August 13th
…that they have already translated.
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April 29th
…only slightly less brave to call them “linear.” Robert Venturi and Fredric Jameson didn’t have to wait for ludology to be invented so they could wrap their heads around the nonlinear spaces of Las Vegas and the Bonaventure Hotel, respectively. Similar observations could be made for sculpture or improvisational music. In these art forms the distinction between linear and nonlinear is just a nonsense. It does not even arise as a problem in the first place.
Go read his whole argument and then tell me you don’t get a sense that Things Could Be Wholly Other about videogame…
This Year In Videogame Blogging: 2015
…
In her essay “Against Flow” Lana Polansky jump-starts a conversation about the “flow” convention of “traditional design,” claiming it numbs subjectivity and side-steps politics in art. Cameron Kunzelman pushed Polansky’s “ideological container” concept further by exploring flow’s origin as a vague term slowly stripped of that vagueness, turning instead into a conservative moniker. Heather Alexandra continued the train of thought left by the previous two and proposed a more interesting, sublime state of engagement with games.
Gita Jackson brought up the 60fps debate and why videogame producers should not invoke cinema too casually, as though film weren’t itself
…
June 19th
…seemed relatively quiet. Part of that may indeed be a respectful silence as people take time to make sense of their place in a troubled world. However, part of it is a normal thing that always happens during E3: the games press is flooded with product announcements, and there isn’t much space for critical writing.
This means a shorter roundup, but it also means I had a bit of extra time, so I took the opportunity to look at blogs in languages other than English. You’ll find those at the bottom.
Bosses
Amid the hubbub about product…
February 9th
…that the geniuses and surely bleary eyed staff at Square Enix may perfect it. It all hurts though, it all takes so much fucking time. Why build a castle for an audience of no one when we may be better served building experiences we can share?”
Critical Chaser
Maybe you can go home, after all–but at what cost?
- Revisiting Animal Crossing: New Leaf Was A Mistake | Kotaku Narelle Ho Sang recounts the horror of coming back years later to a game and a town that never stops counting the days you’ve been gone.
…
This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2020
…racism is not always the conscious personal failing of an individual developer, but something that emerges from the context of racial inequity.
Content warning: transphobia and homophobia. Final Fantasy VII Remake
January 17th
…bring an end to the practice of editors + marketers dispatching vampires to raid our community in search of personal prestige. We demand you take responsibility for the negative consequences of your conspicuous laundering. At the very least, you must dispense with these tedious lies re: what your real motives + incentives are.”
Endings and Beginnings
If you didn’t already know, there’re doing some pretty cool stuff over at fractals. Gathered here are three retrospectives examining what games meant to the respective authors in a year of uncertainty and upheaval.
- 2020: The Problem is Capitalism…
February 14th
…a businessman, cameraman, waiter, or guard, a white cis man is no remarkable sight. They are free of skepticism and the visibility that would be offered to nearly anyone else. In turn, while violence against the powerful might be a claim to a better world for the marginalized, for Agent 47 it is simply a job. He cannot be a person; he is a professional. Though it is alienation of labor that lets him do his work, it also alienates him. While his identity allows him anonymity, it also obscures any real, chosen sense of self. He is everyone and…
October 24th
…I Must Scream | The Digital Antiquarian Jimmy Maher tells the peculiar tale of a surreal sci-fi point-and-click horror game and a co-designer seemingly categorically opposed to the very medium.
“Having entered the meeting hoping only to secure the rights to Ellison’s short story, Pat Ketchum thus walked away having agreed to a full-fledged collaboration with the most choleric science-fiction writer in the world, a man destined to persist forevermore in referring to him simply as “the toad.” Whether this was a good or a bad outcome was very much up for debate.” …
Identity Axes
March 28th
…chronicles Aloy’s character arc in Forbidden West from Annoying YouTube Athiest to someone with a bit more empathy for the value of spirituality in other people’s lives (Spanish-language article).
“Elden Ring has taken the experience of getting absorbed in old-school fantasy literature and translated it into something special: flawed and imperfect, like all art, but a perfect analogue for the inherent solitude and emotional resonance of reading a transportive fantasy novel.” …