August 23rd

Welcome back readers.

Just over a week left on the Friendslop Essay Jam. Get your article in today! Or tomorrow. Definitely by the 31st. No late submissions.

Did I plug the Patreon yet this week? Oh, there we go. Glad that’s sorted.

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

Market Correction

I’ve mostly opted for larger groupings this time around. The opening section this week begins and ends with the same topic: the encroachment of sex-hostile censorship on distribution platforms. Along the way, the selections this week also examine preservation, adaptation, and content labelling.

• ‘Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?’ The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam | Aftermath
  Jay Castello investigates how Steam’s increasingly black-box content moderation process is leaving indie developers of all styles and stripes in the dark (Further Reading: Grace Benfell interviews indie developers on Itch).
• Blue Reflection Quartet and the Effort of Preserving Multimedia Projects | SUPERJUMP
  Ivanir Ignacchitti brings an adaptation lens to the topic of preserving online mobile games for offline play (Further Reading: Eithan Rosemberg on Granblue Fantasy: Relink).
• The Threat of Organic Videogames | Mokkograd
  Eric describes a chicken-and-egg problem with “no AI” content labelling (Further Reading: Luna on witch hunts for LLM writing).
• Culture Carnage: Night Trap & Witch Hunts | Adult Analysis Anthology
  Croomfolk connects contemporary anti-sex crackdowns in games to the US Senate hearings on Mortal Kombat and Night Trap in the early 90s (Further Reading: kaorukofan1993 on Horses).

“This story doesn’t have a nice moral or tidy ending, as it is, in a sense, still ongoing. It is expected that companies, especially massive ones, follow the mainstream. But I leave you with one final rhetorical question: for independent collectives or individual artists, in a landscape where a game’s content has no relation whatsoever to the controversies surrounding it, what is the point of anticipatory obedience?”

Femininity in Play

Next we’ve got a variety of critical perspectives on femininity, examining character and player-subjects on both sides of the screen.

• Finding Fox and Divergent Play | Unwinnable
  Alyssa Wejebe contemplates Super Smash Bros‘ ‘git gud’ equivalent across many contexts of play (Further Reading: Sara Hovda on trans visibility at GDQ).
• Hell Maiden Brings Complex Female Characters to a Genre Devoid of Them | Unwinnable
  Gonçalo Santos takes notes on a diverse feminine cast in a recent popular vampsurv (Further Reading: Ashley Bardhan on Hell Maiden).
• In Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, women are the enemy | Mothership
  Taylor Hunsberger takes inventory of RE7‘s disposable, trope-laden lens on feminine agency (Further Reading: Skeleton on the women of Resident Evil).
• Nobody puts Aerith in a refrigerator | Skybox
  Will Borger digs deeper into the fridging trope as it applies–or doesn’t–across comics and games (Further Reading: Niki Fakhoori on Yakuza and the heroine’s journey).
• Papers, Please and the Reality of Being an American Tranny | Deleted Saves
  Micaela Deitz reflects on the banal violence of arbitrating personhood (Further Reading: Satyr on Warframe).

“When I went back to the DMV for the last time, I was nervous about explaining to the clerk why my gender was different on my license and passport. Here I was, a trans Jorji, about to smooth talk a government employee because I knew that I was breaking the rules. As the border agent of Arstotzka, I was the one that held people’s lives in my hands: I could save them or damn them.”

World Enough and Time

This one’s all about virtual worlds, their inhabitants, their material and ideological possibilities and constraints. I’m stretching things a little here to encompass aesthetics and art direction. Look, Lomax is a pretty game. Formative childhood experience for me.

• Court of Ash | Stop Caring
  Skeleton dwells on ruins and their inhabitants and interlopers, past and present, in Metroid and the American Southwest (Further Reading: Autumn Wright on Battlefield 6 and Gaza).
• The No Man’s Sky players building utopia at the end of the universe | Eurogamer
  Matt Wales chronicles the growth of a civilization (Further Reading: Jamin Warren talks to Mélanie Courtinat about liveable virtual spaces).
• Ouroboros: The Game and Everything, Forever | Gamesline
  Lilith muses on the material constraints of virtual worlds, and the contradictory and competing interests that push to expand their borders anyway (Further Reading: Ela Bambust on Crimson Desert).
• Lomax: Let’s go! | Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster
  Kimimi shouts out what I would consider to be one of the prettiest 2D platformers ever made (Further Reading: Davy R. Howard on the ontology of the platformer).
• Pentiment and Astrologaster: Playing with the Past | The Stacks
  Hannah Sparwasser Soroka brings an early modern historian’s perspective to games that invite us into their worldview (Further Reading: Emma Kostopolus on Pentiment).

“One of my constant exhortations to students, colleagues, and friends is that studying early modernity is fun. These people were so strange and wonderful with their obsessions and passions; the literate among them wrote with maximum panache and minimum standard spelling; the early modern world was full of magic and miracles, both supernatural and scientific. Their world was also changing, shaped by the growing availability of print, the Protestant Reformation, the colonization of the Americas, political radicalism, new art, new science, new food, new drink, new drugs, new faiths, new fears. What a pleasure it is to study this era. I had forgotten. Pentiment reminded me.”

Perfect Parry

Let’s get into the weeds a little on mechanical minutiae. I recently had cause to look up some entry-level trigonometry principles (kind of important in game programming!) that I’ve fully forgotten for at least two decades. Humbling and harrowing.

• Forbidden Solitaire: From Representation to Manipulation | Gamers with Glasses
  The joker’s on Caroline Delbert in this one as she puts a frustrating Solatro in dialogue with Lev Manovich’s post-communist media theories (Further Reading: Chuck Sebian-Lander on Balatro as vibe-poker).
• Doing The Math Homework: My Journey Through ‘Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice’ | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold solves for Sekiro and shows her work (Further Reading: Willa Rowe on Sekiro).

“Unlike any FromSoftware title I’ve finished, Sekiro’s confidence is unyielding. Like the equations from which it draws its inspiration, it acknowledges the reality that you can cheat on your homework by copying your friend at lunch. But when it’s time to put away the notes and take the test, Sekiro properly evaluates whether you have learned the material.”

Critical Chaser

Ok. I’m not signing off with a gag article or a poem this week, just a piece that moved me. Enjoy.

• Evil Never Ends, Neither Here Nor in Hyrule | Cat Calls Soup
  Akshit Dangi puts the cyclical mythology of Zelda in dialogue with the moral philosophy of the Mahabharata (Further Reading: Kate Gray on Skyward Sword).

“Some people seem to really dislike the very idea, but I think if none of the Links could ever fail, their courage would lose its meaning. Victory would become inevitability in a costume, which I don’t want. The ancient epic already gave me that. Courage can mean something only if failure is genuinely a possibility. What this timeline shows, more than any other branch, is that time will not stop if one generation comes up short. A kingdom will suffer because of failure, but it will continue to survive until some other generation in the future builds the courage to try again.”