This Week in Videogame Blogging

March 1st

by

Welcome back readers.

Thanks for the shout-out, Edwin : )

And a huge thanks as well to our community at large. Over the last few days you have rallied and helped to put us back into the black. If the numbers I’m seeing hold steady, that should put us in the clear in the near term and allow us to start building up a reserve to put towards contributor payments and fun projects. If you haven’t already checked out our Patreon and would like to support our work, subs are still very much welcome and appreciated.

Today also marks the formal close of our second Fansite Jam. If you by chance have been working on a website but haven’t posted it in the submissions channel of our Discord, please do so! I want to include your work in the showcase roundup, which I hope to publish sometime this week.

As thanks for helping to keep our work going, here’s an absolutely stuffed 30-article issue. I am going to bed as soon as I hit publish.

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

A Spectre is Haunting the Games Industry

A whole lot of spectres, actually. Franchises of an eternal present, corrupt corporate buyouts, low carbon packagi- actually that last one sounds pretty good.

“Pokémon is looking forwards, and that means deviating from what brought it to this point. It’s why being reflective on the creation of the series feels like an irrelevant point that obscures just how much Pokémon has changed. With mobile games and merchandising a bigger core, the appeal of Pokémon is more akin to a Disney theme park. The original media is important, but for the purpose of funneling the most beloved aspects of those experiences into a broader experience you can live and be a part of far beyond it.”

A Spectrum is Haunting Britain

Okay, I won’t do that again this week. Here’s a trio of historically-minded pieces that situate their games of interest in timelines of platform and genre.

“When reality has been cut away, a game is not just simply left with empty space. Rather, it is the players’ imagination which now fills that void. As Shunichi Takanashi wrote in one of the earliest Japanese articles explaining the tenets of role-playing, “Unless combined with rules, the player’s imagination and creativity—the heart of play—will amount to nothing. Therefore, games are all about good rules and good players. I believe this applies to all simulation games with role-playing elements.”31 In the case of Unlimited SaGa, it is a player’s imagination which bridges the gap between the game’s rules and the depiction of the game’s world which in turn is what allows for the emergence of a unique narrative.”

Ties that Bind

These next two picks explore games as social worlds, both for good and, well, complicated.

“There’s a toxicity to extraction games that’s inherent to a genre built on “you can take advantage of players’ trust” but the audience for those games so far have been pretty self-selecting. Marathon feels like a step above that, where the density of its systems and mechanics laid its desires bare to a degree I couldn’t handle anymore. It asks players to be vulnerable in a game where the primary language is aggression and deceit. This is not any different from other extraction shooters, in the end. It’s what the genre is. But the repeated degree to which I experienced the cruelty of this across some 50-odd hours total was just too much for me to bear.”

Genre-Confining

Now for some thoughts on genre.

“I’ve been thinking about the gray zone recently and how it relates to a certain stratum of games. Games that scratch an itch but feel more pleasingly passable than memorable. Games that mechanically engage but do not mentally excite. Games like Ball X Pit.”

Interactive Friction

Lots of good writing on narrative this week, spanning interactive fiction, narrative design, worldbuilding, and more.

“This opposition of analogue vs. digital in photography connects to broader ideas of the digital as disconnected from real lives and bodies and, therefore, muted. We recognise this when someone says that listening to vinyl “hits different” than digital formats, or that zines will always “feel more personal” than blogs, or that getting a letter is inherently “more meaningful” than getting an e-mail. LAKE Adventure is one counterexample to these ideas. It shows how the digital can, to use Barthes’ phrasing: “reach me, animate me, and I animate it … this is what creates every adventure.” The digital can reach, move, touch and be touched.”

Attack and Dethrone G.O.D.

Some more great picks this week on RPGs too! Yeah I know I slotted the Unlimited SaGa one up above. . . .

“I know from what Lebkuchen’s told me that she’s been losing her faith, but she still wears a string of pears with a white cross on her head like a tiara. A princess of God or a princess of pastry – there’s hardly any difference. While I let my soul get torn apart by my feeling misunderstood, either as Elise or as a real girl scrolling for too long on Instagram, Lebkuchen remains empathetic. Even when I’m disgusting and angry, I know she has a frosted lebkuchen designed with almonds and candied cherries to make me reborn.”

Queeries

Two articles this week examining queer theories, themes, and audiences.

“Contemporary conversations about bodies, pronouns, and embodiment in games often circle back to questions of control and constraint. Who gets to define the player’s shape? What happens when that definition loosens? Independent games that foreground fluidity and refusal are often described as new or corrective, but they inherit a much older logic. They draw from an early moment when bodies in games were unstable, incomplete, open. The difference is that this openness is now claimed deliberately, rather than emerging by accident.”

Mirror Match

These next four selections unpack the links between virtual worlds and our own.

“Nate might reject help to the point of absurdity+, but the thing is, he can go it alone. As Ed wrote, Nate may be bullheaded, but he’s uncommonly skilled at moving his body from one place to another. In the end, now that we understand the territory, we’re finally given that map, tracing the messy circuit of Nate’s journey. In this surreal hinterland, he has found something he’s good at, or at least something he can apply himself to in full, an opportunity it’s safe to say never crossed his path while he smoked out his parents’ basement. Never anyone’s idea of an alpha, he has still managed to ascend.”

Free Play

These three are all about the love of play.

“Angeline Era proves that good things happen when devs decide to trust players. It gives you the basics and trusts you to experiment and learn. When you get stuck, the solution isn’t to Google the answer. It’s to slow down and think about what the game is communicating through design.”

Critical Chaser

Questing for Camelot.

“For a company with such a deep and lauded RPG pedigree, it’s a tragedy that Fever‘s signature adventure mode can’t even hold on to dangling Daisy’s life by a thread for more than two minutes before losing interest and deciding “maybe babies?” What happens at the end of the Adventure Mode? Nothing. You can go play the same modes you always could play. And you’ll need to play them to unlock things. The desire to shove an extra $10 at Nintendo just to get all the weirdos and options for the decent, if nothing new, multiplayer matches is overwhelming. Did we forget everything that Mario Tennis for the Game Boy Color taught us?”

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