May 31st

Welcome back readers.

We’ve got lots of interesting stuff to dig into this week, so I’m going to limit this opening preamble to briefly plugging our Patreon, which helps us keep laying down this record of critical conversations in games. Ok? Let’s do the thing.

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

Degossing

Our first trio of selections for this week all write in response to or against different kinds of discourse, to varying degrees of directness.

• My Ongoing Affair With Emulation | Jake Should Be Writing
  Jake Steinberg sees the emulation handheld as a window looking out from the discourse hall of mirrors (Further Reading: Nemesis on Anbernic).
• Unlearning misogyny to truly appreciate the women and girls of Kingdom Hearts | Mothership
  Caelus McKeel unpacks the misogyny–external, internalized, in-narrative, in-fandom–that has shaped the Kingdom Hearts series and its popular reputation (Further Reading: Madeline Blondeau on Sora and Roxas).
• i’m not mad, i’m just disappointed | tell them i died
  Ian Walker wants to know what the worker-owned model will do differently if it’s not standing up for Palestine (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on a year as a killjoy).

“why go through the trouble of establishing a worker-owned website if not to be in a position where you can easily take a stand when the times comes? you can’t be fired. a microsoft blacklist means nothing with thousands of subscribers backing you up. these are your self-professed advantages as an independent outlet, so why tie yourself in knots making excuses?”

Everything Is Permitted

Next up: game worlds and the experiences they cultivate, encourage, and occasionally transgress.

• Assassin’s Creed and the Total Video Game | Chiropteran’s Blog
  Chiropteran interrogates Assassin’s Creed‘s early aspirations toward perfect immersion (Further Reading: Edwin Evans-Thirlwell on AC1).
• L.A. Noire’s Compelling Tale Sits at the Heart of a Make-Believe Los Angeles | This Week In Videogames
  Khee Hoon Chan concludes that L.A. Noire‘s writing carries the experience over Team Bondi’s more uneven ambitions of verisimilitude (Further Reading: Blake Reno on L.A. Noire).
• Empty Worlds of Wonder | Unwinnable
  Maddi Chilton finds a newfound appreciation for the comparatively sparse original Borderlands (Further Reading: Jake Steinberg on Borderlands 4).
• The demand for weapons in Subnautica 2 reveals the difficulty of separating open worlds from conquest | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Edwin Evans-Thirlwell ponders Subnautica 2‘s efforts to depict a world that exists beyond the player character’s whims (Further Reading: Phoenix Simms’ interview with Nikhil Murthy).

“I think Subnautica 2’s open world qualifies as “postcolonial”, in that while it harbours something of Murthy’s hollow “amusement park”, it is swimming against the currents of its genre. It’s both a richly adorned landscape of plunder and a story about indentured settlers that routs away from the violence widely expected of open worlds.”

Dig In

Mina the Hollower is a game that came out this week, so we have two pieces on that.

• mina the hollower: the one more run review | one more run
  Grayson Morley routes the Tenebrous Isle.
• The games that Mina the Hollower is not | Autumn Wright
  Autumn Wright buries the lede on how Mina is neither a Souls nor a Skong but a secret third thing (a new game).

“The problem I had at the start of Mina the Hollower, both hitting and avoiding being hit by enemies, was one of perception. I wasn’t actually thinking ahead, which I knew because I was always in midair when I needed to be underground and I was always aiming where an enemy wasn’t any longer. It wasn’t an issue of speed, but of training. (I started aiming where enemies were not yet, which was also fatal.) I needed to learn to see ahead, to understand the game like a clockwork platformer and anticipate what enemies would do. I needed to learn to see the trajectory of an encounter.”

Track Changes

I can feel myself getting a bit loose with the sectioning here, but each of these next four have something to say about design.

