July 27th

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

Collective Sigh

Long section to start off with this week. Here we’ve collected a variety of pieces–reporting, commentary, interviews, calls-to-action–concerning the recent crackdown on NSFW games by Steam and itch in response to the agitations of a TERF group. Given the breadth of angles here, you could consider this a suggested reading order.

• Steam and Itch.io Are Pulling ‘Porn’ Games. Critics Say It’s a Slippery Slope to More Censorship | WIRED
  Megan Farokhmanesh highlights the push to censor queer creators and difficult art out of public visibility by going after risk-adverse payment-processors.
• Credit Card Companies Are Hurting the Future of Video Games | 404
  Emanuel Maiberg chats with NYU Game Center chair Naomi Clark about Itch’s response to payment processor pressure, the last 20 years of creative explosion within the hobby, and a general lack of awareness outside of the hobby of games as a legitimate medium for engaging with serious subject matter (Further Reading: Nathalie Lawhead on games about trauma).
• Developers Are Protesting As Adult Game Bans Come To Indie Storefront Itch.io | Inverse
  Robin Bea covers the counter-movements developers and players have been making in response to Itch being targeted by TERFs.
• The Digital Chastity Belt | Inner Spiral
  Alli sizes up the inarticulate clowns leading the moral panic around porn games, points out the disproportionate harms these crusades exact upon marginalized creators, and highlights the good work being done to turn the tide.
• How the Religious Right Censor Morally Objectionable Content to Target Queer and Adult Media | Mimidoshima
  Kastel documents the history and tactics of far-right groups lobbying against porn under the guise of feminism.
• Super Columbine Massacre RPG! — 20 years later, are the limits are still winning? | Medium
  Felipe Pepe remembers an RPG Maker game about the Columbine shootings as an historical parallel to the censorship fights plaguing games today.
• the itch.io adult content ban | harmony corpsepit
  Stephen suggests we start rethinking the entanglement of the communal and economic dimensions of artmaking on platforms that starve us of the former and hold the latter for ransom (Further Reading: Marcia on de-commercializing the TTRPG hobby).

“the people who most need to charge money for their games are also people who don’t have a lot of money to spend on other people’s games. i do think it’s kind of led to people being alienated from their own peers a bit – to a landscape where students, broke people, people excluded from the official economy end up all trying to hock games to the same nonexistent middle class consumer, while having their own time and shared terrain eaten up by f2p, fortnite, roblox, gacha and anything else without that upfront cost.”

Namco Museum

This one’s a long section too, and I’m playing pretty loose with the associations. All of these picks have something to do with history–personal history, art history, industry history, (a)historicism–you get the idea.

• Treating the Curse of Trivia | Gamers with Glasses
  Caroline Delbert reflects on Encarta MindMaze, growing up “gifted”, and staying curious and compassionate beyond your school years.
• The Nintendo 3DS Guide: Louvre is retiring, and I’m sad to see it go | Skybox
  Justin Grandfield recounts the success and value of an unlikely partnership between Nintendo and the Louvre.
• Elite – “The Universe will open up before you” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew recounts the history, ethos, and legacy of the original space trading sim (Further Reading: Art Maybury’s expansive critical writeup on Elite).
• Shadow Labyrinth Is A Brooding Memorial of Pac-Man (and Namco’s) Bygone Glory | Endless Mode
  Madeline Blondeau considers what lessons Namco’s approach to their own arcade history can impart to other developers looking to nostalgia as a wellspring for creative new ideas.
• Adam Jensen is Not the Golem of Prague | Unwinnable
  Vehe Mently pokes holes in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided‘s clumsy, ahistorical allegories (Further Reading: Don Everhart on surveillance and voyeurism in Mankind Divided).
• Reviewer 2’s Review of Red Dead’s History | History Respawned
  Robert Whitaker reviews a published work of historical game studies that cites. . . none of the game studies (Further Reading: Grace Benfell on the problems with anthology Critical Hits and games crit at large).

“There is already a great, developing literature on historical games that accomplishes this goal. Maybe one day Tore Olsson will read it.”

Community Action

This next set brings together different ideas around community–whether it’s protest, game jams, or porn game dev.

