September 14th

Welcome back readers.

If you haven’t already seen it, Kaile’s latest Patreon recap is live–we made the difficult decision to delay it so as not to compete with the release of Hollow Knight: Silksong. Does that also explain the string of Tuesday posts on my end? Uhh, while you’re here, you could also consider joining the Patreon as a supporter and directly help us keep doing this work!

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

Visual Kei

We’re starting this week with industry-level analysis and commentary, offering both data science and critique regarding indie, AAA, and everything in-between.

• By the way, what’s a AA? | HushCrasher
  Antoine Mayerowitz and Julie Belzanne present a data-driven update to the established (but not necessarily well-defined) taxonomy of game production categories.
• Hollow Knight: Silksong offers a way forward in the bleak video game industry | Slate
  Joshua Rivera unpacks how Silksong got turned into a referendum on the state of the industry (Further Reading: Aura Triolo on Silksong, GTA, and indie vs. AAA economics).

“A lot of these questions are, frankly, kind of silly, and one might wonder why a single game has to bear an entire industry’s insecurity. That precarity, however—both within the games industry and in the media that reports and comments on it—is the unspoken rationale behind every cultural skirmish happening around the game. When it is nigh impossible to get anyone’s attention over anything, a single blockbuster release can become a referendum on any number of topics, some of them worthwhile, others merely hitching a ride. The attention economy can turn anything into a circus.“

Visual Knowledge

Discussion of pop VNs has really (sorry) popped off of late, and a lot of that comes down to a surge in popularity of the works of writers like Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi.

• No Sleep For Kaname Date – From AI: The Somnium Files Doesn’t Even Understand Moma Kumakura’s Worst Bit | Unwinnable
  Hiero de Lima gets Sonic Cycle’d by the slow dissolution of an intriguing trainwreck of a character.
• Round and Round, Like a Carousel – The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Review | Gamesline
  Nikolas contemplates Hundred Line, Danganronpa V3, and moving beyond whether a story is “good” towards what we take from it into our own lives (Further Reading: Diego Nicolás Argüello on Danganronpa).

“The Hundred Line itself is, as cheesy as it may sound, a battle between hope and despair, a story that demands you triumph over it – over its vast, unending, constantly intimidating scale, over all the different themes and messages and stories it can spew out at any given time, over all the deaths and atrocities it and its cast go through or commit – and find hope in it, find some level of meaning that can carry you forward.“

Community Craft

The thread I see running through these next two picks is community in art-making, art movements, and specifically gamedev spaces.

• A/S/L: Jeanne Thornton’s Saga of the Sorceress | Stop Caring
  Adam Wescott chats with Jeanne Thornton about the unwritten histories of hobby gamedev circles, the legacy of ZZT, and more (Further Reading: Em Reed on unproductive hobbies and creative abundance).
• The Expressionist Games Manifesto | Medium
  Jay Dragon lays out the qualities of a game to open the mind rather than close it off.

“I refuse to make slot machine games. I refuse to make games that turn people’s brains off. I refuse to make games that people can insert their OCs into and escape inside without struggle. I want games that challenge me, that provoke me, that force me to fight against the harsh confines of society. I want to rattle the bars of my proverbial cage. I want games that I can argue with, games that trust me to read them closely, games that demand I think through them. I want to realize I’m something I’m not, get embarrassed, get stupid. I want to lose and lose and lose and still feel like I’m going somewhere. I want games that make me work for the taste of it. I want to practice dissenting against bullshit systems and bullshit laws. I want games that make me bleed and games that make me stare across the gulf of human comprehension and I want games that make me appreciate the power that constructs every square inch of my life. I want to fight, piss, claw, bite, and love!“

Script and Celluolid

Now let’s focus on narrative, form, and writerly craft.

• A Real World | Bullet Points Monthly
  Yussef Cole gives Mafia: The Old Country its flowers as a focused diorama of interactive storytelling.
• PizzaPachulia’s review of Mass Effect Legendary Edition | Backloggd
  Nicanor Gordon muses on the difficulty of endings–and beginnings, and middles.
• Playing God | Broadcast
  Claire L. Evans unfurls the long and winding history of interactive cinema in conversation with some of its experts (Further Reading: Matt Turner interviews Sam Barlow and Natalie Watson).

“I have the sense that Ebert’s curmudgeonly take was the right one: an interactive movie is not a movie. But it isn’t a game, either. It’s somewhere in between the two, and its precise location on the spectrum shifts with the decades. Although it never seems to succeed commercially, a few weirdos in every generation give it a try.

I should know; I’m one of them.“

House of Horrors

I’m probably stretching it a little with Control but this is the horror-focused section!

• How Cronos: The New Dawn Won Over A Stalwart Bloober Team Hater | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell reflects on how Bloober mostly (load-bearing “mostly”) stayed out of its own way on this one.
• Oldest House Party | utilitymonstergirl
  utilitymonstergirl finds Control curiously unwilling to stray outside the lines of a fairly rigid and overly serious design formula.
• Dead Wives’ Society: Male Guilt and the Horror Game | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus muses on how horror protags will literally pursue their dead wives and girlfriends through a haunted town/ship seeking violent catharsis instead of going to therapy (Further Reading: Madeline Blondeau on Biphobia).

“The horror in each of these scenarios is ultimately not the literal mechanism wreaking havoc – it’s that these men were all unable to have an emotionally affirming and supportive relationship with a woman, and instead of ever reckoning with that through self-reflection, she has to turn into a horrible monster that he can kill for catharsis.“

Play and Preserve

Two meditations on practices of play, and our engagements with history and genre.

• Give me more of your unpopular weirdos, classic game publishers | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi makes the case for why we need to keep the bad old games in play, too.
• Co-opting Co-op | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms thinks through theories, practices, and futurities of care and connectivity, and how these ideas are often underdeveloped or absent in cozy games (Further Reading: Maddi Chilton on PMA as an un-cozy game).

“I find lately, the narratives of care that feel the most impactful to me are happening in game genres that aren’t explicitly labelling themselves as being “wholesome,” “cozy,” “lo-fi” or “chill.” Citizen Sleeper, South of Midnight and Mutazione – despite often depicting collective suffering – are also adept at depicting collective, interdependent care.“

Critical Chaser

Add-to-kart.

• The 7 Most Ariana Grande-Coded Nintendo Characters | Gayming Magazine
  The Angel puts together a Grande list of Nintendo Queens.
• The Garfield Kart 2 review (Werner Herzog’s version) | Polygon
  Werner Herzog Giovanni Colantonio reviews Garfield Kart 2.

“My fear of impending death fades for a moment as I enjoy the exhilarating speed of a 150cc race. I consume four slices of lasagna in rapid succession and barrel forward like the cannonball, an achievement popup rewarding me for my thrill-seeking antics. It is a shallow delight, with few ways to test my skills in an anemic online ecosystem, but it is akin to the lime green bag of sour Skittles you swallow between hearty meals. You know that God would disapprove, but what is the harm in a sweet bite of trash?“