"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…Chaos of History – Uppercut Grace Benfell studies how both Jedi Fallen Order and Sekiro Shadows Die Twice examine ritual and spirituality, through both their pitfalls and possible redemptions. SHIT this was good.
“KOTOR 2 is one of the few pieces of Star Wars media I’ve been exposed to that recognizes how fucking terrifying it must be…
…much every stripe of bigotry).
“If the games industry had taken a bold stand during GamerGate then subsequent events may have taken a different course. Maybe the later alt-right campaigns would have felt less emboldened or been less successful. Maybe major players in the realms of social media would have felt obliged to make real changes and take real substantive action. Maybe it could have all been different. But that isn’t the reality, and we can now say for sure that the games industry was on the wrong side of history for this one.”
Giving…
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A pair of pieces document some early incursions of videogames onto TV.
Bobdunga presents a neat retrospective on 90’s Canadian children quiz show Video & Arcade Top 10, celebrating its focus on fun and participation in a time before gameplay footage was abundantly available. (Autocaptions)
To uh, celebrate (?) the madness of The Game Awards, which also happened in December, NowThis
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…to save human society and history. Everything will end. Endings are inevitable. But that doesn’t mean the end of everything.”
I just want to reiterate how glad I am to see the continued proliferation of critical writing on small-scale indie games and other stuff that big sites typically miss. Here are two of this week’s standouts.
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…justified, or necessary?
“Killing Hitler is an easy choice. Who is more universally recognized as deserving of a violent death? But Hitler’s evilness is largely left abstract in video games, presupposing a knowledge and understanding of why Hitler’s death should feel
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…crisis-of-the-moment.
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…the real-world climate and conservation issues that disproportionately endanger islands and island communities.
“Games like SimCity have been promoted by proponents in the gaming and tech industries as a useful tool for teaching the fundamentals of city planning, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons has taken some cues from the same philosophies in terms of how it frames the process of developing…
…is thriving, right?! And so, and then another way of looking at it, the origin of it is that he was actually acting to, he uses the term appropriate survivance from the French. And so he took the French term to act back on them to say “actually our stories, our oral stories, and our re-tellings of history are in fact valid in the court of law”. That was actually the very beginning of the term ‘survivance’ and so it is interesting how even that terminology goes back to, being able to have power, within a court setting in order…
…think it now can be easier than ever for anyone to understand why I spend so much time being a part of make-believe communities where there’s always someone who wants to talk, and always something I can do to help.”
Two authors this week look back at remakes–both of individual popular titles, since that’s a thing right now, as well as of the industry itself, via a charming what-if visual novel.