October 19th

Welcome back readers.

This week we have a slightly more streamlined issue with 11 new-and-cool picks. Thanks as always for reading our compilations, sharing your recs, and supporting our Patreon!

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

For Those Who Come After

Most of the articles we collected this week meditate in one way or another on game dev as an artistic and creative process. These discussions range from thematic expression, to design principles and processes, to transmedia and genre lineages, and beyond. This starting point focuses on the industry, its practices and trends, its long-running sustainability problems, and the lineages of design and genre that produce the games we consume today.

• Shorter Games with Worse Graphics Really Would Be Better For Everyone, Actually | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell critically revisits the oft-repeated rallying cry for a more sustainable games industry.
• Thief of Joy – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 | Pixpen
  Sam Howitt charts the ways in which E33 echoes and remixes the themes, ideas, and designs from many RPGs that came before.

“As much as it’s obvious to me as an experienced RPG player, that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has taken a lot of notes from the RPGs that came before it, it’s also clear that it’s not some mere copy. It’s taken inspiration in order to build its own story. The developers have understood what made those other games work, and have applied those lessons to tell a story with its own themes. I do wonder what comes next from them. Do they remain in the same world, or do they also move on?”

Jam-Hacked

For this next movement, let’s zoom in on individual practice, looking at artmaking, self-reflexivity, design ethos, critical dialogue, and more.

• Masterpiece Is the Story of the Creative Process | Jeremy Signor’s Games Initiative
  Jeremy Signor reviews a rich canvas in Maddy Thorson’s recent SMW hack/art thesis (Further Reading: Sara Hovda on Maddy Thorson’s SMW hacks).
• 3XXX: NAKED HUMAN BOMBS Postmortem(?) – Competitions / IFComp | The Interactive Fiction Community Forum
  Kastel essays through game dev, critical dialogue, discontinuity, and discovery.

“The most value I have completing a work is reading what others have perceived in my own experimentation. I am always curious about how people read my works when I’m so self-absorbed, so unsure if my thoughts truly matter in the long term. I’m not seeking validation per se, just critical engagement so I can make sense of what I have derived from the world.”

Colossal Conversations

Next let’s look at developer conversations, looking at how games come together from many angles.

• Dinosaurs On the Run in Clever Girls | Unwinnable
  Alyssa Wejebe chats with the developers of dinosaur tactical RPG Clever Girls about the game’s yuri origins and more.
• Shadow of the Colossus: An oral history | Design Room
  Matt Leone sits down with a whole bunch of folks involved in putting together one of the PS2s most remarkable games (Further Reading: Oisin Kuhnke on emptiness and companionship in Team Ico’s games).

“Shadow of the Colossus isn’t most games. Over those 20 years, it’s developed a reputation as a minimalist, poignant experience. The kind of game that feels unaffected by pop culture. To some, it’s the best example to date of a game that should be considered art. Which makes for an unlikely connection to something as colorful and mainstream as Spider-Man — or at least, that’s how many fans see it.”

Rain and Fog

Let’s make a genre pitstop to look at new and recent horror games.

• Silent Hill f y Bye Sweet Carole son el mismo juego | GamerFocus
  Julián Ramírez contemplates timely themes of feminine oppression in recent popular horror titles (Further Reading: Madeline Blondeau on Silent Hill f).
• Full of Spirits, Devoid of Soul — Ghostwire: Tokyo is Haunted by the AAA Design Curse | Medium
  Kat remarks how Ghostwire squanders a rich corpous of mythological source material on a rote AAA framework (Further Reading: David Shimomura on Ghostwire: Tokyo).

“How is it that a game (the key verb of which is to play), can be so goddamn un-playful, with this much vibrant source material at its disposal? How could a game developer take such a basic assignment — make a game that brings a motley crew of trickster goblins and nature spirits to life — and turn it into yet another generic action game where you shoot and sneak and kill?”

Remix, Remake, Replicant

Our concluding section this week considers different approaches to remaking and remixing games, be it the full-blown commerical remake, a revised and enhanced port, or the paratextual remixes of memes.

• Final Fantasy Tactics Memes Prove Video Games are Art | Stop Caring
  Niki Fakhoori explores memes as paratexts in continual conversation with both audiences and source texts (Further Reading: Chuck Sebian-Lander on FFT‘s translation history).
• beyond the steel sky | ash’s other stuff
  Ash Schofield catches up with Final Fantasy VII Remake, contemplating the very ethos of such a “remake” in the first place (Further Reading: Emily Price on FFVII Rebirth).
• Snatcher [1988/1994] | Arcade Idea
  Ara Maybury finds that Kojima’s early detective thriller mines only the aesthetics of its cyberpunk influences, warping them into an carelessly nihilistic worldview (Further Reading: Ara on Portopia Serial Murder Case).

“Snatcher is a cryptofascist text, above and beyond the Dirty Harry [1971] cop-action standard. It’s a text of genocidal extermination in defense against some sort of racial/ideological Great Replacement, laced with incredibly overt bigotries against not just its insidious invading sci-fi stand-ins but, besides that one aforementioned generic and unracialized immigrant and Americans, practically every real-world minority group around.”