This Week in Videogame Blogging

May 17th

by

Welcome back readers.

There have been some good discussions over the past week about encouraging more longform blogging as a curative to short-form and often-hostile posting-driven discourse. Allow us to offer a contribution to building up some of that much-needed institutional memory with (checks notes) 27 newly-selected readings this week. Read deeply and eat well!

Institutional memory has been on our minds for a while: since 2009, in fact! If you want to help us out in that project, check out our Patreon.

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

Stay the Discourse

I perceive a lot of critical exchange between sections this week, and I have tried to order and organize the sections accordingly. It strikes me as appropriate, then, to start with two articles highlighting each in their own way the need for sustained critical dialogue between writers in the space.

“We need to push each other to engage in concrete terms with our colleagues’ writing, and we need to push each other to engage in concrete terms with the games themselves, writing past feeling and identification towards close readings and analysis.”

Assemblage Queries

Let’s call this a section on literary criticism. I think both Jake and Kastel here touch on ideas about knowledge production as a communal practice (though not, as Jake examines, immune to collective distortions), carrying forward some themes planted in the previous section.

“I have a hard time imagining a happy ending for Sensei, but because the game wants me to move on without apologizing for his actions, I need to work my brains out. I don’t want to rely too much on extrapolation, but I do feel like answering this call requires a degree of poetic license. Hundreds of hours in, I don’t know what a solution might even look like. Nevertheless, I have to try because even the most incorrigible survivors deserve a way out of the cycles of abuse. Happiness should not be exclusive to people who have never suffered trauma as the status quo implies. I have to imagine something that’s unimaginable by today’s societal standards, a world where survivors can actually live happily. That’s the message that I was able to interpret from the game, and it’s a tall order.”

Old Horizons

The next four sections also form a kind of series. First, this grouping on cozy games explores labour, friendships, and nostalgia. Keep the motor running on that last one.

“A space only begins to feel real when things happen that you didn’t ask for and don’t want… and you love it anyway. The absence of that environmental friction in New Horizons creates an experience that mimics the most alienating aspects of modern late-stage capitalism. You’re sitting alone in your private, digital real estate, surrounded by algorithmically pleasant sycophants who exist only to validate your aesthetic choices…. and I don’t like that.”

Link Cable

Alli in the previous section hands us off to a dedicated set on Pokémon and its own nostalgic capital.

“If a remake of a game retreads the same roads with little deviation, it is not for those of us actively interacting with the media. It’s there only to court those searching for a cheap hit of nostalgia. Pokopia posits that building on top of a foundation while introducing new things for new inhabitants will still appeal to those returning.”

The Dinosaur in the Room

And so we arrive at Mixtape. No bonus points for guessing the overarching theme here!

“Music in Mixtape feels isolating, almost competitive. Taste is a thing wielded like a weapon. It’s a means to build yourself up. It’s the small town nerd shit. You know the hyper fixation that makes you special while the town “normies” go crazy for something “dumb” like sports or whatever. They don’t like the right things or if they do they don’t like enough. This too feels like a coming-of-age movie trope, the kid who needs to leave because their dreams are too big for the area code or are just plain misunderstood. There’s usually some comeuppance there right? You get your dream but at the expense of something you took for granted. I don’t think that quite happens in Mixtape. Not in any way that matters at least. Stacey might say she’ll miss the town though is there anything in the dying throes of the night that demonstrates that? She gets her perfect day but I guess Slater gets to break the fourth wall once.”

For Your Convenience

Yep. We’re still (mostly) on the nostalgia beat, but now let’s expand the focus outward to other recent games.

“And yet for all of its specificity about its time and place, about Mara’s particular aspirations as a writer and her curiosity about the world around her and her desire for love and sex and her uncertainty about what her Judaism means to her and everything else, it made me feel connected to not just her but all of humanity, to all the people who are alive or who have ever been alive. That’s something only a truly great game can do.”

Picking up the Gauntlet

What better way to follow up on a sustained inquiry into nostalgia than with some histories?

“The Gauntlet that was #1 for ten weeks had its defining gameplay element of four players removed (there was an addendum to Crash‘s definition of a Gauntlet variant, clearly based on the home version: “If we’re really going by the book, the game should have a two-player option”). With that and Gremlin’s other enforced compromises on size and style, it’s arguable whether their Gauntlet was much more Gauntlet in spirit than some of the better-made of the apparent clones. It was Gauntlet in name and iconography, though, and that turned out to count for an awful lot.”

Running Laps

I already used “More-athon” as a pun last week. I’ve got nothing else! But the critical community still does.

“Every Runner is an other; they are also all the same. This is a truth, an experience, older than empire. From cruising a nightclub to crashing your ship on a foreign shore. You look for another and then you find them. Are you like me? Will you hurt me? Sex and murder share a few things. Curled fingers. Huddled limbs. Clinched fists. Both sex and violence rely on what Charter of Arachne calls “sacred thermodynamics.””

Games of Empires

Bringing a few different topics together here–Battlefield, Final Fantasy, Paradox games–in a loose collection on how games refract sociopolitical realities.

“Aki Ross is not just an example of cutting-edge animation. She is an early manifestation of a persistent cultural desire to divorce the female body from the woman herself, and to make that body infinitely manipulable.”

Critical Chaser

Signing off this week with some GlitchOut.

“the dreamlike in its way, feels like a direct access to reality… that is… the ancient idealised and philosophised thing beyond the waking. and the artistic, metaphoric representation of that place is perhaps our capturing in a sense the universe as it is experienced by itself at the level of foam. as fluctuation.”

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