June 15th

Welcome back readers.

We’ve got 17 new-and-cool picks for you this week. Keep the recommendations coming by joining our Discord, and keep the whole operation going by supporting our Patreon! Good deal!

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

Fuck ICE

Our first pairing this week looks at both the artful and artificial intersections between games and our material conditions.

• For Those Who Come After | Superjump
  Brandon R Chinn delves into Clair Obscur‘s meditations on death and life (Further Reading – Ian Walker on the US healthcare system and the gommage).
• The Inescapable Intersection of SGF and ICE Protests | Pen To Pixels
  Janet Garcia reflects on Summer Games Fest and the city and people its attendees can no longer dismiss or ignore.

“Time is a flat circle when it comes to immigration reform in America. We’ve been fighting for immigration reform for as long as I can remember. Time is a flat circle. Summer Game Fest (SGF) and the ICE Protests felt more like a crossover than a collision. But for some in our industry, the LA protests against ICE may have been illuminating.”

Shop Talk

These next two interviews are specifically engaged with the video essay as a medium over time–its eras, its production, its pitfalls.

• A Dialogue with Jacob Geller | Unwinnable
  Autumn Wright sits down with Jacob Geller to chat about the trade, the tone, and the trajectory of the video essay (Further Reading – Autumn’s previous dialogues on the state of games crit).
• Pause & Select Vs. Aguas’ Points: Cultural Studies Media Mix Sing Along | Aguas’ Points
  Luis Aguasvivas and Joe from Pause & Select have a dialogue about crit and accessibility in an expensive entertainment medium, video essays, specificity of language, and more.

“From my experience [the use of academic] language has usually been more negative than positive. People tell me “You don’t have to say it like that” and then [unprompted] give me alternative ways of saying it. And it’s usually something completely different from what I intended to say.”

Crystal Tools

These three picks all intersect the topics of RPGs and adaptation, be it table to screen, or game to film.

• Sword World SFC: Where is the lore? | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi is rebuffed by a console RPG adaptation that has the scaffolding but not the sauce of its more fleshed-out forebears.
• The Kindest Demon I’ve Ever Known – Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (PC) Review | Gamesline
  Lilith takes a shine to an Owlcat TTRPG-to-CRPG adaptation while noting the structural and ideological baggage the game inherits from its parent text.
• Based on Reality | Bullet Points Monthly
  Cole Kronman looks at Final Fantasy XV and its peculiar tie-in film to make the case that games will not achieve their artistic fullness by copying cinema’s homework (Further Reading – Ed Smith on Resident Evil and its various film adaptations).

“Over the years I’ve only become more assured in my stance that Final Fantasy XV is, basically, good. Crude and unfinished, yes, occasionally puerile, of course, but for all its lumpiness a consistently affecting, charming thing. If Kingsglaive is a glimpse at what sort of shape XV’s much-marketed “darker tone” was meant to take, it’s quite possible that the game is only good in spite of itself, considering how often it undercuts all that with a bunch of goofy bullshit. XV is not cinema, it’s not literature, and it certainly isn’t real life. It’s a game about eating ham sandwiches and pressing B to fight goblins with your hot boyfriends. It’s a game that, maybe by complete accident, doesn’t aspire to be anything else.”

Critical Mix

Here’s a selection of critical inquiries on games of all sizes and vintages.

• The Alluring Mystery of PlayStation’s Deserted Island | Medium
  Vidyasaur excavates a forgotten artifact from the experimental early days of the PlayStation (Further Reading – Patricia Hernandez on nearly-lost game TRIPITAKA).
• How Much Game Can You Fit in 2.7 Inches? | Push to Talk
  Ryan K. Rigney explores the minimalism and maximalizm of the Playdate in conversation with some of the developers making games on the platform (Further Reading – Luis Aguasvivas on the accessibility and depth of the Playdate library).
• June Roundtable: Fishing in Games | Sidequest
  The Sidequest crew have a back-and-forth about the allure and abstraction of fishing games. If you saw this one already you knew I was gonna put it in (Further Reading – Robin Bea on Webfishing).
• Finding Heart in the Absurd | Inner Spiral
  Alli sees the method to the madness in how Yakuza‘s tonal structure supports a worldview rooted in empathy (Further Reading – Hiero de Lima on Promise Mascot Agency).

“In Kamurocho’s side streets, absurdity becomes a gateway to vulnerability. We laugh at the ridiculous setup, will let our guard down, and in that wake, a genuine bond forms between player and character, hero and NPC. The result is some kind of emotional alchemy, through laughter, a feeling of warmth and connection emerges, turning brief encounters into memorable human moments.”

B-Sides

Two pieces here on music and composition.

• On Comfort Zones & ‘Style’ | Dispatch from the Radical Dreamland
  Lena Raine muses on how her music–and the artist that makes it–gets collapsed into a perception, an idea (Further Reading – Wallace Truesdale talks to Okumura about writing rap tracks for boss battles).
• Was the Zelda Fairy Fountain Music Inspired by a Track From Super Mario Bros. 3? | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie investigates musical genealogy, convergent evolution, Japanese city pop, Chopin, and more.

“What this amounts to, more or less, is convergent evolution: a handful of composers stumbling onto the same musical structure because it creates a specific, desired effect in the person listening. And while this might be evident to someone who studies music on a structural level, someone who just experiences music passively might hear the two tracks and jump the conclusion that two different composers couldn’t have arrived at the same idea separately; one must have inspired the other, to say nothing of one ripping off the other.”

Effort Values

This section is partly about Pokémon but more broadly about nostalgia and the distorted lens it can project both on the games from our histories and the times in which we played them.

• Pokémon Black and White Is a Reddit Game | Jake Should Be Writing
  Jake Steinberg finds a void where the Internet remembers a manifesto.
• Kabuto Park is for a modern kid, not your nostalgia | Bloomed Wings Blog
  Cind sits with a cute bug-battler that looks forward instead of back (Further Reading – Phoenix Simms on the alluring contradictions of nostalgia).

“Kabuto Park is not a game about my childhood. It is not a reminder of what Pokemon used to be. Instead, it’s a story of a kid. Hana is just a character who you are meant to play. It is undeniably rooted in the 2020’s, with one kid dropping a ton of zoomer slang. It is not a pandering game, it did not poke at my memories and ask me to be a kid again. Because I’m not a kid. It instead asks me to fill the shoes of one, a girl on her way to being a master entomologist, and the way she just hangs out and makes new friends. It is not a Pokemon we grew up with, but rather a reminder that in all of it, kids will still play. And explore. And make up games. And we should help make a world where they can keep doing that, rather than trying to disappear into our own pasts.”

Critical Chaser

Two to sign off with this week–some poetry and some good ol’ fashioned shitposting.

• HELP! I’m on my last Bowl | Ferg’s Frickhouse
  Ferg pursues the age-old inquiry of with whom in games one ought to smoke a bowl (Further Reading – LordDarias on the best smoke spots in games).
• Foggy Skies And Butterflies | Videodame
  Latonya “Penn” Pennington seeks solace in the Midnight Channel.

“Somehow

a butterfly

gives me grace.

It flutters

as I hug myself.“