"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…come together as a coherent and meaningful whole.
“The creators of 80 Days took the time to question the foundations of both their source material and the medium they were working in. Sometimes that’s what it takes to find something new worth building.” Keep reading; it’s not always “just” a bad game over …
Critical Chaser
…Creed Unity: Ubisoft can’t help rebuild Notre-Dame cathedral | Polygon Simone de Rochefort debunks the idea that Assassin’s Creed Unity‘s adaptation of Notre-Dame could serve as a basis for reconstruction efforts along axes of game design, copyright, and the living history of the cathedral itself.
“The Notre-Dame that existed during the French Revolution would be unrecognizable to us today. The original gargoyles were removed around 1726. The nave’s stained glass was replaced with white glass — to better illuminate the interior — in the 1750s. In the 1770s, a huge chunk was taken out of the central…
…Uppercut De’Angelo Epps traces the thematic trajectory across the No More Heroes games from sensational cynicism to hopeful redemption.
“What might be interpreted as moral complexity in a man can easily become aloofness in a…
…and their gaming habits, from Columbine onward).
“By externalizing the cause of white violence from perpetrators, these narratives both assume and reinforce white innocence, abdicating mass shooters for responsibility, and scapegoating a single entertainment form without meaningfully interrogating the broader culture that has produced it.” Next up are two pieces about two very different games, a full 60 years apart in time, united by the conversations of preservation and historicity.
Save States
…closely from the previous section, these next three featured authors explore critical tensions in the thematic and ideological threads that tie their games of study to our own world, past and present.
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…site, we’ve got a new Keywords! This episode’s guest is Dr. Esther Wright, discussing her forthcoming book Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity.
This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.
To open this week we’re looking at intersections between games and state power, along axes of game design, story worlds, and labour organization.
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…new topics in player experience and sound engineering; check ’em out!
“Pessimistically, it might seem like the rock-star developers of the time threw a sound into their splashy new game because they could
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…best bosses and locations drew inspiration from an unlikely source | Inverse Cian Maher takes inventory of how Elden Ring is absolutely suffused with influence from Irish mythology and points out, among other things, that you’ve probably been pronouncing “Siofra” wrong.
“To live in the Global South is to brave apocalyptic conditions enacted…
…pushing technological boundaries, but what about the side-projects and spinoffs? To understand these smaller titles, it’s important to situate them in their respective times, places, and platforms, like our next two featured writers do here.
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…the particular pleasures of Rollercoaster Tycoon specifically and management sims more broadly.
“It’s a deference to an idea of “rationality” that lets you escape interrogating the underlying premises…