• So, How’s The BDS Xbox Boycott Going? | Endless Mode
  Wallace Truesdale checks in on the campaign to pressure Microsoft out of enabling genocide in Gaza after three months of progress (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on journalistic dutry during the boycott).
• 8 Great Games to Play From the Toxic Yuri Visual Novel Jam | Endless Mode
  Willa Rowe shouts out some cool and interesting picks from the recent Toxic Yuri Visual Novel Jam.
• The Meet ‘N’ Fuck Saga | BP Games Inc.
  Liz Alfos unpacks the anatomy of a Flash-era porn game, and evaluates their lasting legacy today (Further Reading: Zoquete on porn as an integral component of their game Deathblossom).

“Flash games have different priorities than regular games.They were made to be played for a short time, and so they often went straight to the point. In non-porn games, the point is ‘the good stuff’, the thing that hooks the player, whether it’s story, gameplay or art. As for porn games, you would think it’s the sex. But if the sex is the good part, people would watch regular pornography.”

Art and Craft

This next trio all talk about the craft of game design from some angle, whether it’s how a player character comes to be, theatrical device, or the surprising lore affordances of beds.

• On a Roll with Kulebra and the Souls of Limbo | Unwinnable
  Alyssa Wejebe details the mythological and mechanical inspirations behind an undead, rolling snake in conversation with the game’s developers.
• The Best Parts of Death Stranding 2 Are When the Characters Acknowledge They’re in a Game | Endless Mode
  Maddy Myers ruminates on how fourth wall-breaking intersects with Death Stranding 2‘s style, story, themes, and Hideo Kojima’s attitude to being a creator (Further Reading: Nicanor Gordon on games-as-theatre).
• Baten Kaitos: Thank you for subscribing to Bed Facts | Lia’s blog
  Lia drops some lore on Baten Kaitos: Origins‘ textile-based worldbuilding (Further Reading: Lia has a whole site dedicated to BK Nonsense).

“I’m an engine programmer, not a writer. And so to my systems-oriented eye, this looks like an incredibly powerful approach: once the mechanism is in place to let people put a couple of simple textboxes anywhere in the world, they can easily throw in bit after bit after bit of detail. All of this detail adds up, without needing an extra menu, voice recordings, a media player, or much of an overarching plan that all needs to come together just so.”

Treasure Hunt

The three pieces collected here all highlight interesting and unusual media artifacts.

• Fantasy Zone (Hashy Top-In LCD): Welcome to the (tiny) Fantasy Zone! | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi goes hands-on with a charming, smartly adapted handheld take on the Sega cute-em-up.
• A Window Into a Heist – Radical Dreamers – Le Trésor Interdit | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt plays the “lost” Chrono game (Further Reading: Sam’s previous writing on Chrono Trigger).
• Moon Light Café | CD-ROM Journal
  Misty De Méo checks out a mysterious Enhanced CD single, already slightly anachronistic at the time of its release.

“This all perhaps sounds a bit harsh, but I do have a real and abiding fondness in my heart for an interesting failure. This disc is clearly not what anyone involved wanted it to be, but there’s something intriguing about the almost-clarity of the concept and the room to imagine what it could have been in other circumstances. Moon Light Café didn’t live long enough to see its own format live again, but we can still visit from time to time. Can’t we?”

Oz Well That Ends Well

These two pieces examine the exchange and influence between games and artists in other media.

• Videogame music wouldn’t be where it is without people like Ozzy Osbourne | PC Gamer
  Mollie Taylor pours one out for the Prince of Darkness.
• The real-life faces behind Onimusha’s lead characters | Skybox
  Peter Glagowski furnishes historical and artistic context on the actors whose likenesses were used in the Onimusha games.

“Nowadays, the advent of streaming services and digital distribution platforms has made it easier for people interested in stories from other countries to seek out the rich history and culture that makes them so unique. I hope you might seek out some of these films to learn not only about the respective actors, but the mythology behind the stories they tell.”

Critical Chaser

Long live the Sunday Papers.

• The Sunday Papers | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Graham Smith signs off on his tenure over a fellow roundup column with some very good advice.

“It’s in the strapline of every one of these columns: read more! I’ve curated The Sunday Papers in part to spread writing I think is worthwhile, but I’ve also handed the reigns of the column to the newest writer on the team several times over simply to give them an excuse to read more during work hours. The field of games journalism has a cultural memory of about six weeks in part because even the practitioners of it don’t read enough games journalism – but also, you should read voraciously outside of videogame journalism, too.”