This Week in Videogame Blogging

February 8th

by

Welcome back readers.

New Critical Distance Patreon update from Kaile! Check it out, read a bit about our upcoming projects and plans, and if you’re in a place to send a few bucks our way to help those plans come to fruition, we’d really appreciate it!

As a reminder, our Fansite Jam is running through the month of February. I worked on mine this week! I now need to resize a lot of screenshots.

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

Interviews

I’m once again starting with the interview-shaped picks at the top, with this week’s topics ranging from collecting and preservation, to fitness games, to Stardew.

“Dickson is what your typical Supernatural user looks like. In an emerging tech category with expensive hardware dominated by 18-to-34-year-old men, the majority of Supernatural’s warriors are women, people over 50, and folks with limited mobility. And in the weeks since the news, they’re not staying quiet in their grief.”

Relatable tbh

I often link together pieces relating games to own material circumstances, and there’s definitely some of that in here too, but the the connection I see among these five pieces is in how we relate or do not relate to game characters and especially protagonists.

“Every step in Baby Steps is an act of resistance, a movement away from the supposed ideal sought after in the game’s image. The image in this mirror retreats, leaving the player alone with its absence.”

Haters’ Corner

Note that I am not putting the haters in a corner here. These critics have earned their hate, through love.

“Jin is always fated to be the Ghost. To save Tsushima by any means necessary, even mass poisoning, and to be ostracized by the society he covets and sacrifices so much for. That is the story of Ghost of Tsushima. Trouble is, it’s just not a very interesting one. It doesn’t strive for even heavy-handed genre subversion. It wants to play ALL of the tropes both in the mechanical genre and that of its story. It’s the fantasy of getting to be a “cool samurai and a cool ninja” in one package that plays all the stereotypical cultural hits of pre-industrial Japan from haiku, to winding trees dramatically blowing in the wind, torii gates, onsen, katana, tatami mats, honor being said every three sentences, and so on like an Around the World exhibit at Epcot.”

Weird Wending

There’s something inherently weird about puppets, right? Maybe uncanny is the better word, but Phoenix did not write an article called “Where is the Uncanny?”, so that’s where I’m at.

“Play for me has always been fraught and Weird. Play often creates mirrored, alternate versions of worlds that exclude various aspects of my identity. Play is often paywalled, especially in AAA realms, and sometimes technically inaccessible as well. Even before we engage with play in digital worlds, we often first learn about who we are as a playful subject in games of speculation and socialization as kids. Who accepts you in a playful circle? Who doesn’t? What is considered valid play? What isn’t?”

Yes Chef

These next four picks give more primacy to the authors’ play experiences, but if you’re looking for a tigher theme we do begin and end with cooking analogies.

“Making food, like making a game, is a process that takes time and skill to perfect. Even if you use the most basic, most recognizable ingredients, getting a meal right is not guaranteed; one wrong move, a moment of lapsed attention, and everything you work for might be ruined. The ingredients in Harvestella are eminently familiar, and if they had been implemented improperly or without care, we might be talking about this game as a failed Nier clone with Rune Factory or Story of Seasons stapled to its back. Instead we get something delicious: a game that inspires players to slow down, learn about the world they’re visiting, make a tasty homegrown meal, and revel in the comforts of a compelling story well-told.”

Make and Play

If the previous section talks about play, this one moves toward articulating philosophies and values of play and making.

“It took me a long time to recognize how vibe coding and the culture of pro-LLM people are repudiating the very idea of community, and I find this to be the most convincing argument against them. Even if people have figured out how to make LLMs not spread misinformation, found a way to decrease energy costs, etc., I still believe these technologies as they are currently implemented should be rejected for inculcating rent-seeking mentalities.”

Critical Chaser

Learning a bit more about Italian infrastructural policy than I expected this week.

“That’s right. As Arc Raiders takes place in Italy, this is a stop sign that’s failing to observe Articles 144, 145, and 148 of Title 2 of the Regolamento di Esecuzione e di Attuazione del Nuovo Codice della Strada, which stipulate that stop signs must be accompanied by cross-lines featuring the word STOP on the pavement, repeated across each lane of traffic subject to the stop sign, and which must be marked at least 5 meters away from a pedestrian crossing should one exist. That anyone could ignore roadway safety in Italy is a notion so offensive that it borders on the inconceivable.”

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