March 29th

Welcome back readers.

We’re back to our regular Sunday schedule again with sixteen new-and-cool reads for your consideration. No major around-the-site updates this time around, but as always, your support through our Patreon makes this work possible and sustainable! Let’s dig right in.

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

Infil/Exfil

Two up top on Marathon this week.

• To kill is to die, yourself | dreamcastaway
  Harper Jay MacIntyre unpacks the prisoner’s dilemma of rook v. rook (Further Reading: Aurahack on Marathon).
• As in life, you can lose it all quickly in online games like Marathon | AV Club
  Madeline Blondeau observes that by embracing impermanence, Marathon will live forever (Further Reading: Kaile Hultner on Marathon).

“Human life is fleeting and fragile, finances and bodies bespoke pottery against the pavement of governance and capital. But it’s what ones fill those vessels with—and how much, for how long, with whom—that defines its worth. From that perspective, even if Marathon fails, it will not die. If the servers were shut down tomorrow, and there were 24 hours left to play, the last several weeks still happened. There are videos of players zipping around on drones with grappling hooks, or role-playing their characters on comms, or slicing someone to ribbons right as they try to exfil. These moments—every big haul, every crushing death—happened between real people who will recount them well into the future. Take it from a Lawbreakers, Friday The 13th, and Radical Heights fan: People will discuss these moments, years after the fact, as they pine for long-dead servers and playerbases.”

Knights Errant

Another pairing, this time on 1348 Ex Voto. Doesn’t look like this one’s gone over so well.

• “Lesbian knight game” 1348 Ex Voto isn’t all that interested in lesbians | Willa Writes
  Willa Bloomfield-Rowe sizes up a pair of knights doomed by shallow and simplistic storytelling (Further Reading: Ceridwen Millington on Life Is Strange: Reunion).
• 1348 Ex Voto review: Hundred Years’ Bore | AV Club
  Dia Lacina finds that Ex Voto is only playing at knights.

“Sometimes in video games your girlfriend gets kidnapped and you have to go find her. And, sometimes, your girlfriend just told you she’s The Mordred and You’re The Arthur, and your bimbo knight ass is getting played like a lute for the next four hours. So, when brigands sack the city the two of them call home, forcing Aeta to slash her way through clustered arenas of peasants-turned-marauders only to find a dropped, titular Ex Voto (a sacred token offering for her girlfriend’s now-postponed journey to the monastery), it should be clear that Aeta’s being played.”

Industry and Inquiry

This is nominally the “industry” section this week, but the articles I’ve gathered here span a range topics, from localization, to consumption, to decolonization, to preservation.

• Nintendo, Nostalgia and Gaming as Accumulation | ArtReview
  Lewis Gordon traces Nintendo’s shaping influence on hyperconsumer culture, past and present (Further Reading: Alicia Haddick on the Pokémon-industrial complex).
• Immigration Buddhas and decolonizing play: Game devs still work to diversify industry | 48 hills
  Leah Isobel seeks out the alternatives at GDC, talking to the developers interested in building something new (Further Reading: Leah’s previous writing onn GDC).
• Metaphor: ReFantazio: quick notes about its Brazilian translation | Whatever the Wind Brings
  Leonardo shares some notes from working on Metaphor‘s translation into Brazilian Portuguese.
• Dead Games and the Necromancy of Love | Gamesline
  Lilith celebrates the long-lived Dead Game.

“As long as people continue to care, a game can continue to exist. Modders will make custom clients, emulators will enable old games to live on new platforms, and even the most passionate will take server architecture into their own hands. The Concords and Highguards of the world are dispiriting, yes, but as people who care for this medium of art, it is our duty to take the things we love and carry them with us. A corporation preserving the things they make should never be the expectation, especially when they are financially disincentivized from doing so. Preservation is not impossible; we can love the things we love, provided we hold on tightly and refuse to allow them to be taken. Doing the work is hard but I think the effort is necessary.”

