June 20th

Welcome back readers.

First, I’m going to re-up this itch bundle. Good if you like TTRPGs. Also good if you don’t like ICE. Good all around.

Next I’m going to plug our Patreon per usual. You can sign up for free and get access to Kaile’s excellent monthly recaps. Becoming a paid member is also always an option and helps us build longevity into this project. Good all around.

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

Off to the Races

We’ve got three picks to start off with this week taking up various industry-level critical perspectives (or several industries, in the case of Grace’s piece).

• Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Turns an Exploitative Sport into a Predatory Game with a Relentlessly Positive Facade | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell peels back the uncanny thematic resonances between horse racing and gacha (Further Reading: Bruno Dias on the pitfalls of gacha coverage in western games press).
• Banning porn is one of Valve’s dumbest decisions yet | No Escape
  Kaile Hultner has no grace for Valve changing the rules creators must abide by at the drop of a hat to appease payment processors (Kaile works for CD) (Further Reading: Oldie but goodie from Tim Colwill on the exploitative relationship between Valve and developers).
• The Pendulum Swings Back: On God of War and Sex and Violence in Games | Endless Mode
  Diego Nicolás Argüello has an expansive conversastion with prolific developer/producer Shayna Moon about the AAA industry’s flinching away from sex, the overabundance of white men in industry leadership positions, the dadification of games, and more (Further Reading: Franny on the in-game protests against Old School RuneScape‘s pride event rollbacks).

“Moon is hoping that more developers sit down to think about what it’d like to portray sexuality in creative fields and the work they make. While nowadays people are having more conversations about it—including discussions about sex and romance separately each year at GDC—the industry seems to still be in a phase where it’s still a little uncomfortable or giggly. But as these arguments make these topics and questions more prominent and more present in everybody’s minds, the less scary and intimidating they become.”

Consent Creation

The intersection of sex and games came up in two articles from the last section. Let’s focus in a bit now with three more pulls from the Adult Analysis Anthology, now in its third issue (Further Reading: This previously-featured pull from the same issue by Zoquete).

• Please Let Me Say “Yes”: A Study Of Consent & Agency In Eroge | BP Games Inc.
  BáiYù responds to a lack of opportunities for female protagonists to give consent in eroge by highlighting some counter-examples.
• “Clicking Away While Imagining How Things Would Feel” – A Survey Of Gender Feelings In Porn Games | BP Games Inc.
  Faye talks to folks across several different communities about the gender feels they have playing porn games.
• Demons Roots And Sex Scenes As “Content” | BP Games Inc.
  Eithi weighs different approaches to pacing and gating sex scenes in HRPG Demons Roots.

“Despite my griping, Demons Roots was still enjoyable to me. I liked taking time off to see the new and crazy sex scenes I’d unlocked as I got more party members and more parts of the theme park opened up. And while the stuff in the bad-end dungeon isn’t to my tastes, I still came back to watch the scenes that contributed to worldbuilding not shown anywhere else. Still, seeing all this effort put into a part of the game the player may never even look at felt wasteful to me. I don’t know if it would have been better to distribute these scenes along the critical path either because they would have disrupted the pacing of the main story, and removing them outright would be antithetical to the game’s identity.”

Peak Performance

Now for some critical analysis of medium and genre.

• It’s called a Play after all | Carlito Calzone
  Nicanor Gordon starts a new conversation on the porous boundary between the roles of performer and audience (Further Reading: Yussef Cole on Kentucky Route Zero and theatre).
• “Friendslop” | Pressed Petals Creative Collective
  Lotus looks at the recent success of PEAK and suggests that maybe Millennial critics are taking it all a little too seriously.

“This is where the real divide between the casual and hardcore, the zoomer and millennial, lives. While there is an interesting development here with overtly casual gaming spaces organically inventing a critical term… “Friendslop” is, bluntly, not that serious. It could just as easily have been “friendcore” or “friendlike,” since the co-op, “Friday night with the squad” vibe is the most integral component of the genre. It just hit the zeitgeist at a very particular time, with slop front of mind and these games tipping past the saturation point on video-based social media.”

Care Actors

These two picks explore the relationships and attachments we form with characters, in games and beyond (Further Reading: Jackson Tyler on Final Fantasy being about guys).

• Nitro Gen Omega and the Mech of Theseus | Gamers with Glasses
  Wallace Truesdale considers the narrative and philosophical implications of a mech game with no character creator, a shonen anime with no protagonist.
• Slay the Princess and the Multiversal Language of Love | Uppercut
  Gab Hernandez loves the princess.

“In the deepest woods, the hero becomes one with nature itself, accepting her embrace. The mass of blades meets its match in more ways than one. The spectre, once seeking to possess, instead sees the heart you hide within you.  And every single one of them loves you.”

1-Credit Crit

The next three featured picks this week take a variety of critical perspectives on games across genres. I don’t have a throughline here but they’re good!

• The Shallow Depths of ‘Dave the Diver’ | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold finds Dave the Diver initially charming, but it all gets to be a bit too much.
• Starfield Isn’t Worth Remembering | Kotaku
  Claire Jackson lets go of the memories–and a hundred or so gigabytes of capture.
• Girlhood Is Deadly In Cave’s Classic Shooter Deathsmiles | Endless Mode
  Madeline Blondeau unpacks the vengeful gothic lolita power fantasy in Deathsmiles (Further Reading: Kimimi on Panorama Cotton).

“Deathsmiles is underpinned by a philosophy that softness and vulnerability are assets to strength, not hindrances. This embodies an idea that femininity and girlishness do not have to exist solely to be victimized in the context of fiction. That a child murder victim is as capable of seeking justice for herself as a would-be grizzled father or cop figure. It’s an undeniably fantastical conceit, sure, but one that belies a confidence in young girls so often missing in the medium.”

Bonfire Rest

Both of these next two picks are about community and the undead. Ghosts are undead, right? I’m not looking this up.

• The Softer Side of Dark Souls Fandom | Sidequest
  Kathryn Hemmann chronicles a fandom that grew up and branched out.
• Spectres of the Past | Tearing Down the Dam
  Sophie Grace finds the building blocks of life in the afterlife in this read of Hauntii and Ghost Trick (Further Reading: Malindy Hetfeld on Ghost Trick).

“No matter how much our memory may mean to us, how important that growth may have been, and how much we may be guided by history, we cannot exist in the worlds left behind. Only by moving forward can we live, lest we be trapped as spectres of our pasts forever.”

Critical Chaser

Speaking of life after death. . . .

• Lena Raine’s Escape From Video Game Music Purgatory | Bandcamp Daily
  Lewis Gordon chats with Lena Raine about the afterlife of her soundtrack to Earthblade.

“The release, which Raine describes as more of a concept album than a traditional soundtrack, is a rare and precious thing: an aural artifact of a lost virtual world. With its pitter-patter ambience and swelling electronic crescendos, the album evokes the ebb and flow of the adventure that players would have embarked on playing as Névoa, the child of a people who were once custodians of Earth. For Raine, this fluid, emergent soundtrack was going to be her “big thesis statement” on a “career’s worth of working.” But, of course, she didn’t get that far. What is left, writes Raine on the Bandcamp page, is a document of aspiration: “30 minutes of music that paints the picture of what I hoped Earthblade might be.””