This Week in Videogame Blogging

February 1st

by

Welcome back readers.

I have a reluctant confession to make: I haven’t worked on my Fansite Jam entry all week. I’m pulling extra hours at one of my other jobs, and that makes it harder to find the brainspace to write.

The good news is I still have a whole month to get my fansite into shape, and if you’re interested in joining the jam, so do you! Hope to see you there!

As always, please give our Patreon a look if you want to help support the work that we do.

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

Playing with Power

This week let’s start with some critical analyses of the games industry past and present.

“We are essentially watching the mainstream video game industry transform from a creative powerhouse into a high-end museum gift shop, where the primary business model is selling us souvenirs of experiences we had twenty years ago rather than creating new memories. The tragedy isn’t that these remakes are bad games, as I said before, many of them are technically brilliant productions; but that their dominance signals a complete lack of faith in the future of the medium. The industry has become so efficient at monetizing our past that it has forgotten how to invest in its own future, creating a feedback loop that feels increasingly claustrophobic.”

Patch Notes

Our interview picks this week highlight subversive genres and marginalized creators.

“”I’m not interested in showing the murder,” he says. “I’m interested in what that dialogue tree looks like.” Saint-Domingue had 16 racial classifications. Navigating that social structure without a weapon—only words, only choices, only the consequences of saying the wrong thing to the wrong person—that’s the revolution Rabrun wants to put in your hands.”

Pale Fire

We’ve got a couple genre-specific pairings coming up next. The first takes the long view on RPGs and history.

“This is why the Pale would less than 30 years after the events of Disco Elysium ultimately succeed and cover the entirety of its world. The past finally erasing the present and future. For unlike our own world, Elysium only has failed ideologies and a nihilist belief in the status quo. But we might still have a chance. Not by embracing anarchism but by embracing what anarchists have always stood for: a future for everyone, a future where no-one is lower or higher than the next and no-one goes hungry. Look around and you will find – amidst this doom and evil monarchs in high places – myriads of groups of all kinds of stripes already working on bringing this future about. A rainbow of good created in this world right now.”

Carrying Capacity

Now let’s look at some horror games.

“To rationalize and explain an action is not to justify it, though, and The Medium is careful to not excuse Richard from the weight of his sins. Rather, it uses his sexual dysfunction as an overt critique of fascist ideology. On a subtextual level, the writers argue Nazism cuts psychological, emotional wounds into the psyche of anyone touched by its evil. This litigates fascism as a stunted ideology—gazing to the past at the expense of harm done to the present and doom sowed for the future.”

By Design

Let’s shift gears and look at some reflections on design as both formalism and lived practice.

“I watch my kid on the playground with some kids he has never known, yet suddenly they all understand the idea of tag. Or hide-and-seek. We meet up with one of his friends, and as her mom and I sit on the bench and watch, we laugh at how they ping off each other, one pitching an idea for some imaginary castle or other that they’re storming, and then the other adds on and changes the game, two youngsters just finding out what fun they can have. Can she teach him to do the monkey bars? Can he help her climb up the slide? The games keep coming, flashing into youthful minds and disappearing into the cold air when it’s time to go.”

Mythopoesis

These next two selections each examine intersections between games and myth.

“Iris is also ensconced in the sanctum of a stasis pod. While her cycle of rebirth within the simulacrum resembles the biological processes of the cicada, she is not the Tithonus transformed by Eos, but the Crying One shut behind a set of shining doors: endlessly babbling, endlessly degrading. She is forever cocooned, with no promise of escape or respite, disconnected from both the world at large and the others interred alongside her.”

Skate or Climb

Here are some more single-game pieces exploring labour, locality, and lines.

“I don’t know if I can call the South home. I only lived there for a few years, and I barely experienced it. I think what mostly gets me is that fact, that I only saw a glimpse of what it had to offer, the lost promises and life on my own. How can I call a place home when I only skimmed the surface of what composes it. Transience cannot replace homecoming.”

Critical Chaser

Our closing section this week is bone dry. Forgive me.

“There is something beautiful about how some of the most eternal and unifying cultural phenomena derive from great disaster. In the face of unspeakable tragedy, when the flame of humanity flickers at its weakest, we turn to creation for salvation. And then those creations inspire more, spanning generations and centuries, influencing humanity throughout the world and across the ages. Art and culture unite us in our suffering, and, in spite of everything, we survive—like video game skeletons.”

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