August 3rd

Welcome back readers.

This week I’m plugging this year’s Queer Games Bundle over on Itch, which recently went live. Right now is always the best time to support queer and trans game developers, and there’s some pretty great pulls in this year’s collection.

Quick shout to our own Patreon, which helps us keep doing the thing!

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

Good Grief

There are several common threads that run through this week’s first section–memory, grieving, sequels, and remakes to name a few.

• ‘Silent Hill 2’: What It Means to Bury a Ghost | Sinegang
  Joshua Jude Ubalde reckons with Silent Hill 2, the weight of remakes, and our collective relationship with memory.
• PRESS X TO LET GO | Bullet Points Monthly
  David Wolinsky maps the stages of grief onto a sequel that isn’t necessarily interested in the weight of expectation that accompanies sequels (Further Reading: Gabrielle de la Puente on Death Stranding 2).
• How ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’ Helped Me Grieve | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold debriefs on Clair Obscur‘s multifaceted, non-linear approach to understanding grief (Further Reading: Chris Lawn on Clair Obscur and end-of-life care).

“I’ve written before how sometimes, you don’t interpret art, art interprets you. Clair Obscur presents a world of complete projection, a place built out of a need to escape into art to avoid the cataclysmic emotional reality outside of it. In that sense, Verso’s ending also signifies a hard line in the sand that declares how there are definitive limits to the manner in which we can escape into art. Sooner or later, Verso’s ending seems to suggest, we will have to face reality again. In my case, post-breakup, that meant I had to begin the Sisyphean work of putting myself back together again.”

Large Languid Monoculture

We’re talking about LLMs again with two sharp pieces identifying sites of resistance against the sloplords in games and wider creative media.

• AI Could Never: Mary Skelter | Skybox
  Lucas White delves into a dungeon crawler too fucked up for an LLM to have belched out.
• We need to reclaim software’s wishing well from the cruelty of generative AI | Rock Paper Shotgun
  I’m not summarizing Edwin Evans-Thirlwell’s entry in a very holistic way here, but the conduit back from AI hype towards the more grounded and un-anthropomorphized procedural generation engines of yesteryear (including analog ones!) is a compelling throughline (Further Reading: Niko Stratis on the texturelesness of LLMs).

“It’s not a concrete practical solution, next to joining a union and petitioning for proper controls, but I think we should also reclaim the idea and practice of a software generator from Big AI. I think generators have a capacity for enchantment that is both particular to computers and continuous with older, pre-digital artforms such as dice and decks of cards. You see this enchantment in my gloomy mystical characterisations above. I think it needs to be liberated from the corporations who are now using genAI to wreck workplaces and culture.”

Vis-à-Visa

Next up we’re talking about both romance games and porn games in a set examining both genre and culture.

• The Language of Digital Love: Introducing a Taxonomy of Romance for the AAA Game | Game Studies
  Amy Brierley-Beare offers language and framework for understanding styles and expressions of romance in games.
• How VTubers Are Leading The Backlash Against Adult Game Censorship | Kotaku
  Ana Valens talks to the lewdtubers organizing collective action efforts against the recent crackown on porn games (Further Reading: Alli on the recent Steam and Itch freezes on NSFW content).
• Gooner Nation
  Sam Bodrojan examines the state of porn culture, its low-level saturation of entertainment media, and its reinforcement of conservative anti-sex mores in an isolated society.

“In place of real sex, there is the impulse to make porn everywhere. Gooning is the eroticism of apathetic, animalistic distraction. The gooner dehumanizes themselves and their objects of affections at once. They deny themselves climax in pursuit of a greater reward – pleasure without end, alone. I think that sounds like a fun way to jerk off sometimes! But I worry about why, exactly, it is the only filth not actively antagonized at the sexual bedrock of modern America.”

Representative of the Medium

Each of these next three pieces offers a critical unpacking of some facet of representation in games, finding things to both celebrate and scrutinize.

• Content warnings, spoilers, and Roger | Renkotsuban
  Renkon muses on spoiler-averse culture, the primacy of content warnings, and telling a story about dementia.
• Nintendo Has Unexpectedly Turned Its Damsels in Distress into Icons for Young Girls | Endless Mode
  Maddy Myers applauds Nintendo’s recent turn towards having their leading ladies, well, lead, but still sees an underserved demographic Nintendo has yet to recognize (Further Reading: Ashley Bardhan on the state of games marketed primarily to women).
• With Its Dwarf Woman Nefi, Tales of the Shire Subverts the Typical Tolkien Adaptation | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell finds warmth, though no bite, in Tales of the Shire‘s bearded dwarf woman.

“While I object to how the game avoids the Shire’s distaste for outsiders, it would also be a mistake to make her “abnormality“ a center of the story. In my day to day life, most people treat me as I would like to be treated. That is not always true, but when I am among my friends I forget that I am a rare and peculiar woman that legislators, preachers, and sycophants wish to remove from public life. I am who I am. When I see Nefi among her friends, smiling, I am reminded of that truth.”

Shifting Gears

Two very different games and takes, both of them all about play.

• Roadtripping with Keep Driving: an essential “vibes gaming” experience. | Essay Games Blog
  Nicholas O comes back from the road to talk up a game about hitting the road.
• Kickstart Your Crystal Heart – Hedon Review | Gamesline
  Lilith recounts five years learning the language of Hedon (Further Reading: Solon on Slayers X).

“We live in a time where many games become samey, not necessarily from a lack of drive to do something novel, but instead because people know what works. Like film motifs, this language becomes the cultural undercurrent to what a game is expected to be. Games which go against the grain are by their nature frictional, but are all the more likely to stand out as a result. Hedon manages to buck current trends, ironically by gazing back as much as it does. Hedon having the vision to avoid becoming something more approachable—and thus more forgettable—while also having strong fundamentals is key to its successes.”

Cultural Misfits

Our final set of picks this week all engage in some way with games as a cultural institution–what that culture is (or isn’t), what history and baggage it brings, and how we participate in it.

• Skill issue | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi makes the case for being bad at good games.
• How To Do Your Video Game Homework | Endless Mode
  Wallace Truesdale offers some advice for catching up on the classics (hint: it’s not just about playing games).
• Videogames Are Mainstream. What Will Make Them Feel Like It? | Unwinnable
  Emily Price unspools the longstanding structural contradictions that keep games from becoming “legit” (Further Reading: Mikhail Klimentov on the hyperfixation on market scrying in games press).

“Are games storytelling experiences, or are they vessels for battle passes and sponsored plastic crap? We’ve resigned ourselves to them being both. Yet one prevents the other; I can’t see the forest for the pop-up-infested trees. Overall, what drives people to write thoughtfully about an artistic medium is the sense that it has something meaningful to add, or that the wider world is being affected by it in some way. We know games can have that kind of impact; the question remains if they want to.”