April 5th

Welcome back readers.

If you haven’t already seen it, Kaile’s back with a new monthly edition over on the Patreon. Go check it out! And if you want to help us keep this show on the road (i.e. with a small monthly contribution), that’s also the best place to do it! It might also be the only place to support us with a small monthly contribution, at least in an automated and structured way. Anyway.

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

Outer Path

I’m being quite loose with some of sectioning this week. These initial four selections highlight unorthodox, underlooked, or unintuitive approaches to genre, text, criticism, and play.

• profound experiences with simple things | one more run
  Grayson Morley takes a run at a travelogue theory of games writing (Further Reading: Alexis Ong on Dragon’s Dogma 2).
• SWEET FRUITS IN SEASON | DEEP-HELL
  Skeleton unearths Harvestella as both an RPG and farmsim built different (Further Reading: Kaile Hultner on Harvestella).
• Skeuomorphs and the Uncanny in Her Story’s Mirror Game | Eteo Archetypes
  Florence Smith Nicholls exorcises the doppelganger haunting the interface in Her Story.
• Marathon may challenge Runners to find new paths to survival | Medium
  Quest Log draws on Go, game theory, and the deep wells of Bungie lore to imagine another way out of the Cryo Archive (Further Reading: Harper Jay MacIntyre on Marathon).

“The rules and design of Marathon don’t forbid or encourage a ceasefire, but the conditions of Cryo Archive may benefit those who practice it. They just need to choose it, act on it, and defend others who do the same. Would the Seventh Vault be opened wide already if we took this path? Would that spirit spread to the surface of Tau Ceti IV? Would we escape this stalemate where only a few come out ahead, but still they gain no greater purpose aside from survival atop the pyramid just a bit longer? Would we make our own fates?”

Infinity Mirror

We’ve got some interviews and critical conversations to share, on design, development, the “gambling-like”, and more.

• Sitting Down with Sam Eng | Unwinnable
  Ashley Schofield chats with Sam Eng about skating, gamedev, culture, New York.
• Inkle’s Jon Ingold on the Craft of Narrative Design | Narrative News
  Rose Behar chats with Jon Ingold about a narrative designer’s approach to assembling a book on narrative design (Further Reading: Hannah Nicklin on the weight of worldbuilding).
• Are Indie Games Developing a Gambling Problem? | This Week In Videogames
  Francisco Dominguez opens the Skinner lootbox in dialogue with the experts (Further Reading: Anxiety Shark on Balatro).

“Indie games don’t have a gambling problem, but economics and game design trends could tempt a relapse. Exploitative design was once called skinnerware, after the Skinner Box lab experiment that conditioned mice to push buttons for rewards and avoid punishment. Slot machines are an evolution of that experiment applied to humans. What games learn from the industry that mastered the machine zone should be handled with care.”

Pac Participle

Our next two picks this week both find themselves at opposite ends of an eccentric orbit around Pac-Man.

• Head On (Sega/Gremlin, 1979) | exp.
  Mathew Kumar forays a little ways before Pac-Man (Further Reading: Jake Steinberg on killing your inner lore master).
• Shadow Labyrinth Won’t Be Consumed | Superjump
  Guilherme Alves asks whether Shadow Labyrinth really has come a long way since Pac-Man (Further Reading: Madeline Blondeau on Shadow Labyrinth).

“Using play as interpretation, it becomes clear that a fear of imagination plagues nostalgia. Shadow Labyrinth is also not immune to interpretation. It contains multitudes, much like the original, and, of course, it can direct players through specific means of reading. As previously mentioned, there are hints of colonialism, hard sci-fi, it has tons of fun with its references and names, it talks about family, it critiques and embraces technology, etc. You will definitely come out of it with different texts that you will acquire through play.”

Starry Diadem

Two new meditations on horror, adaptation, and dressing to die.

• Emotional High Fidelity: On Adapting Horror Games | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus charts the emotional landscape of adapting contemporary horror games to film.
• Death dress | Plant or Beast
  Ashley Bardhan deciphers the horror protag dress code along aesthetic and thematic throughlines (Further Reading: Ashley’s previous writing on the Fatal Frame 2 remake).

“We deserve, in the ugly horror, to feel pretty. This is where the erotic tension of the horror game protagonist outfit becomes necessary. The world has made funny, broken things out of us, and it can only ever interpret what’s girly as idiotic and crushable. But we, who have accepted the bruises, tears, and decided to breathe through them, know that femininity means resilience.”

State of the Art

Now we turn to games and their interactions with art, form, and culture.

• Quake Brutalist Jam III prods architecture’s discomfort in engaging with spatial violence | stir
  Bansari Paghdar unpacks Quake Brutalist Jam III as a refraction and critical meditation on the architectural form (Further Reading: Vehe Mently on Armored Core VI).
• Ozymandias, or Let The Butlerian Jihad Come For Crimson Desert First | Patreon
  Ela Bambust is thoroughly appalled by the Content of it all.

“Crimson Desert is not Bad Art, I don’t think. I think Crimson Desert is sort of what happens when AI cobbles together the bland ideas of people with zero sense and zero desire to make art, which is ultimately why this game feels so devoid of merit to me. When Midjourney was just getting started, someone said “now you can see what was outside the frame of the Mona Lisa.” Crimson desert feels like what’s outside the frame of the Mona Lisa. Forever.”

Critical Chaser

New Arcen? New Arcen.

• I am The Thing from the Tower | Jank
  Sin Vega (role)plays a city (mis)manager for the sickos.

“Heart Of The Machine wants you to explore, to imagine, to play with its premise: that you’re an (actual) artificial intelligence, newly sentient, in a far future dystopian city. Now what? What kind of being are you? What should you do about the world? Don’t look it up. Figure out who you are, you goddamn coward. Make a decision. Be someone.”