April 6th

Welcome back readers.

This week the thing I want to plug is that Kaile is putting together a book bringing together both new material and previously-published hits. Don’t worry, I’ll be back to ask you for money for the site next week.

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

• Art is By People: Dreams and Deadlines and the Ghibli AI Trend | Gamesline
  John reflects on the inability of LLM-generated art to replace emotion with theft (Further Reading – Shannon Liao on what Split Fiction has to say about GenAI exploitation of creatives).
• To All the Robots I’ve Loved Before | Gamers with Glasses
  Caroline Delbert juxtaposes the robot characters in games and other storytelling media with the modern myths peddled by technocrats.
• Ocarina of Time: A Picture’s Worth a Thousand Years | @gracefulgabbing on Tumblr
  Sophie Grace muses on playing with time, playing by the rules, and the resilience of creation (Further Reading – Dominic Preston on why Hyrule is the best thing about Ocarina).
• All Bark Some Bite in Techno Banter (PC) | Gamesline
  Franny checks out a lightly cyberpunk-flavoured game about building out community resilience amid capitalist dystopia.
• Oops! All Canon Now! | Inner Spiral
  Alli identifies fanworks and modes of creative production as structurally oppositional to capitalist modes of media production.
• sonicmenu | Why Sonic Robo Blast 2 Matters | startmenu
  Adam W presents the Doom mod/Sonic fangame that has evolved into a thriving ecosystem of fanworks and development in its own right.

“When folks today talk about “games as platforms,” they refer to how players might gravitate towards “everything games” like Fortnite and abandon the rest. But there’s another possible future that looks more like this underground cave system. Rather than untouchable monoliths spewing out content, games instead become raw material for hyper-fans to reinterpret however they like.”

Track Changes

Our next meta-section starts with lookbacks at both 1980s microcomputing classics as well as the developers that brought them to life. From here we move into the communities and structures supporting margianlized developers in the contemporary and future industry.

• Jet Set Willy – “Entrance to Hades” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew chronicles the history of one of the Spectrum’s foundational platformers, and the neglected programmer who made it.
• The timeless genius of a 1980s Atari developer and his swimming salmon masterpiece | Ars Technica
  Benj Edwards situates the enduring context–past, present, and future–of Salmon Run.
• Tara Mustapha’s vision to support marginalised developers and build sustainable studios | GamesIndustry.biz
  Sophie McEvoy chats with Code Coven founder Tara Mustapha about building out infrastructure and supports to enable marginalized developers to survive and thrive in the industry.
• Don’t Play Wimme | Patta Magazine
  Shawn Alexander Allen offers a crash course in Black representation in games and gamedev, and charts out a promising future (Further Reading – Malindy Hetfeld interviews narrative designer Adanna Nedd about making space in the industry for Black creatives).

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“I wager video games are just now hitting their Blaxploitation era. But as we’ve seen with the history of games, they grow quick and fast as a culture, so maybe we’ll see it sooner than later.”

Expansion Pass

Let’s pause now for a shorter section consisting of two longer-form pieces, unpacking the social and labour contexts of their object games.

• Commemorating Gendered Collective Trauma: Social Realism and Procedural Rhetoric in the Chinese Indie Game Laughing to Die | Game Studies
  Mayshu (Meixu) Zhan examines the role of indie games like Laughing to Die and fan communities in effecting social critique and countering dominating capitalist narratives.
• Putting Labor Process in Play | Cosmonaut
  Sam Dee puts the game-as-labour experience of Papers, Please in conversation with the labour-as-play observations of Michael Burawoy (Further Reading – Luis Aguasvivas charts the enduring and evolving critical resonance of Papers, Please over a decade).

“In his 1981 ethnography of a machine shop, Manufacturing Consent, sociologist Michael Burawoy set out to answer not how capitalists are able to exploit through coercion but rather how willing workers are to participate in their exploitation. In the shop where he worked, Burawoy was fascinated by the combination of salaried and piecemeal work that management had in place. Machine operators would always earn a flat rate (i.e., goldbricking) but could earn up to 140% of that salary based on how much they exceeded set production quotas (which the operators termed “making out”). Burawoy was surprised by the frequency and pride with which experienced workers would make out and their disappointment and anger at falling short of their internally imposed goals or being forced to goldbrick a day. He realized—they were playing a game.”

Recompiled

Our final section moves from game design conventions and experiences into puzzle-specific considerations and new ideas for tools to add to the kit.

• Let’s Do It Again, But This Time Better | Unwinnable
  Emily Price weighs the FF7 Remake games–and their many, many minigames–as a follow-up not just to the original FF7 but to countless genres and trends that have emerged in the industry since then (Further Reading – Claire Jackson on FF8 as its own kind of sequel to FF7).
• ‘Omori’ and the Small Traumas of Relationships | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold reflects on Omori, small traumas, and moving forward through grief.
• a game ends when you stop playing | a weapon to surpass blaming yourself or god while knee-deep in the dead
  Chuck Sebian-Lander tackles the muddy and convoluted problem of knowing when the game stops giving, and when to put it down.
• Blue Prince review: A mystery-packed mansion that cranks open your mind | Polygon
  Jay Castello seeks the 46th room.
• How fictional languages are perfect for the Metroidbrainia formula | Thinky Games
  Devin Stone explores the intersections and synergies between conlangs and knowledge-gated puzzle design (Further Reading – Jay Castello on Chants’ of Sennaar‘s real-world sociolinguistic roots).

“Unlike more guided logic puzzle rule-discovery games like The Witness, which often intentionally mislead the player into false assumptions only to subvert those assumptions with an embarrassing punchline, the false assumptions made while playing Epigraph feel entirely organic. This I believe happens because the “rules” which players must discover during language decipherment are so open-ended—any glyph could represent any concept—that the likelihood of multiple players making the same false assumption is comparatively low.”