March 30th

Welcome back readers.

Hey, Game Informer is back! Nice.

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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.

Scanline Filters

Our opening group this week spans topics and genres, but all involve fresh critical looks at older games.

• How Dante’s Inferno Forced Christian America To Repent Its Sins | Paste
  Madeline Blondeau offers a rich reading of the 2010s action riff on the Divine Comedy.
• Interpretation as Interaction and the Horror of Limited Agency in Until Dawn | First Person Scholar
  Julie Veitch unpacks the ways in which Until Dawn‘s approach to horror favours a restrictive and interpretative mode of interactivity.
• Crosscountry BC | CD-ROM Journal
  Misty De Méo plays, basically, the provincial edition of the Canadian modern-day equivalent of The Oregon Trail. Sort of. You get all that?
• Blue Skies & Dreams | Inner Spiral
  Alli reflects on the hauntology of the Dreamcast’s Y2K futurism (Further Reading – Madeline Blondeau on the Sega Genesis’ own period-appropriate vibe).

“nostalgia, when it’s real, and it burns, isn’t about going backward. It’s about reclaiming direction. Saying: hey, remember when we believed in a weirder, more joyful world before late-stage capitalism? What if we did that again?”

Bohemian Rap Sheet

Our next two featured writers unpack Kingdom Come: Deliverance II as a historical and contemporary artifact, respectively.

• Look But Don’t Touch | Bullet Points Monthly
  Maddi Chilton contemplates the limitations of historical simulation as commercial videogame (Further Reading – Nicanor Gordon takes an exhibition approach to Mexico 1921‘s historical narrative).
• La Vie Chauvin | Bullet Points Monthly
  Nick Capozzoli finds that Kingdom Come: Deliverance II doesn’t need to do all that much to make itself commercially respectable in a industry and world already characterized by the reactionary and the chauvinistic (Further Reading – Josh Tucker on the fundamental conservativism of triple-A videogames).

“Gerard de Puymege, who literally wrote the book on Chauvin, ends it (per Bronowski) “with a quote from the German philosopher Karl Krause, who says that it is not xenophobia but smug self-love that is the most repugnant feature of chauvinism.” It is the impulse to draw one’s borders around the lowest common denominator of people who you can see yourself in, and turn guns outward, like the vozová hradba, precursors to the tank whose use Jan Žižka pioneered in the Hussite Wars (see? I am learning things). That’s how Vávra can write, without a shred of self-awareness, that diversity is “the option to choose freely what I like,” an argument so profoundly solipsistic that it manages to obliviate the very existence of other people, in Kuttenberg or Kenya alike. He and his ilk only ever choose one thing, no matter how much they dress it up.”

Mic Drop

Now for some interviews!

• To Have Fun in Spite of The Tragedy of It All: The Pertinence of Molly House | Unwinnable
  Luis Aguasvivas chats with designers Jo Kelly and Cole Wehrle about the design and thematic truths of their tabletop game Molly House.
• Turns Out Rapping As A Survival Horror Boss Isn’t Easy | Exalclaw
  Wallace Truesdale talks to hip-hop duo Okumura about rap in videogames and their own approach to the craft in Sorry We’re Closed and more.

“It was straight up — we just wanted that joint to bang. I wanted people to talk about the lyrics, I wanted people to look the song up. We never made boss music before, I didn’t know how to do it, you know what I’m saying? I just wanted it to hit.”

Holistic Crit

Games are products of, and entangled in, oppressive systems and structures. Our next group sets about performing some critical disentanglement, identifying the linking points of those entanglements and in one case proposing an intervention.

• The Bodies We Leave Behind | Steven’s Substack
  Steven Santana takes the ubiquitous game verb of looting to task.
• Lara Croft’s Colonialist Shadow | First Person Scholar
  Anoushka Lad examines Shadow of the Tomb Raider‘s uneven efforts to arc the series away from its colonial impulses (Further Reading – Yoel Villahermosa Serrano on Indigenous erasure and neocolonialism in Shadow of the Tomb Raider).
• In the HOLE | Sandbox Dunes
  Finn Carney digs for a way to disentangle the pleasure and revulsion linked together by cop fantasy in tactical FPS games.

“HOLE is the kind of game, and game design, that I also really love to see. HOLE is undeniably straightforward in its adaptation of the Tactical FPS genre, but is in no way subservient to it’s aesthetics or traditions. And this is important, not just for maintaining the core of a genre, but also for enticing players away from other, more harmful fantasies. I would love a world in which we had just way less games about guns or violence in favour of other mechanical interfaces, but we can’t ignore, not resent, the public for desiring this kind of work. But it’s then just as important that we internalize that we don’t need to give an audience exactly what they want. We can filter, refine or challenge their desires, even while maintaining the exact kinds of genre, mechanical and even narrative aspects they came for. And that needn’t always be an exercise in discomfort or direct opposition to the player fantasy. Sometimes, it’s just as worthwhile to be like HOLE, and have a little fun with it.”

Character Sheets

Our next two featured authors unpack character, text, and world.

• cape hideous gives us living, breathing beings | gAmeDHD
  Colin Clark boards a pirate ship and thinks about what makes a game come alive.
• Difference Is Resonance | TIER
  Grace Benfell grapples with a queer furry RPG too preoccupied with memes and relatability to commit to the warmth of its own worldbuilding.

“In the Lovely Lady RPG art book, writer Digital Poppy describes how the original intent of the game was to make something about archetypes. Lovely Lady and Nasty Girl would discover the ways their two dimensions limited them and begin to crack through to a deeper sense of self. In the version of the game we have, this shows up only in flickers, but the approach this idea engendered is felt everywhere. Without the subversion we are left only with the clichés. In its effort, Lovely Lady RPG ignores a fundamental truth: people can only resemble clichés, they cannot be them. You cannot create depth by working from the cliché in, you have to work from the reality out.”

Critical Chaser

Two closers this week! I’m going to get some dinner.

• Despite making a roguelike where you can have countless arms and legs, Caves of Qud’s creators say the ideal form is a limbless sphere: ‘We started in perfection and only moved farther from God’ | PC Gamer
  Lincoln Carpenter gains +1 Insight from Qud creators Brian Bucklew and Jason Grinblat.
• The Best Dark Souls Locales Based Purely on Vibes | Paste
  Dia Lacina drops an unranked but still competitive list of peak hangouts (Further Reading – The Best Smoke Spots in Gaming).

“This is the world from before disparity, still and ancient and enduring despite the Age of Fire far up above. It’s a somber and beautifully understated space, that while ignored by many, holds all the lore of Lordran together.”