July 26th

Welcome back readers.

If you haven’t already seen it, we’re bringing back Blogs of the Round Table on a semi-recurring, topic-oriented basis. The first topic is Friendslop. Check out Kaile’s announcement post for details on when, where, and how to participate!

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

Relational Frameworks

We’ll open up this week with connections drawn from global injustices to games as hobbies and commodities to collective action.

• Replaying the first Assassin’s Creed Videogame During the Gaza Genocide | Unwinnable
  Matteo Lupetti situates the original Assassin’s Creed‘s more subversive text in relation to US imperialism projects in the Middle East past and present (Further Reading: Saniya Ahmed on AC Revelations, Istanbul, and white protagonism).
• How Videogames Feed the War Machine | ArtReview
  Lewis Gordon interrogates the history and present of the games industry as paradigmatic media of Empire.
• Why an indie survival game gives me hope despite climate disaster | Mothership
  Amanda Tien contemplates the intermix of climate anxiety and community resilience in The Flame in the Flood (Further Reading: Emily Price on Saltsea Chronicles).
• boy…cott? | Carlito Calzone
  Nicanor Gordon distinguishes personal lines from collective, organized action with quantifiable deliverables, and identifies routine conflation of the two in online spaces (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on a year as a killjoy).

“Boycotts are outreach. You hear of the boycott, you not only learn about the violations of an employer or firm or government, you now know of an organisation attempting to do something about it. That is your rabbit hole. Your call to arms. Maybe for a completely different organisation or someplace more local. You are hearing the call to get active.”

Sunoscience

I’ll call this the industry-oriented section, bringing together thoughts on music, collaboration, censorship, and community.

• Why I don’t post about everything I play | Laura Michet’s Blog
  Laura Michet on how (not) to talk about bad indie games.
• An empty bit of good | Anxiety Shark
  Niko Stratis is writing strictly about music here but I think her thoughts map neatly onto the games industry and how the games press covers its use of LLMs (Further Reading: Thomas James on the incursion of LLM hacks into the fan translation space).
• Relationship Building Is Why Killing Huge Roaches As Fatboi Sharif While Listening To ShrapKnel Is Possible | Exaclaw
  Wallace Truesdale details the context and collaboration that brought the underground beats of Backwoodz Studioz to Beatdown City Survivors (Further Reading: Wallace’s previous writing on Okumura and Sorry We’re Closed).
• Getting Off The Slippery Slope | Adult Analysis Anthology
  A.J. Malachite draws a bright line between the weaponized vagueries of online censorship and the need to not split hairs about uncomfortable fiction (Further Reading: Grace Benfell on the Itch and Steam censorship crackdowns).

“Our brains love dark power dynamics, taboos, forbidden passions, subversion, and taking the grossest, ugliest things and making them attractive. Perverted, pornographic fiction shines a light on them, helps us process them and understand them, and de-fangs shame and repression. In an environment of targeted censorship that drives queer creators away from taboos, queer people lose full access to one of the most powerful and ancient tools of self-expression humans have: pornography. In this environment, bigots are handed more weapons with which to further our ostracization, our oppression.”

Play It Loud

Next up, material histories of games and tech.

• Clearing Things Up: The Ideological Limits of Translucent/Transparent Technology
  Davy R. Howard clears the air on the Atomic Purple Game Boy Color, its histories and philosophies, its precedents and antecedents.
• The Brick Game, through the Ages | Nicole Express
  Nicole Branagan digs out the ubiquitous 118-in-1.
• What Does “Arcade-y” Mean? | birthbydrip
  pang offers part material history, part design philosophy on the humble coin-op cabinet (Further Reading: Seer on the BattleTech arcade contraption).

“In some ways, the current material reality offers the perfect opportunity for these ideals to persist. The rise of online gaming effectively turned every gaming platform into a shared one, opening up online leaderboards and matchmaking in the process. The comparison seems like it is not lost on developers, who have used simulacra of arcade settings as online waiting rooms. Likewise, brick-and-mortar arcades increasingly offer online play, giving an alternative to in-person interaction. It is easy to imagine “arcade-y” fundamentals persisting and evolving with conscious effort, even as the original material reality has changed significantly.”

Back and Forth

Two of these are on tennis and two of these are on Atari 2600 games but actually this is the design section.

• Tennis – March 1981 | Atari Archive
  Kevin Bunch tackles Activision’s first tennis game for the Atari 2600 head-on (Further Reading: Dia Lacina on tennis games to play during Wimbledon).
• Haunted House: Lighting the way | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi revels in the immaculate design and minimalist verisimilitude of the Atari 2600’s original survival horror game.
• Tennis’s Trick to Balancing Asymmetric Games | Celia Wagar’s CritPoints
  Celia Wagar imports a skill-rewarding balance patch from tennis (Further Reading: Richard Garfield on balance in board game design).

“The player serving is generally considered to be at an advantage, but it’s debatable and not really important. Each game is played to 4 points, and each set is played to 6 games with players alternating who serves each game. Importantly, if you don’t have a 2 point or a 2 game lead, you keep playing tiebreaker rounds or games until you win with a lead of 2. If the score is tied up at the win threshold, then the next player to score a point has “advantage” and scoring another point wins the game. For that reason, I’m going to call this pattern, “Playing to Advantage”.”

Blades and Parades

Sometimes I work my organizing magic and sometimes you get six articles in one section. I promise it’s all good stuff, though.

• Discopup is a Lynchian deconstruction of the club and the city | Mothership
  Jenna Mahale ruminantes on race and class allegories in a surrealist tale mining Animal Crossing aesthetics (Further Reading: Caroline Delbert on Paradise Killer).
• Sticks & Stones: The One Where They Put a Slur in a Video Game and Now I Have to Write about Why It’s Bad | Gamesline
  Spencer is asking why a popular gacha had to go and drop a slur for seemingly no real reason.
• Reconstructing The Self | Inner Spiral
  Alli seeks the self in Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
• It’s Time We Admit That Hades Isn’t Supergiant’s Best Game About Temperamental Gods | GameSpot
  Grace Benfell muses on patronage, faith, and divinity in Bastion (Further Reading: Jay Castello on Pyre).
• I am extremely here for turn-based strategy game The Great Villainess, and not just for gay reasons | Rock Paper Shotgun
  Sin Vega has a mighty fine time with an accessible strategy game with more than a dash of toxic yuri.
• Mostly I Think About the Mistakes | Bullet Points Monthly
  Reid McCarter draws on The Americans to find common mappings between Portofiro’s twisting topography and Hershel Wilk’s psychic landscape (Further Reading: Kaile Hultner on Zero Parades).

“In The Americans, the real humanity of the characters comes in moments when they assert themselves in response to operational or personal disasters. Their guilt entrenches their worldview or causes them to push against existing beliefs. Cascade’s ability to feel regret, to think mostly about her mistakes, is what gives her humanity, too, and Zero Parades is a story about how she can make something more than sadness out of confronting that.”

Critical Chaser

Remember to read plays out loud.

• Two Women Talking about Stalker (Extended Cut) | Unwinnable
  Vehe Mently presents two women talking to, sometimes past one another, working through thoughts in motion on the Zone.

“Sofia: It’s about men. STALKER is a series about men. You never see a woman anywhere. You might hear one mentioned occasionally as a mother or a lover. But everyone you meet, everyone you talk to, everyone you see walking in the distance is a man. And there’s this masculine fantasy about apocalyptic fiction. It’s about the boys getting together and adventure. Shooting guns. It has to be apocalyptic because on some level the modern world has to be wiped away. What’s left is a wasteland of men.”