Steppe Up

The next two sections mostly bring together single-game pieces, though not exclusively. This first trio adopt a bit more of a critical remove (thought I was going to say it, didn’t you?) from their objects of interest.

• Even Batman Can’t Fight City Hall – Unwinnable | Unwinnable
  J.M. Henson unpacks Arkham City as an apparatus of authoritarian state violence (Further Reading: J.M.’s previous writing on Arkham).
• Fist to Mirror, Bullet to Temple | Bullet Points Monthly
  Grace Benfell diagnoses the many Cartesian crashouts of Daniil Dankovsky and of videogames more broadly (Further Reading: Julie Muncy on Daniil Dankovsky).
• Let’s Imagine More than Dragons | Gamers with Glasses
  Don Everhart aspires to new imaginative horizons in games and crit (Further Reading: Luis Aguasvivas on Dragon Quest VII and critical boredom).

“Maybe imagination requires a little more of Benfell’s seriousness. Maybe it means showing more, thinking through more connection, together. When I’m able to think more purposefully about my experience of games, or writing, or other recorded media, it’s helpful for me to think of that experience as a foggy kind of conversation. There’s someone, often many someones, on the other side of the piece. Then there’s me, or me and my partner, engaging with it in some other context, at some other time. A lot of the conditions can be anticipated by designers, a lot of contexts assumed. But maybe there’s too much shorthand, too much expectation, too much product, for much imagination and meaningful conversation. Americans aren’t afraid of dragons, not anymore, because we can safely assume that everyone is already familiar with dragons, and dragons are good for business.”

Hoenn In

In truth there’s no strict boundary between these two sections, but I found that these four selections weave in a pinch more of the personal.

• Breathe In. Breathe Out. Play the Dolphin Game. | Gamers with Glasses
  Nate Schmidt sets Sword of the Sea in emotional juxtaposition to Shadow of the Colossus.
• A Great Beyond – The Legend of Heroes: Trails Beyond the Horizon (PS5) Review | Gamesline
  Rose finds that Kiseki continues to be much more than the sum of its proliferating and ponderous parts (Further Reading: Lilith on Trails and mundane worldbuilding).
• Planting Roots in Hoenn | Inner Spiral
  Alli muses on geography, topography, and ecology in Hoenn (Further Reading: Samantha Trzinski on Hoenn).
• A Consumer Childhood | Stop Caring
  Micaela Deitz situates Consume Me in personal, cultural, and historical contexts of body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and diet culture.

“Disordered eating is notoriously monkey see, monkey do. It’s understandable that Hsia would want to skirt the darkest aspects of her disorder to avoid negative inspiration, but in minimizing Jenny’s disorder into “dieting,” she avoids letting players experience first hand the problems of being a messy anorexic. Through their interactivity, video games are uniquely suited to recreate dangerous actions and mindsets without physically harming the player. Letting people experience Jenny’s anorexia completely, letting them see the positives of dieting slowly crumble into a self-harming obsession that destroys her body and mind, could have allowed Consume Me to do what disordered eating literature, film, and TV can’t: turn sympathy into empathy through “first-hand” experience.”

Critical Chaser

Critical support to Luis in this difficult marital time.

• A Great Gift of Love is Boredom: On Being Part of the Herd in asses.masses | Unwinnable
  Luis Aguasvivas finally gets cancelled–albeit only by one person–in the noble pursuit of boredom.

“To feel bored as a collective is an act of intimacy that can ratchet up discomfort. It reveals things about those involved that some would not want to know or experience. asses.masses forces its participants into a state of intimacy where dulldrum numbs us to an extent that an elderly gentleman can no longer hold in his fart after hours of sitting on his ass and eating vegetarian food and as a result he lets it loose directly in front your spouse without even noticing. The asses run wild. All one can reasonably do is laugh because you are weirdly tired. Tired of watching others play games, no matter if the story being presented is deep and entertaining. Tired of the cold world bridled with jaded people that awaits you outside of the ICA’s Barbara Lee Family Foundation Theater. I have to take her to a fancier place than Bubba Gump to make up for this.”