Search Results for:

narratives

This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2019

…are a frequent consequence of traumatic experiences, and in particular, many popular anti-war narratives, like Catch-22 and Jacob’s Ladder, show memory issues as a symptom of PTSD.

Metal Gear

It’s always Metal Gear O’Clock on the internet, but especially in light of Death Stranding‘s release, 2019 was a banner year for all things Snake. Heather Alexandra’s series of retrospectives is, of course, essential. At Fanbyte, Moira Hicks made the case that Metal Gear is a magical realist series.

Others

At Deorbital, Ty Gale took a look at beloved indie Bastion and the “power fantasy” of…

December 2019

…in touch with any and all videos you’d like to recommend (hashtag TMIVGV), and that goes double for creators that fall outside the over-represented ciswhitedude norm.

Pick-of-the-Month

  • Does Call of Duty Believe in Anything? – Jacob Geller (25:29)

    Jacob Geller explores the discrepancies between Call of Duty’s stated apoliticism, its marketing campaigns, and its renditions of military “controversy” which nevertheless continue to validate status quo narratives of the US military. (Manual captions)

This, in microcosm, is what Call of Duty believes: War is hard, and often brutal, but there are a Few Good

…

January 19th

…of the forays into the genre that came before: direct, dynamic interaction with characters, engagement with the world on a fundamental level, and diegetic systems that keep you immersed within that world.”

Queering the Present Moment

A pair of articles this week weigh in on the state of queer representation in games, looking not only at contemporary titles but also why queerness needs to be a present lived practice in the game narratives.

  • Queer Representation Needs More than a Past | Unwinnable Jeremy Signor discusses why queer characters in games need to be fleshed out…
Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

February 23rd

Welcome back, readers.

I speak sometimes of the overarching themes and narratives that pull together each week’s selections over and above the explicitly delineated categories I come up with here. This week that theme might be games of the 2000s, which by my count comprise solidly half of this week’s selections (Bayonetta and Heavy Rain are close enough). Maybe that’s in part because we’re in the dry part of the year as far as big-budget releases go, but the bottom line is that’s two articles now on skateboarding games in as many weeks, and I’m pretty happy about

…

April 2020

…Plug: there’s a new Keywords In Play episode, this time with Emilie Reed. I’m looking forward to having a listen once I’ve posted this.

This Month in Videogame Vlogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical videos about videogames from the previous calendar month.

This Fictional Dystopia is Happening Now, Actually

The ways certain videogame narratives depict, predict and reflect on our contemporary predicaments was a key topic for three compelling videos this month.

  • Disco Elysium – All Hobocops Are … – Renegade Cut (1:09:09)

    Leon Thomas explores how modern police forces uphold

…

June 7th

…2020 – Gayming Magazine Stacey Henley talks through queer romance, protest, and resisting stereotyping with the developers of A Summer’s End.

“Hong Kong is its own character in the story, and one of increased importance given the current political landscape. However, Michelle and Sam tell a powerful story on their own, and represent queer narratives often ignored in fiction.”

Contemporary Waking Nightmares

We close out the week with two meditative reflections on games which themselves reflect the uniquely contemporary anxieties of this generation.

  • Pleasant Nights, Troubled Dreams: She Dreams Elsewhere | RE:BIND…

July 2021

…Virtual Displacements

Here are a couple of thoughtful and well-researched essays on the representation – or lack thereof – of displaced and disempowered peoples in videogames.

  • “Decolonization is not a metaphor”: Settler Colonialism and Indigeneity in Video Games – Game Assist (2:01:17)

    Daz and Sara look at how indigeneity has been implicitly coded in the fantasy worlds of various videogames, demonstrating how these games perpetuate settler-colonial narratives and illustrate Tuck and Yang’s framework of “settler moves to innocence”. (Autocaptions)

  • Empathy for the Refugee in “Bury Me My Love” – LambHoot (44:56)

    LambHoot explores how

…

May 2020

…Have Nots, and how Midgar’s construction reflects some of the complexities of environmental poverty and racism. (Manual captions)

  • The Post-Apocalyptic Aesthetic – eurothug4000 (16:50)

    eurothug4000 surveys the common visual cues of post-apocalyptic worlds in a whole bunch of games, pondering the link of this style to the current popularity of urban exploration (UrbEx) video productions and the contemporary aesthetic of disused/decaying spaces of late-capitalism. (Manual captions)

Work/Precarity

The relationship of game worlds and narratives to imagined, representational and real work is explored in the following three fascinating pieces.

  • the original Mario

    …

The Stanley Parable

…glass to the “flaws” of typical game narratives, and tells its own story largely by employing those very “flaws” on its own terms. “TSP joyfully embraces the fact that its players come to games to play – to fiddle around with interactions, to push the boundaries of what is possible, and to ask inconvenient questions like ‘why can’t I open this door?’” Writing for Pixels or Death, Jason Rice compares the direction and narrative form of TSP to the non-linear interactive theatre of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More production.

Just like the first time you go in the

…

Bioshock: Infinite

…the future, games will include engaging, socially responsible narratives that complement exciting gameplay.”

Brendan Vance, in March of 2015, wrote “The Ghosts of Bioshock”, interrogating the ways that Infinite used artifice, American nationalism, and Manifest Destiny in its narrative, specifically looking at Booker’s symbolic nature as an avatar of American expansionist genocide. Vance ties together history (American and global) with the game’s attempts to tell a grand story of American identity.

In the world of Infinite it is not the Sioux who rise into the air at the moment of Wovoka’s great flood, but instead Comstock and

…