June 8th

Welcome back readers.

Happy Nintendo Switch 2 week to those who celebrate? I got my thumb caught hard in the new joycon attachment mechanism within five minutes of opening the box. I did not get Mario Kart. Anyway, segue to Patreon! Support us for cheap and help us collect and communicate great writing on games every week.

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

Recency BIOS

This week our opening section captures ideas and impressions across a variety of written genres with a focus on new and recent games.

• Space Without Story | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello tallies the over/back ratio on Split Fiction (Further Reading – Shannon Liao on the same game).
• Promise Mascot Agency’s Best Asset Is Its Female Cast | Unwinnable
  Hiero de Lima situates Promise Mascot Agency in relation and opposition to the Yakuza genre and its heavily gendered storytelling conceits (Further Reading – Dia Lacina on Yakuza‘s increasingly strained approach to women).
• The retro sleuthing pleasures of Puzzle Spy International | 48 hills
  Leah Isobel chats with Mike and Talia Dashow about the 60’s-styled spy puzzler/visual novel they’re cooking up.
• Many Nights A Whisper Is A Lesson In Preparing For The Future | Exalclaw
  Wallace Truesdale contemplates both shouldering the burden and letting it go (Further Reading – Emily Price on the same game).
• Designing for Land and Body | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms unpacks Kara Stone’s solarpunk practice as a game designer and situates her work within a larger movement of Canadian ecocritical literature (Further Reading – David Molina’s interview with Kara Stone).

“Stone is one of the game designers to watch when it comes to designing in an eco-conscious manner. But they should also watch her because she is a master of crafting stories that entangle the mundane with the mythic. The familiar transmuting into the sublime. Sorrow’s tale is cyclical, like many things in nature, death and decay leads to new growth.”

Twistly Little Passages

Now let’s move into a horror-focused section, and more specifically its overlap with other genres and modes.

• Look Outside: Sometimes Tragic, Sometimes Comic, Always Grotesque | Gamers with Glasses
  Sophie Atkinson vibes with the tonal if not always the genre mashups in this cosmic body horror/black comedy RPG Maker outing.
• Horror Game Biophobia Grows A Garden From Grief – And Art | Paste
  Madeline Blondeau checks out a short, meditative body horror title and chats with its designer Charlotte Madelon about its inception.
• Into The Restless Ruins carries the spirit of Adventure in today’s world | Bloomed Wings Blog
  Cind measures the pendulum swing between power and horror in adventure games past and present (Further Reading – Kathryn Hemmann on Crow Country and climate change).

“To journey out in Adventure is to seek glory; climbing the Tower of Druaga is hard and requires secrets, but it will make the sense of conquest even sweeter. In these dark Ruins, though, there is only a dwindling torch, and the soft words of the Maiden gives you the hope that maybe, just maybe… she isn’t lying. That it wasn’t her fault. That you can save her. And have your heart’s desire.”

Field Notes

These next three selections pursue a collection of topics centered on archaeology, curation, exhibition, and preservation.

• The 2-year hunt for ‘one of the rarest games in history’ | Polygon
  Patricia Hernandez investigates the story of a nearly-lost game as emblematic of the precarious state of games preservation.
• An Interview With SEQUENCEBREAK// Curator Nilson Carroll | TIER
  Grace Benfell and Phoenix Simms talk to Nilson Carroll about curation, exhibition, creating third spaces for game makers, and more (Further Reading – Jini Maxwell on Two Point Museum through an exhibit curator’s lens).
• Drafting the Archaeological Mental Model of Blue Prince | Florence Smith Nicholls
  Florence Smith Nicholls demonstrates a new framework of player-archaeology via offscreen notetaking in Blue Prince (Further Reading – Emily Short on lingustics, archaeology, and procedural generation).

“Encouraging players to slow down and look away from the screen might seem counterintuitive, but I think that it’s actually a powerful way of getting people to more deeply engage with puzzles and digital space.  If note-taking helps scaffold archaeological mental models when interpreting analogue archaeological remains, then it can also aid players who essentially take on the role of archaeologists when interpreting environmental storytelling.”

HIDEO 1

Now let’s look at critical intersections between games and film.

• Solid Start | Cinema Purgatorio
  Ben Verschoor embarks upon a cinematic review of Hideo Kojima and his oeuvre with a look at the original Metal Gear.
• Why did they make the Licker look stupid? | Bullet Points Monthly
  Ed Smith uses Resident Evil to articulate the formal gulfs between games and film that make them difficult partners for adaptation (Further Reading – Bruno Dias on the structural distinctions between the film and game industries).

“Even if we pretend that your average movie and your average game have some kind of comparable artistic value, one just doesn’t convert into the other. If there are no good videogame films, it’s because—even ignoring mechanics and gameplay and interactivity—the subject matter and aesthetics and narratives of games are not good material for filmic interpretation.”

Grand Theft Model

These next two pieces investigate very different technological paradigms, but which nonetheless are grouped by popular nomenclature under the banner of “AI”.

• What was Radiant AI, anyway? | paavohtl’s blog
  Paavo Huhtala untangles the histories–technological, oral, apocryphal–of Bethesda’s infrastructure for NPC bread-thieving and mudcrab-sighting.
• Prompt engineering | ReaderGrev
  Mikhail Klimentov has two pieces here–on LLMs stripping writing of process, and on Valnet stripping Polygon for parts. I think they go together (Further Reading – Niko Stratis on the textureless hyperreal of LLM-generated media).

“There were many different “eras” of Polygon, but each had a point beyond just churn. There are, after all, already dozens (hundreds?) of websites that clumsily paraphrase tweets and press releases. So who is served by throwing Polygon into the industrial vat of internet slop? (Perhaps a more apt phrasing: Who is enriched by it? No prize for guessing right.)”

Critical Chaser

I liked this.

• The Secret Diary of a Video Game Horse | McSweeney’s
  Kathleen O’Mara pokes fun at the hero’s (e)quest (Further Reading – Nico Moisson explores gendering in horse games through poetry).

“Today, the hero left me standing on the edge of a cliff as he glided off with some kind of flying machine. I did see a staggering amount of horse bones at the base of the ravine, as though someone was crass enough to just run their horse right off the cliff. Unsure why he needed me to gallop at full speed for no more than thirty feet, but he always knows what’s right and good. I’m sure my contribution was necessary and strategic, not just something he tried because it’s cool.”