"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…Experience (Content warnings: Mentions of dubious consent and BDSM and NSFW images) Heather Alexandra discusses consent and sexual negotiation in Ladykiller in a Bind and Mystic Messenger and how these games allowed her to explore her own sexuality.
…is neoconservative, being both moral and regulatory and having encounters that frequently revolve around ideas of controlling sexuality and identity. Goodneighbour is neoliberal, being amoral in its ends and means with inhabitants enjoying drugs, jazz and paying the Sole Survivor to enact state-sanctioned violence against its inhabitants.”
A particularly important example of historical portrayals in games at the moment is Mafia III, which has attracted a great deal of insightful writing over the past few weeks. This week is no exception.
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…the signposts that prompt you always onto the next star system.
“Between pushing environmental stories through found objects and walks through corridors that emphasize hone in distance in geography, the player is constantly getting one clear message: time and space matter” Back on earth, we have been critiquing gender and bodies as they are portrayed and catered to across games …
No Man’s Kyriarchy
…game as a memorial for the developer’s son Joel Green and a personal exploration of their faith.
The Division
Homefront: The Revolution
…chapters
Our understanding of the world is only ever provisional and partial, but when it comes to some of the most shameful aspects of our own history, how do we ensure there’s some sort of consensus about reality? “Kansteiner complains …
…noise triple-A produces; rather, it’s encouraging you to listen to a different song once in a while.
Technical investigations into games are a common part of the writing scene, but it’s rare for them to be a form of criticism in themselves.
…space to deviate from those ideas, or allow games to be understood on their own terms.”
Discussions on how spaces function in games returned this week, intersecting with some particularly morose topics that seem to have been on people’s minds.
…Robert Yang presents an illuminating reading list and personal evaluation on cultural scamming, translation, and exchange.
“If I had to sum up all this conversation, I’d say it feels like talking about cultural appropriation is ultimately a bit of a trap, but at the same time, it is necessary for us to fall into it. The alternative is to fall into a much worse trap, full of unchallenged racism and ignored pain and hot molten lava. Compared to that trap, this one isn’t so bad, right? And then when we eventually figure out how to crawl out…
The familiarity of portrayals of combat, pain, and trauma were explored by many critics this week, as people look at how tropes get started, how they are perpetuated, and how they can be subverted.
Critical reflection on E3 has so far focused on the overwhelming dominance of combat-oriented games, with a bit of attention also given to reports of poor event planning.
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