new, something amorphous, something like water, moving swift, pushing along with dangerous purpose. Suddenly it was the next day again. It felt so good. Once. Didn’t it? Does it still? I started to get annoyed, flustered, angry. My heart beat faster every time I edged on victory. When I lost I swore under my breath and I felt bad and started another round. I told myself I would only play one more, as the hours melted away. I felt so bad, but I kept going, because I had to win and I had to claim victory and in doing so I would feel so good again, the way I had before. When I finally sat it down to focus on other tasks the music haunted me and the clicking of buttons haunted me and I thought about how good it probably will feel the next time. I thought about how good it felt before and how good it might again and I needed it to feel like that, just once more. I didn’t notice my teeth grinding against each other as I thought about good it might feel.”

Critical Chaser

Very cool imo.

• Meet a Navajo weaver inspired by video games | YouTube
  Melissa Cody describes her spin on an intergenerational art, inspired by the games she grew up with.