This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2021
…Points Monthly Astrid Anne Rose examines Cyberpunk 2077‘s juvenile, yet sanitized and ultimately hollow approach to sex, sexuality, and sex work.
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Queer Games Criticism in 2021 (so Far)
Welcome back gaymers!
Pride Month is a year-round affair here at Critical Distance–the same goes for Wrath Month–but all the same it feels timely in June to highlight some of the best damn queer-themed writing featured in our weekly roundups through the first half of 2021. So let’s do exactly that!
For this issue, the cool thing I want to plug first is the TTRPG Charity Bundle for Trans Support currently being hosted over on Itch throughout the month of June. There’s some stellar talent included in this package, and I’m glad to see a focus on
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November 2021
…be positioning the player to sympathise with. (Manual captions)
Soft & Hollow weighs up the purpose and execution of death mechanics/fail states in several popular horror and horror-adjacent titles. (Manual captions) Finally for November 2021, we check in with the month’s best critically-edged open fan letters. The Games Professor explains how Final Fantasy XIV character Hildibrand (the Gentleman of Light) provides some exceptional Good Times Appreciation Society Club Group
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December 2021
…but measured critical snapshot of the 2021 that was.
This Month In Videogame Vlogging highlights the most compelling critical videos about videogames from the previous calendar month.
A Matter of Agency
A surprisingly common theme amongst December’s video selection is: what you can learn when you let the game pilot itself.
- Whoops I still suck at gaming. – Laura Crone (23:05)
Alternatively titled “The Joy of Playing Games Wrong”, Laura Crone finds she can get away with more in (and in turn, get more out of) Astrologaster after initially (accidentally) playing through it by
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January 2021
…(15:45)
Gymnast86 looks at the combination of accident, deliberation and collaboration that has gone into the discovery of some significant time-saving glitches in the speedruns of various Zelda titles. (Manual captions)
Razbuten considers the pluses and minuses of achievement implementation and extra-narrative tasks, and how these affect a player’s understanding of what it means to finish a game. (Manual captions) [Contains embedded advertising]
That’s all for the first video roundup for 2021! Hopefully I’ll be back in good time with another batch. In the
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Now Accepting Submissions for TYIVGB 2021
…published before 2021.
Our Senior Curator and contributors work hard each week to present a comprehensive roundup showcasing the breadth and depth of The Discourse, but we can’t possibly catch everything first time out. That’s why, if you feel we overlooked a piece from earlier in this year, we especially encourage you to submit! To submit, simply contact us via email, over Twitter, on Discord, or through the form below! If contacting us on Twitter, be sure to include …
May 2021
Welcome back, readers.
Gosh, this is a very late video-content roundup. It’s been one of those months. Sometimes these things get away from you (in this case ‘things’ meaning ‘watching vods about videogames’, and ‘you’ meaning ‘me’). My apologies. Hopefully this has given you all a bit of extra space to appreciate Chris’s excellent collection of fantastic queer games criticism from the first half of this year.
This Month In Videogame Vlogging highlights the most compelling critical videos about videogames from the previous calendar month.
Historically Speaking
Videogame history videos are a personal non-guilty pleasure
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August 2021
…writing within the paradigm of American self-determinism. [No captions]
Ah, failure… my favourite topic. ‘But failure isn’t always bad!’ suggest these final few videos to round out August 2021. Jon ponders the ways Bloodborne narratively, mechanically and ludically teaches the player to reconcile with failure. (Autocaptions) MidnightCowboi looks at how “glitches” can disrupt the perceived boundaries between emergent design and authorial intent, citing examples Complicated Failures
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September 2021
…Cyberpunk 2077, a video nearly a year in the making and supposedly so long that Youtube seems unable to finish processing it (or at least, that is how some are willing to interpret the vod’s repeated delays). I’m torn about this. On the one hand the criticism-as-spectacle can be fun, and funny, and “epic” video essay length is a strange and undeniably captivating qualifier of this arrangement that somehow works if, well, not quite oppositely, at least differently to written criticism, and I’m sure that’s worth talking about. On the other, I’m not sure I have the time. Anyway while…
July 2021
…experiential qualities of movement through 3D space.
- Getting Lost – Soft & Hollow (18:32)
Against the norm of the navigational assistance usually provided to players, Soft & Hollow highlights a few “navigational horror” games – including Miasmata, Tomb of Rooms, and Perennial – which use combinations of limited, restrained or absent mapping systems with visually obscured environments to create organically scary scenarios. (Manual captions)
- The Tranquility of Traversal – eurothug4000 (16:13)
Maria recalls fond experiences of games in which getting from one place to another becomes, in itself, a relaxing task. (Manual captions)
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