November 2nd

Welcome back readers.

We’re back with 20 new picks of all shapes and sizes to greet November (though that’s not to say we’re done with October). I promise I’ll plug our own stuff again next week, but for now if you’ve got a few bucks to spare I’m going to propose you send it to The Jamaican government’s official portal for Hurricane Melissa relief instead.

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

Earth and Sea

We start this week with two pieces that look outward beyond games towards the systems, lives, and crises they abstract.

• A Decolonial Review of Earthborne Rangers | BoardGameGeek
  Som Paris offers a decolonial perspective on a tabletop game that imagines frameworks of community and interconnectedness both in-world and around the table.
• Hurricanes and Boss Fights | Carlito Calzone
  Nicanor Gordon dwells on Hurricane Melissa, climate injustice, and the allegories of RPG boss fights (Further Reading: The last time Nic wrote about a hurricane).

“I’m not going to fight a hurricane. I’m not the protagonist. FFX’s Sin tears through villages, it’s a mass murdering weather system. The villagers pray and they rebuild but before that they bury and that’s who I am. I will bury until I am to be buried.”

BALL x LIFE

With the wildest World Series in a minute now firmly etched into the history books, let’s look at some perspectives on sports, fandom, and the affect of it all.

• To Lose is to Care | Tearing Down the Dam
  Sophie Grace finds a lesson about art, stories, games, and feeling the feelings after crashing out on the World Series (Further Reading: Wallace Truesdale on Despelote and Rematch).
• This moonlighting | BASKETBALL FEELINGS
  Katie Heindl compares joy and generosity across the NBA, MLB, and sports fandom broadly.
• THE GREAT ONES NEVER LOSE. THEY JUST RUN OUT OF TIME. | LIFEBAR MAGAZINE
  Will Borger thinks about Madden, sports RPGs, and getting older.

“Part of being a sports fan is learning to live with disappointment. There are thirty-two teams in the NFL. Only one team, one fanbase, is happy at the end of the year. The rest are left wondering what might have been, and hoping next year will be different. Some retreat to the memory of glories past. Others turn their eyes to the horizon. In many ways, Madden mirrors the sport it’s based on. Imperfect, buoyed by the hope that this year everything will come together perfectly, that our patience will be rewarded. Each game, each season, will inevitably be followed, replaced, by another. Father Time is undefeated. But I’ve learned to appreciate the little moments, regardless of the ultimate outcome, to find joy in small things. The great game, the moment you finally beat a rival, the perfect pass, the beautiful trade, the little moments when you can see your improvement, when you realize you have just done something that you couldn’t have before… those things make it worth it.”

Pumpkin Pie

If you’re the kind of person who–like me–keeps the pumpkin lit for a few extra days past Halloween, you’ll appreciate these seven horror-themed pieces coming up next.

• Hopes, Dreams and Marzipan | Into The Spine
  Hiero de Lima muses on play, cosplay, interiority, exteriority, and Mouthwashing (Further Reading: Gita Jackson chats with Shellanin about being a Black cosplayer).
• I broke a baseball bat over the head of a ghost | Bullet Points Monthly
  Ed Smith notes a heightened dissonance as Silent Hill f lurches at once towards greater narrative abstraction and greater mechanical legibility.
• Silent Hill f Is the Series’ Most Profound Reckoning with the Horror of Home | Endless Mode
  Grace Benfell muses on womanhood, home, escaping, remaining (Further Reading: Ashley Bardhan on Silent Hill f and growing up in a haunted house).
• Sex With a Sadist | Stop Caring
  Artemis Octavio contemplates the erotic ambivalence of sex and violence in the intro of The Evil Within.
• Constructed Realities Part I | Nature’s Corrupted
  Magen Cubed reckons with the doomed deuteragonist women of popular horror games (Further Reading: Spencer Johnson on DDLC, Monika, and LLMs).
• “The world is sick and ugly” | TIER
  Mazen Haggag considers the horror-attuned strengths of interactive fiction via the surreal, eugenics-tinged horse-raising simulator Horse Master.
• Hope, Zombies, and Resident Evil | Skybox
  Thomas Wilde highlights Resident Evil‘s consistent eschewing of apocalyptic wish-fulfillment otherwise prevalent in zombie fiction in favour of a world worth preserving.

