November 30th

Welcome back readers.

We’ve got thirteen new picks this week to close out the month of November. Thank you as always to our incredible Patreon supporters, a group that you can join if you want to help us keep this project going!

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

Critical Conversations

Let’s start things off this week with some dialectical pieces exploring industry and genre.

• “It’s extremely frustrating and also f*cked up” – one of the world’s best indie studios is facing shock closure following confounding Steam ban | Eurogamer.net
  Matt Wales chats with Pietro Righi Riva about the studio’s upcoming game Horses, the opacity and inconsistency of Steam’s content guidelines, and the problem with Valve being both a monopoly and gatekeeper for the medium (Further Reading: Grace Benfell on VILE: Exhumed and Girls Purgatoriem).
• Why are there so many bloody roguelikes or roguelites, and what really makes a game roguish? | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Edwin Evans-Thirlwell takes apart and puts back together the meaning and meaninglessness of “roguelike” in conversation with the experts (Further Reading: Bruno Dias on immersive sims).

“I would argue for the philosophical difference that where today’s generative AIs are often posed as sycophantic and worryingly pliable, even when they’re couched as characters inside hostile gameworlds, the roguelike algorithm doesn’t just aim to please. It also wants to decieve, filling the world with random buffets and moments of treachery that border on ‘bad design’: the bouncy poison frog stuck in a narrow passage metres from the exit. Perhaps the lesson we should cling onto about roguelikes is that the world itself is the rogue.”

Hand and Foot

These are the single-game pieces we looked at this week, weaving play and player experience into a fine critical tapestry.

• A quest for relevance: Dragon Quest’s remakes search for the impact it had in the ‘80s | AV Club
  Dia Lacina weighs a changed Dragon Quest against an entirely changed landscape and context for videogames (Further Reading: Kerry Brunskill on Dragon Quest‘s staying power).
• Demon Girl Catharsis | Stop Caring
  Artemis Octavio relates Brush Burial‘s demon-girl-with-depth protagonist to her own experiences of domestic abuse (Further Reading: Artemis on The Evil Within).
• I’m Great At Baby Steps Because I Walk Like That In Real Life | VGBees
  John Warren recounts a history of rehabilitation and relearning how to walk, both in and out of game (Further Reading: Imran Khan on Kaizo Mario and physical therapy).

“I believed Baby Steps‘ not so subtle theme involving the perils of male isolation would be lost on me. I like people! My friends are great! I don’t have many hangups about what it means to be a man, I thought! After spending time with Nate and the many strangers met on the mountainside, I take my lesson. It’s okay to admit that these setbacks of mine have been hard. It’s okay to tell you that this cycle of rehabilitation has been frustrating. It’s okay to get out there and try even if I embarrass myself in front of strangers because friends always start as strangers.”

Draft Notes

Next let’s talk about design, both in abstract and in application.

• Notes about Evil Game Design | mokkograd
  Eric explores a natural counterpart to good game design (Further Reading: Jay Dragon’s Expressionist Games Manifesto).
• Dispatch shows how player choice doesn’t always work with telling a story | AV Club
  Willa Rowe finds Dispatch‘s nominal structure to be at odds with the actual story it seems to want to tell (Further Reading: Inkle on dialogue choices).
• Not Just The Writing: Hades II’s Issues Are Entrenched In Mechanics | Bloomed Wings Blog
  Cind sets aside narrative to focus on the nuts and bolts of Hades II’s frictionless gameplay loop (Further Reading: Jake Steinberg on Hades II).

“Zagreus bashes against his father repeatedly. He is a rebellious young man, and he and Hades will each never budge. At least that’s how it seems. Keep running, keep going, no end in sight, just for those brief moments on the surface. And eventually, out of nowhere, Hades doesn’t burn off his cloak and prepare to fight, he just relents. He gives in. There was no sign of when it would happen, or if it even would happen, just a father and son butting immortal heads, a familial conflict that many of us have had and know.

Melinoe is going to bring death to Chronos repeatedly because he drops magic sand and she needs five of them.“

Playing Differently

This next set explore alternative approaches to play and making, rejecting the conventional rules and revenue streams in favour of broader possibility spaces.

• Do you play, when you play video games? | Luna’s Gaming Log
  Luna contemplates a deoptimized play mindset (Further Reading: Robin Bea on A Pizza Delivery).
• Mario Kart World Review — Does An Open World Need Quests? | Gamesline
  Crystal finds that Mario Kart World is at its best when you aren’t racing, aren’t questing–aren’t doing anything at all, really (Further Reading: Giovanni Colantonio on Garfield Kart 2).
• Alternative Games From The Fringes Of Cyberspace (fighting for art and something better in this dystopian digital world) | The Candybox Blog
  Nathalie Lawhead traces the history of altgames and early internet utopianism, pointing to digital artmaking as an enduring site of resistance and renewal against platform consolidation, commercialization, and technofeudalism (Further Reading: Nathalie’s recent interview with TIER).

“The urge to create something that doesn’t exist… The possibility space that computers are, and our collective digital fantasy… as dark as things seem in context of the way the web is being changed, the way social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook dominate our use, or are responsible for fueling so much fascism, even genocide… there’s always that alternative you can be part of. We never stopped dreaming up better ways to exist here.”

Critical Chaser

Two to close out with this week: a photo-essay and, well, you’ll see : )

• Paradise of Rot | Rob Haines Creative Space
  Rob Haines compiles an annotated photographic travelogue of the Land of Shadow (Further Reading: Diego Nicolás Argüello’s photo-essay on The Last of Us: Part II).
• Horses Are Women | Red Tecate Chairs
  Julia NR pieces together a fragmentary history of cowboys, Kurosawa, American unexceptionalism, and Umamusume: Pretty Derby (Further Reading: Kathleen O’Mara on the plight of videogame horses).

“And though everything new is just the old with a vengeance, the United States of America is forced to defend its merely bicentennial culture against the forces it created. Anime moral panics come in waves of five years or so. (‘Anime’, a reminder, is a transliteration of the English word animation.) Was Pokemon going to introduce Satanism to children? No, but it ran the much larger risk of teaching this Japanese-American mode of trading and collecting, creatures valuable for both power and aesthetics printed on Magic cardstock. Where the pandemic killed Pokemon Go, it left Honkai: Star Rail, with its sex appeal and paper-thin gameplay. Now Umamusume has committed the cardinal sin. It has sullied the horse, the foundational animal of the Americas, long reduced to luxury sports like dressage and, ever-popular among gamblers, racing. The derby must stay in Kentucky. It must not be revealed that the American horse has its equal in Tokyo, its rider in Ciudad Juárez. That there was never a Wild Bill, only a teller of tall tales, dead at the poker table. Only Mexicans in kimonos.”