"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…in NieR: Automata have gleaned from the human ruins of gender, beauty, war, and philosophy.
“More than its commitments to ecological fidelity in the game’s rules and its representations, I think ECO should be lauded for staging issues of environmental crisis in online social space where it invites both collaboration, as well as sabotage.” Get out your reading glasses now …
Art and Artist
…the most wasted, misinterpreted character in the latest bat-game might be the city itself.
“Drawing people’s attention using design is a fraught subject in the internet age. Sites like Hot or Not? changed the way our brains work online, while the invention of pop-up and banner advertisements helped to monetize those rapid page changes. But Immortality combines classic-looking, seamless cinematography with the interactivity of a traditional…
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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.
Our opening section this week unpacks both thematic and structural queerness across a variety of games, alongside the lasting influence of these titles on players and developers alike.
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Our next section focuses on language, etymology, and localization. “It’s strange for me to write about this given that my Cantonese is actually terrible, which I attribute to being born and raised in the UK, which comes with
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…years with the wisdom of perspective–much how the initial skepticism around Wind Waker and its shift in art direction has long given way to admiration, the initial warm critical reception enjoyed by Bioshock Infinite has gradually ceded ground to wider critical awareness of the false equivalancies sewn into the game’s half-baked racial politics. These next two pieces look around and beyond their focal texts at a wider critical and contextual landscape.
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…tears in the fabric of this digital reality authored or accidental?”
Breath of the Wild depicted what many described as a “cozy” post-apocalypse–fantasy can be an effective buffer between audiences and material catastrophes. These next three authors and their respective object games examine more grounded choices and consequences in a variety of difficult futures.
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…to, I guess, find ways to resist those kinds of dominant structures, those landlords of the field, those Nintendo and Sony and what not. And so I don’t think it’s a coincidence that, as this kind of expanding of the field has happened, we’ve also seen the first, much more successful rise of game makers unionisation movements, game journalism that cares much more about who’s actually making the games, not just the games themselves. Much greater pushes for all kinds of kind of diversity and whatnot in games. Like all this has only been able to happen because marginal game…
…unpacks the digital patterns of antiblackness in games which continue to oppress and imperil Black lives in real life.
“So necropolitics continues to help us understand the targeted ways that Black bodies experience death in both physical and digital spaces. These systems of social control extend far beyond the physical spaces of jails and prisons, and these practices underscore how carcerality is embedded in and sustained by a range of processes and dynamics, including creating stereotypical characters (Blackness as criminal), the limiting of the Black expression in games (Blackness as the help or sidekick), and the devaluing…
…many exclusive niche games but not so many sal*]}*es–presents a sort of parallel universe to discerning genre sickos. Lia’s entry, which catalogues the experience of the Baten Kaitos games through media galleries and extensive tweet archives, is as much a flex of web-dev engineering as it is compelling window into this parallel universe of sickodom.
…sexualización de Eve en Stellar Blade | GamerFocus Julián Ramírez unpacks the curiously shallow and sexless case of Eve in Stellar Blade (Spanish-language article).
“Loss has never been a neutral expression. Even when my grandmother died, we were asked to attend her wake and burial in our brightest purples. Surgent Studios’ debut game Tal*]}*es of Kenzera: ZAU is the first time that I’ve played through a
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