This Week in Videogame Blogging

February 22nd

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

Gotta Rent ’em All

First things first: two interviews, two commentaries, spanning industry and culture.

“I’m seeing it in the younger generation, too. We give them so much shit for their brainrot slang, but have you watched them move? Shit’s amazing. They’re realizing that not caring is just a defense mechanism that leaves you lonely as hell. They’re looking at the climate crisis, the genocide in Palestine, and the looting of their future, and they aren’t responding with 4chan nihilism. They’re responding with a fierce, terrifying sincerity. They are risking their safety for strangers.”

A Series of Interesting Choices

What follows are a series of narrative-themed pairings. The first one looks more at structures of storytelling.

“Most video games still struggle to take themselves seriously. Scarlet Hollow and Slay The Princess are the products of that struggle. They swing between the medium’s most profound highs and its wretched lows. They offer a sign of better things to come and a map of how to get there, while reinforcing why games need to move on in the first place.”

But What, and for Whom?

The second looks more at the kinds of stories being told.

“For as technically accomplished as its sex scenes are – and they are unquestionably so – Baldur’s Gate 3 ultimately disappoints where it matters: exploring human beings, their desires, flaws, personalities, and queerness. This is not to say that many queer people cannot find queer joy in Baldur’s Gate 3; many demonstrably have. But in a moment where games with adult content from independent creators are being aggressively pushed even further to the margins than they were before, it feels profoundly insufficient to settle for a game concerned more with providing sex as a safe, flattering commodity for a cis-het male audience as the apex of how sex can be depicted and explored in video games.”

Disc Two

Our next two selections concern themselves with the PS1 era of RPGs–its affordances, its subversions, its evocative staying power.

“This interplay of pre-rendered environments ? being able to go from intimately zoomed-in shots inside elevators and train carts to zoomed-out world views ? encouraged the worlds of these JRPGs to contain both fragments of minutia and awe-invoking scale. Seeing the smaller spaces, cities and then open world leads one to fantasise: what other places could be out there in this vast landscape?”

Even Footing

These next ones, otherwise very different in style and scope, are linked by their attention to games and spaces that get us to use and think about our feet.

“Something strange happens in that moment when your perspective changes. You go from looking outward at the world, focusing both on Nate’s feet and on the horizon, to only being able to focus on your feet. You go from looking ahead to looking down. This was exactly the experience I had when trying to correct my own form. I became fixated on what my feet were doing beneath me, just as I had to do now, in Baby Steps, when forced into a first-person view.”

Image, Text

Forgive me for another slightly footloose pairing (ok, scratch that, forgive me for that), but both of these picks are interested in imagery and iconography.

“The funny thing is, it’s so uncinematic. For a company that was literally called Cinemaware, it’s strange that their games are so gamey. You would assume that a Errol Flynn-inspired swashbuckler would have started with a story, a script; a blend of cut-scenes and action scenes in order. In many ways I’d imagine the design would be more like the movie licenses released by Ocean later in the 80s and 90s–half-assed mini games with a cinematic connective tissue, and it would have probably been easier to make, less wasteful, and just as successful.”

Dicey Circumstances

Now let’s take some time to look at games as a lens of social critique.

“I can’t say I enjoyed watching it, but I don’t think enjoyment is even close to the point. I’m interested in games that aren’t about enjoyment because that’s another displacement, when by and large we expect games to be fun. I mean, we expect healthcare to make us feel cared for but that’s so rarely the case as well. I think this is why, when the doctors rolled the dice at the end of the film, I wished those dice calls had punctuated the entire film, explicitly. I wanted the film to be more up front with us, less clever, arty, social experiment and more obviously criticism. But I would say that. I’m a sick critic.”

Critical Chaser

Advantage, Jake.

“By declining to “balance” tennis against Mario bullshit, Mario Tennis Fever exposes the equation as a bad premise. The game indulges completely in tennis—its pressure and momentum—and deploys Mario’s aesthetic to heighten the drama.

Mario Tennis Fever is the best Mario sports game ever made.“

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