"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…the latest and greatest roguelikes/lites more accessible and engaging for a wider audience.
“I dedicate nearly a virtual lifetime to building up piety: buying indulgences, going on pilgrimages, and (crucially) abstaining from love affairs. All this to turn around at the last minute with a swift middle finger to the Pope and…
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We’ve got a couple of characer studies this week (or character-archetypes, in the case of Chris Compendio’s piece) operating with the benefit of hindsight by looking at how critical and player reception of these characters/tropes has shifted over time as we grow a little wiser and perhaps a little more wary.
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…Camera in Assassin’s Creed | Cole Writes Words Cole Henry considers the long history of influence the language and techniques of cinema have had on games, and how the original Assassin’s Creed–uniquely in the series–challenges that relationship.
“I think we see evidence of an ongoing pattern of alienation of players from games as…
…emergence of a hard ‘skeuomorphic’ aesthetic – in which the intent to appear in a way to evoke another (older) technology or material ends up informing the game’s core design decisions – in certain Paper Mario, Kirby and Yoshi titles. (No captions)
Jacob Geller compares Albert Marin’s work on creating a texture upgrade mod for Resident Evil 4 to processes of classical art restoration. (Manual captions) [Contains embedded advertising] Hamish
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Our next picks consider videogames and history from within the political moment. Intelligame thinks about Pendragon’s portrayal of restoration and hope in the context of the US Election Day, 2020. (Autocaptions) Kyle Kallgren looks at the 1940s-60s messaging around nuclear weaponry which influenced the aesthetic of the fallout series, and how the perpetual trauma of misinformation resonates in this time of pandemic. (Manual captions) Backward and Forward
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…this week intersect with cyberpunk along different axes, looking at 2077, other games, and the genre itself.
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Let’s start this week with a focused look at trans representation in recent and contemporary games!
“We’ve come a long way from Capcom plugging their ears for decades when Poison’s gender was brought up and Nintendo deadnaming Birdetta in every video game she’s in. Some characters have made great strides in positive trans representation, however, others were clearly written without a single queer person in the room.”
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…in that it is the like underpinnings of our history in games studies. And there’s still a lot of debates, even if people don’t use those terms, there’s a lot of debate between whether we should talk about platform and form or whether we should talk about representational content and cultural meaning as if those two things are opposed. And for me what queer studies does is that it shows us that those two things are not separate. Y’know I’m not as interested in representation, I’m interested in design, I’m interested in computational tools. I’m interested in that stuff that…
…just a little more exaggerated?”
Next up, we have a series of design-focused articles covering a range of topics, from narrative structure, to genre conventions, to spatial navigation, to cynical corporate strategy.
…| Waypoint Grace Benfell examines in Mass Effect‘s Asari a tangled tension between queer possibility and regressive heteronormativity, and how these things come to a head with the Ardat-Yatshi.
“In theory, the asari represent a break from traditional, human modes of gender. In practice, they recreate specific queer discourses of human history, offering either assimilation or death to its queer analogs.” This week we have the pleasure of concluding our issue with two critical art exhibits, author and critic-curated, respectively, situating two well-known and well-loved games into overlooked and underappreciated contexts.
Critical Chaser
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