Search Results for:

killing

August 15th

…a pair of authors survey the PS2-era Final Fantasy games, unpacking their critical themes with an eye for both grand narrative movements and smaller-scale vignettes.

  • High and Low – Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age | PixPen Sam Howitt zooms in on the smaller-scale stories Final Fantasy XII has to tell about class and privilege.
  • Killing Our Gods: Faith Remains in Final Fantasy X – Uppercut Grace Benfell contemplates structure and sacrifice, community and cruelty, as she unpacks Spira’s complicated relationship with faith.

“FFX believes that more is possible. Together, with the families that

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February 21st

…| GamingBible Dean Abdou observes how a war game about war crimes in the Middle East can only be apolitical in a wider industry framework that positions Arabs and other marginalized identities as the villains by default.

“When playing a video game that normalises players killing hundreds of Arabs, it risks slowly indoctrinating young audiences to see brown people as nothing but throwaway ragdolls. Six Days In Fallujah doubles down on this normalisation with the creators’ insistence that it isn’t a political game. All this serves to highlight is that it’s instead just another game to reinforce…

February 28th

…them in how we relate them to our own messy lives.

  • White Space | Into The Spine Amelia Zollner reflects on what the player takes away from Omori‘s tale of mental illness struggles (content notification for discussions of depression, anxiety, and self-harm).
  • Killing Our Gods: When Tomorrow Comes – Uppercut Grace Benfell relates a game that isn’t simple to a life, an identity that isn’t static.

“What is a human without dust or air or water? How can we define ourselves without the homes in which we have lived or the food that we

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March 21st

…storytelling, and talks about how creators can get started making weird and cool art in this format.

“I think this is a really important creative philosophy to preserve. We lost pretty much all of it, largely because of killing Flash. The type of website I describe was often built with Flash. This wasn’t preserved. Flash games, on the other hand, were… but I think it’s important to bring this up, because there’s no reason that websites need to be this “dead format” that we’ve come to accept.”

Practice Makes Perfect

Next up, we have

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April 18th

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Interventions Divine and Otherwise

Here we’ve got a trio of pieces that situate their subject games in the contemporary material-world frameworks and structures that give them meaning. One does so to intervene, while another is ultimately more passively reflective of the world in which it has been made, and Neo Cab manages to pull off both.

  • Killing Our Gods: The Divine Family of Hades Mimics Earthly Capitalist Structures – Uppercut Grace Benfell is back with a deep structural analysis of Hades‘ ultimate reaffirmation of the heterosexual nuclear family.
  • Goodbye Cruel World | Electron Dance Joel

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March 2021

…(Manual captions)

Violently Aware

Finally, this trio of essays finds their authors grappling with their complicity of in-game violence.

  • On Indie, Oxenfree | Story Without Killing – Micah Edmonds (26:07)

    Micah Edmonds uses a belated playthrough of narrative adventure game Oxenfree to think about how to go about really enjoying games if not the dopamine-feedback loop of combat. (Autocaptions)

  • Ski Sniper – SWITCH STANCE – Joe Bush (17:34)

    Joe Bush tries to come to terms with his enjoyment of the absurdist violence of Ski Sniper. (Autocaptions)

  • Was Call of Duty: Black

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April 2021

…Animal Crossing and Climate Change – Red Letter Daze (14:20)

Deanne uses Animal Crossing: New Horizons and a tarot reading as launching points to recognise some of the ongoing and future horrors of climate change in the real world. (No captions)

  • Gris as a Barnum Statement | Story Without Killing – Micah Edmonds (25:15)

    Micah Edmonds chats to Tarot reader Bridie O’Dare about the affective power of vagueness in Gris. (Autocaptions)

    • Style and Substance

    Our next picks were more difficult to classify, deep dives with insightful analyses.

    • The Style of Bayonetta –

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    June 6th

    …or the anthropocene these days, but in truth that’s only ever half the story behind this writing. If you sit with these texts, there are also new beginnings to look forward to and to strive for. Apocalypses are endings to troubled times, so what can a brighter morning look like after?

    • Egress | Unwinnable Autumn Wright turns to stories of apocalypse-as-present, interrogating meaning in cyclicity in Hadestown and Nier: Automata.
    • Killing Our Gods: A Game Beyond the Endgame—On Anodyne 2, Judgement, and Revolution – Uppercut Grace Benfell unpacks Anodyne 2 through a revolutionary lens, by way of

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    Adrienne Shaw | Keywords in Play, Episode 14

    …the game, and you just put everybody to sleep, you don’t kill anybody, that’s built into the game. Like if there’s a badge associated with it, you know, somebody made it into the game. Versus you know, there’s stories of people who want to play through all of World of Warcraft as pacifists, it’s actually really hard to do that unless you’ve matched up with people who will do all your killing for you. And so like, that’s something that’s not built into the game, and that you have to find a way around what the game wants you to…

    This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2021

    …Keeling reunites Silent Hill 2 with the feminist art and artists to which it owes inspiration.

  • The Death of Adventure Games that Never Was – Vagrant Cursor Clara Fernandez-Vara observes that genres in games almost never actually die, and that proclamations of their deaths more often reflect a reductive historical approach to games that favours popular trends and the North American market in particular.
  • Killing Our Gods: Faith Remains in Final Fantasy X – Uppercut Grace Benfell contemplates structure and sacrifice, community and cruelty, as she unpacks Spira’s complicated relationship with faith.

    • As much as…