This Week in Videogame Blogging

November 16th

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Welcome back readers.

I’m watching the annual Desert Bus For Hope charity stream this week and next. I’m a latecomer to the event, having only first watched it last year, but in that relatively short span it’s become my favourite annual broadcast event in games. So that’s what I’m plugging this week!

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

Raising the Skates

This week we’re starting off with industry-level perspectives, with strong reporting and criticism.

“The science backing up the idea that race can make someone a good or bad scientist or airline pilot is as solid as the logic behind “orcs can’t be wizards” or “a hobbit can never become a great fighter.” This vision of racial rigidity, in which people can be sorted into categories that quantify their potential, has nothing to do with genetics; it is a political creation, a descendant of the same racist pseudoscience that was prominent in Tolkien’s time. In this sense, what we call “scientific racism” could be called “fantasy racism” instead, a belief that people can be reduced to quantifiable numbers, like so many digits on a character sheet.”

Neural Net Worth

Let’s keep the industry-level focus for a bit longer, but zoom in on LLM-oriented critiques. On a completely unrelated note, it seems that content-scraper bots have been swarming our site extra hard of late, which is why we put up the Cloudflare blocker. CD will always and forever remain a project of incomplete, imperfect, and indelibly human curation.

“Kind words, as generous as they’ve often been, turn into paychecks with rarer frequency, often to the tune of months. And every time I see a news post in solidarity with the equally noble struggles of other working class developers to put food on their tables, mine feels invisible the minute those same places write four exhausting words: “according to machine translation.””

Make and Play

Two pieces now on festivals and community spaces of play and making.

“For Aramiha the concept of mana is also connected to the social elements of physical play like tabletops, where there are opportunities for more and more varied stories to come from a group rather than a single person. He says, “rather than being a passive consumer you’re a creator as well. I’m a big believer in collaboration, imagining worlds together, being able to work together as a group —I think that’s an Indigenous approach, right?””

Branch and Bottleneck

Next up, some conversations on genre, structure, experience.

“I like the more neutral and obvious term “thinky game” to refer to the whole aggregate of knowledge, deduction, and puzzle games as a whole; it doesn’t purport to be a coherent genre, just a general descriptor (in the same way that “action game” is). But I think we need better language to talk about some of those emerging mechanical ideas in the space of and around knowledge games, specifically.”

Trauma and Play

Here are some writeups on different kinds of trauma, abuse, survivors, and their communities as expressed in games.

“Games are transformative in their power to turn history into living truth. Reckoning with cycles of trauma in a game gives us the agency to break them; what was once antiquated and distant from us becomes directly and immediately tangible through the act of play. On the global scale, 1000xRESIST weaves a history that stretches beyond us, envisioning a diaspora that does not yet exist, and imagining its liberation from grief. On the scale of my bedroom office, it gave me the knowledge and the strength to let go of what does not serve me. As it is for Iris, Watcher, and all those who come after them, letting go is necessary to living a life unshackled by pain. It is not our fate to be bound.”

Bloodlines 2

Now for a couple of game-specific pairings. The first is on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2.

“The promise made by the Bloodlines 2’s title is a false one. It wants to be the guy but it ain’t that guy. And yet, in spite of the bluntness with which I report this to you all, I’m here to tell you that I am actually very happy I played this game. This might even be the most interesting game I’ve played all year.”

Chronos Trigger

Hades 2, cycicality, and faltering narratives.

“Chronos is the enemy. Chronos must die. It’s a setup that sounds rich with mythic potential—time itself is the tyrant that must be slain—but Hades II never seems interested in asking what this devotion might cost its protagonist. Melinoë isn’t a character enduring a story; she’s a weapon driving it forward until the moment when the story finally surrenders.”

Six Credit Clear

Here’s a larger section of single-game pieces that didn’t fit neatly into other sections this week.

“I know I’m a snob about Roguelikes. Maybe I’m just being too contrarian again. But maybe I’m not a snob enough. Because I, too, inevitably cave to the joys of seeing numbers and lights flash on screen, even when I haven’t done a damn thing to earn it.”

Critical Chaser

Ball x Oma Keeling.

“i lay in the dark room dreaming of a thing to play. it’s perhaps a red ball that goes across a course, of obstacles. and they were placed there by the scientist. because the scientist wanted to study the red ball, for its abilities.”

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