March 24th

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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.

Timed Presses

Our opening section this week concerns itself with the performance element of games, interactive media that challenges the boundaries around “game”, and the artistry that goes into making interactive media more broadly.

• Mélanie Courtinat’s “The Siren” | e-flux
  Jonathan T. D. Neil doesn’t quite connect with an interactive exhibit looking to challenge the notions of play.
• So Much for Being Subtle | Unwinnable
  Ed Smith thinks about spontaneity and performance in games, and the vitality the late James McCaffrey brought to Max Payne.
• Barely Interactive. An Unlikely Appraisal of an Ungame | Medium
  Davy R. Howard takes a closer look at a CD-i art exhibit made infamous by its brief AVGN drive-by (Further Reading – Crushed on EGM’s late-2000s crusade against Endless Ocean and the “nongame”).

“In Video Games Have Always Been Queer Bo Ruberg defines videogames as “any designed, interactive experience that operates primarily through a digital interface and understands itself as a video game”. While I have some issues with this definition, I believe it productively leads us to ask, does TFoRM “understand itself” as a game? Despite the Phillips CD-i ostensibly being a game console, I don’t think that it does. In fact, in the realm of 1990s CD-ROM multimedia TFoRM is frankly unremarkable, by which I mean not that there is nothing to say about it as Rolfe suggests but that it was not uncommon in its time (See Trant and Large). Yet to say that TFoRM is not a videogame would be giving up ground to a reactionary impulse in games culture. Instead I would say that TFoRM is an ungame, in that it undoes the distinctions between games and non-games, interactivity and stasis, videogames and art.”

Space Cases

Our next two featured writers happen to both be in conversation with space-themed games, but also explore the essence of digital spatiality–its details and its gaps–more broadly.

• Did We Need All This Space? – Mass Effect: Andromeda | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt traces a critical path through Mass Effect: Andromeda‘s Ubi-cruft (Further Reading – Kastel on Mass Effect 2 and “large” games).
• I’m Not Meant To Know Every Train Schedule | Unwinnable
  Wallace Truesdale finds a productive imaginative space in the gaps in Citizen Sleeper 2‘s worldbuilding.

“By not giving me those granular details, it makes room to participate in its world-building and interrogate why it would be built like that at all. It’s a thoughtful exercise in deepening your understanding of the game, encouraging you to play around with a train and other less explained parts of the Starward Belt.”

Chat Windows

We were shown lots of good dialectical writing this week–interviews, dialogues, conversations–on all kinds of topics, from genre, to criticism, to development, and more.

• Gaming the system: Immigration, incarceration explored during indie developers’ summit | 48 hills
  Leah Isobel talks to indie creators at Day of the Devs about games that foster empathy with migrants and inmates (Further Reading – Byron Case on gaming communities in a Missouri prison).
• A Dialogue with Nic Reuben | Unwinnable
  Autumn Wright chats with Nic Reuben about Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, T.S. Eliot, and the anatomy of a critical review.
• ‘No-one wants to play a Match-3 game’: Prolific indie dev made his Match-3 Metroidvania to “definitively prove” his publishers wrong | GamesRadar
  Issy van der Velde sits down with Xalavier Nelson Jr. to talk about making the genre soup make sense in a “match-roidvania”
• ARG Digest Magazine | Center for Immersive Arts
  Laura E. Hall talks to the folks behind an ARG-focused independent magazine about pandemic-era storytelling, digital community, the contemporary state of the Alternate Reality Game, and more.
• The story behind the Oblivion mod Terry Pratchett worked on | Eurogamer
  Cian Maher recounts a story of friendship and eventual collaboration between author and modders.

“Thanks to the efforts of Emma and Charles, Pratchett could enjoy his time with Vilja in Oblivion even after his memory started to fade. And all the while, he played his own part in helping with Vilja’s development. Together, the three of them found happiness in helping each other to help Vilja grow, and she continued to flourish as they continued to make her less of a companion and more of a person.”

Graze Counters

Now let’s look at a couple of critical reviews of games past and present.

• Impetuth: Where did all the talent go? | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi picks up a doujin shmup with pedigree and pokes it full of holes.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails Through Daybreak II (PC) Review | Gamesline
  Rose finds that it’s the characters that see Trails through a somewhat less-necessary sequel in the Daybreak subseries (Further Reading – Eithi highlights a different character in a different Trails).

“These characters will keep coming back, they’ll keep growing and changing, getting new outfits and all that. If you’re the type of person who loves thinking about all the different ways characters can interact with each other, or thrive off seeing emotional payoffs for character arcs that are games long, then you probably already know what’s great about Trails. The main narrative of Daybreak II is on the weaker side for the series, more like a Reverie than a proper full sequel to Daybreak, but these character interactions are what makes it enjoyable in spite of that.”

Critical Chaser

We’re closing out the week on a holesome note.

• I Could Have Bought a Latte. Instead, I Dug a Hole. | Gamers with Glasses
  Samantha Trzinski dispenses with the sunk-cost fallacy and digs in.

“Altogether, A Game about Digging a Hole is a pleasant experience that appeals to the human desire to dig a hole and gather loot. As long as you go into the game with the knowledge that it is, at its heart, about digging a hole, you should have an enjoyable time. Be aware, though, that if this house’s price seems too good to be true, then you might want to ask yourself why someone would so eagerly invite you to dig a hole that they are not willing to dig themselves.”