July 6th

Welcome back readers.

Mondays (which, officially, are the day after this issue comes out each week) are when we talk about what old games we’ve been playing this week over on the Discord server. Come drop in, tell us what you’re playing, and if you really like what we do, send a few bucks to our Patreon so that we can keep on doing this work even when today’s games have become “old.”

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

Play Matters

This week our opening picks all situate games within communities, their responses to crises, and broader questions about how art makes meaning out of the world.

• We Have Now Entered the Age of Covid-19 Inspired Games | Endless Mode
  Maddy Myers considers the lasting mark the pandemic has left upon how games tell their stories (Further Reading – Phoenix Simms chats with narrative designer Kaelan Doyle-Myersough on a speculative future canon of post-pandemic games).
• Final Fantasy VII Offers a Way of Living and Working through Catastrophe | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell muses on what people do after the plate falls.
• Games can be so much more than an escape: they can inspire you to take action | Eurogamer.net
  Caelyn Ellis contemplates how tabletop design can move us from play to action.
• Yearning for Meaning: Maddy Thorson’s Super Mario World Romhacks and the Metamodernist Impulse | Unwinnable
  Sara Hovda finds the metamodern throughline in some of the sickest SMW hacks I’ve seen in a minute (Further Reading – Madison Schmalzer on speedrunning as an inherently trans practice).

“Throughout the adventure, Sonic makes their mother proud, comes out as both bisexual and nonbinary, and even creates what the player reads as a subjective masterpiece. If the masterpiece isn’t the level by that name, then it’s at least the romhack as a whole. It may not be perfect, but it’s perfect for Maddy Thorson, for Sonic, and for the player. If personal things happening to Sonic is the theme of this sincerity amidst the chaos, then it is the most appropriate thing in the romhack that the final overworld event, after Sonic completes “Masterpiece” the level, is the revealing of letters spelling out “your gay.” Again humorous, especially with its purposeful misspelling, but also an honest revelation of the self. This is what we can take away: try to save the world and to make the perfect creation, but also know it’s enough to grow into and be yourself.”

Life’s a Beach

Death Stranding 2 has been out for a minute, and the critical distillations are starting to come in. Here are two highlights for this week (Further Reading – Gabrielle de la Puente’s thoughts from last week on the same game).

• La historia de Death Stranding 2 explicada: análisis a fondo del ‘lore’ y los temas del juego | GamerFocus
  Julián Ramírez unwinds Death Stranding 2‘s lore connections to American colonialism, COVID, and more.
• The Freelance Camaraderie of Death Stranding | Endless Mode
  Diego Nicolás Argüello speaks to the ways in which Death Stranding 2 gets the gig life.

“During the review period of Death Stranding 2, a time in which the public didn’t have access to the game yet, the multiplayer pool was made up of members of the media and content creators. I recognized dozens of names during my travels, which made for a more poignant exposure to the asynchronous connection. The hardships were new, but the solidarity remained adamant, with peers building bridges, ramps, generators, and more. I always made sure to drop a like, and return the favor by also lending a hand to make things easier for everybody. The mud on my boots was harder to scrape. I could wash off the blood on my body after a long day, but not its scars. But I was reassured to know that I could at least expect some likes when I logged on again the next day.”

Critical Discontents

These next two picks are self-reflexive examinations of the state of media criticism, its hangups, its shortcomings.

• Please, Touch the Artwork 2 by Thomas Waterzooi | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana argues we’ve been using the term love letter incorrectly to describe games.
• EROTIC RIFLING | DEEP-HELL
  Skeleton weighs the proliferation of guro erotic works in games and elsewhere against a critical landscape who are largely ill-equipped to meaningfully engage with it.

“Like Maruo’s artwork becoming popular (and later, artists like Shintaro Kago) with women, the actual depictions of violence in Beyond Citadel are about collection and ownership of the body. We display and learn about the inner-workings of our pilot-clone-protagonist and the world she lives in, while stripping away what remains of the identity and autonomy of our brainwashed soldiers working for the apocalypse. Just as the hands of angels descended from heaven to make a choice over her own body and reality, now her choice arrives as the player pulls back the bolt on a rifle madelong before the world turned inside out over itself. How do you react to an open wound?”

Memory Palace

These next three highlights are all on a continuum between history and memory, be it personal, public, or cultural.

• Pauline: A History of Nintendo’s First Leading Lady | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie has the receipts and it turns out they may go further back than even Olive Oyl.
• The Queue: Siblings, Gaming, and Family History | Gamers with Glasses
  Spencer Johnson describes what it’s like trying to inch through an SNES RPG with three save slots when you’ve got five siblings to share the controller with (Further Reading – Alexander B. Joy on Goemon and nostalgia).
• indie soapbox | harmony corpsepit
  Stephen dwells on the ways in which games and especially altgames ruminate on, distort, and are ultimately transformed into memory.

“I think it’s more true to say that anything in memory becomes a symbol – that any object of the world becomes a symbol, once it’s severed from experience and returned to us through memory. An object is a world and also the vision of a world. And if alternative videogames are about memory I believe it’s not so much that they want to be memorable as that they want to see what memory will turn them into. A memory game is one that accepts incompleteness in the hopes of someday being completed in some way they can’t expect or recognize.”

Status Affects

Let’s dig into the emotional chords games strike on matters of love and home.

• “Love Is Terrifying” | Stop Caring
  Wallace Truesdale examines frightful human feelings on catastropically celestial scales in Sorry We’re Closed (Further Reading – Wallace’s previous coverage of the same game taking to rap duo Okumura).
• Leaving, Staying | Unwinnable
  Jay Castello reflects on roots and home across the Citizen Sleeper games (Further Reading – Luis Aguasvivas on the same game).

“I’ve never wanted to be pinned down. But having just replayed Citizen Sleeper and fallen in love with one single space station, and then having played its sequel and been ground down by the relentless movement of its sequel, I wanted to build a home. So, I’ll stay. No matter what comes next, I’ll stay.”

Level Grind

I felt that each of these next picks had something interesting to say about design in one aspect or several.

• RPG Levels as a Difficulty Setting | Lockirby2
  Lockirby2 unpacks RPG difficulty as a synthesis of mechanical design and player archetypes (Further Reading – sraëka-lillian on Dragon Warrior II‘s infamous difficulty).
• Super Mario Bros 3: Lively and lovely | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi highlights an evergreen joy of discovery in the venerable SMB3.
• A Little More Character to the Action – The First Berserker: Khazan (PS5) Review | Gamesline
  Rose checks out a solid linear souls-type thing that keeps its hooks in with deference to the staples of PS2 character action.

“You could boil down Khazan to the same old Soulslike combat that has become the accepted paradigm, hell it even has the stagger bar seen everywhere since people realized Final Fantasy XIII is actually awesome, but with the sheer amount of engaging tools with varying skill floors at your disposal, Khazan becomes so much more.”

Critical Chaser

I’ve always wondered what people were using those tiny controllers for. . . .

• How One Tiny Gaming Controller Became an Essential Studying Tool | Endless Mode
  Nicole Carpenter investigates the peculiar story of using a little controller to study for med school.

“Sinha uses her 8BitDo controller (and the Anki Remote, too) to complete 500 flashcards a day—a task that can take up to an hour. Sinha explained the appeal: “Because it’s a gaming controller that we’re using as a remote, we map the keys so that instead of having to use the keyboard, I can be sitting far away from my computer, or I could be walking on the treadmill, or I could just be out on a walk and do the flashcards with my controller.””