“The real problems in Resident Evil  always seem to come down to those who think they’ve somehow earned the right to decide whether other people’s lives matter. Whether it’s a reclusive billionaire, a mad genius, or a cult leader with delusions of grandeur, RE has been surprisingly consistent—especially for a series that’s easy to define by its creative inconsistency—about who its actual villains are. It’s not the people around you; it’s the people who think that, due to accidents of birth or finance, that they should have the right to decide how your life should go.”

New Old Games

We’ve got a range of critical approaches and perspectives here on old games, new games, and new-old games.

• This year’s JRPG remakes keep proving that old games don’t just get by on nostalgia: They’re still just really good games | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill shouts out the elegant simplicity of Dragon Quest in 1986 and 2025 (Further Reading: Sam Howitt on Dragon Quest II and III).
• Silksong is for Speedrunners | Unwinnable
  Emily Price unpacks the ways in which Silksong invites you to optimize it (Further Reading: Jeremy Signor on secret-finding in Hollow Knight and Silksong).
• The Death of Adventure Games: The Cat Mustache Was Never the Issue Here | Endless Mode
  Dia Lacina corrects the record on one of the most maligned puzzles in adventure gaming history.
• Ridge Racer V | Tsundoku Diving
  Baxter Burchill drifts into the high-octane transhumanism of Ridge Racer V (Further Reading: Tony Temple on the rescue of the last known Ridge Racer Full Scale arcade machine).

“Here, the cars are the people. Just like in the future predicted by Electrosphere, the separation between the two is silly and outdated, V seems to say. There is no story mode, no characters (with the notable exception of a radio DJ — a disembodied voice filtered through technology) here. The ghost is in the machine now; the consciousness has been affixed to metal. I see that yellow car that keeps hitting me and passing me and stealing my chance at winning and I hate them. I respect them. I know them.”

Peer-Reviewed

Game Studies just published their newest issue, so if thoughtful, rigourously-cited studies and approaches are your jam, you’re eating good this week.

• Why Flash Games Still Matter: Re-signifying Minor Platform Creators in Videogame History | Game Studies
  Ana Bahia examines the works of Nathalie Lawhead and Paolo Pedercini as key artists in the still-underappreciated movement of Flash games (Further Reading: TIER’s recent conversation with Nathalie Lawhead).
• “Hook me, Daddy”: Queer Semiotics of Dead by Daylight through Gaymers on Twitch | Game Studies
  Patrick Munnelly investigates how gay streamers perform, explore identity, and cultivate community spaces playing Dead by Daylight.
• Feeding the Iron Pimps: The Golden Age of Arcades in Black America | Game Studies
  Taylore Nicole Woodhouse investigates the relationship between arcades and Black communities from the thirties to the nineties and beyond as a corrective to white-dominant narratives of the “golden age” of arcades (Further Reading: Shawn Alexander Allen on Black representation in gamedev past, present, and future).

“This new history of the golden age of arcades is a provocation: what video game histories can we write if we look at how Black gamers played, connected and created on the digital edge? The digital edge invites us to reframe the idea of the digital divide, to seek out innovation and creativity where we might at first see deprivation and exclusion from mainstream technocultures.”

Critical Chaser

Turns out the Louvre thieves left behind the real treasure.

• I Was The Louvre Heist Thief, But I Was Just Trying To Steal Their 3DSes | Nintendo Life
  Kate Gray runs the jewels.

“But once I was in, well, the crown jewels were just sitting there. I thought to myself, ‘You can buy a lot of 3DSes with crown jewels money.”