• Why Are Thin Bodies the Default in Games? | Teen Vogue
  Nicole Carpenter investigates the tech and culture biases that tilt what kinds of bodies get represented in videogames (Further Reading: Oisin Kuhnke on character creators and body horror).
• Why Can Pokémon Only Say Their Names? | Thrilling Tales of Old Video Games
  Drew Mackie explores how–and why–the Pocket Monsters got their distinctive gab.
• The brilliant new puzzler made by a Davis student partly out of spite | 48 hills
  Leah Isobel talks to designer Lucas Immanuel about knowledge puzzles, what remakes tend to leave on the table, and more (Further Reading: Penny on puzzle games).
• What If The Player WANTS To Lose? | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Stanley Baxton asks what mainstream games could learn from porn games by breaking away from flow and leaning into the loss state (Further Reading: Kangoo on designing for failure).

“Maybe, one day, there will be that one Good Commercial Game Studio that’s celebrated for breaking the mould, winning a thousand awards, in spite of what every sales projection tells them. To get there, why wouldn’t you study and take seriously the gamemakers who are already doing that? But even if this studio did, you know damn well they wouldn’t say with their full chest that they were inspired by porn.”

Forward-Thinking

Two picks, respectively, on grief and what comes after.

• Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Grasp On Grief | Emotion Engine
  Ashley Schofield finds that Guardians‘ thesis on grief is undercut by power-up tropes and overly narrow character focus (Further Reading: Ashley’s letters with Micaela Deitz on Spider-Man 2).
• The Importance of Reconnecting: A Discussion of ‘Life is Strange: Reunion’ | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold offers a hear-me-out on LIS: Reunion, mending past connections, and seeking closure (Further Reading: Willa Rowe on LIS: Reunion).

“At the time of writing, I have not hit the credits on Life is Strange: Reunion, but I’m happy to say that this game had the potential to make me think about my own relationships and the ways in which I reconnect with others. There are still many relationships I’d like to repair one day, and many more that prove to me that reaching out and being vulnerable is always worth it.”

Patch Notes

A variety of critical perspectives on recent games.

• What is Titanium Court About? An Investigation | Unwinnable
  Emily Price finds Titanium Court a little too wink-and-grin to actually settle into and emotionally connect with (Further Reading: Artemis Octavio on Titanium Court).
• Harold Halibut: para onde devemos ir! | Backlogger
  Belmonteiro plays a boring game that knows precisely where it’s going.
• Resident Evil Requiem’s Hopecore Ending is Unearned | This Week In Videogames
  James Wood imagines what might have been had Requiem opted to close the book a few pages sooner (Further Reading: Ashley Bardhan on RE Requiem).
• Hong Kong Method | Bullet Points Monthly
  Charlotte Lindsay traces the cycles of transnational capital into the stars (Further Reading: Pao Yumol on Marathon).
• Mixed Up The Tapes | Inner Spiral
  Alli offers a Black Australian perspective on Mixtape‘s subservient reverence for American nostalgia (Further Reading: Nicanor Gordon on Mixtape).

“Ultimately, Mixtape succeeds at what it sets out to do. As an interactive piece of media, it’s a fun, emotionally resonant tribute to the reckless abandon of youth, and I caught myself smiling through much of it. But as I played, navigating teenage milestones to a soundtrack of imported American rock, I couldn’t shake the alienation. It’s a love letter to an Americanized adolescence we all wanted to emulate, masking the heavier, darker reality of what it actually meant to grow up in that cultural shadow.”

Critical Chaser

We’re closing out the week with some fun treats for on-line sickos.

• 868-BACK Review: A Revisit For The Net Of Now | Bloomed Wings Blog
  It’s a review : )
• A Trip to 90s Kansai: Exploring the XD FirstClass Network BBS | CD-ROM Journal
  Misty De Méo unpacks a wondrous time capsule of early-90s client-server possibility.

“I’ve read a lot of archived forums over the years, but this archive feels very different from the usual web forum archive. They’re rarely made by the forum’s own operators or its users; a web forum archive is usually done by outside parties, or even just by chance. The members of web forums aren’t necessarily aware their community is being archived, or may not want their posts preserved outside their original context. This archive has a purpose, and was created by the BBS’s operators and on behalf of its users specifically to show to other people. We were meant to see this archive, we were meant to be reading these posts. They wanted us to have this chance to be introduced to them from a distance. Even though we can’t join them, these many years later, we can at least get to know them and learn who they were just as they wanted us to. I’m grateful we have the chance.”