May 11th

Welcome back readers.

This issue is out pretty late for my local timezone, but it’s here! If you want to do the funniest thing ever you can join our Discord and submit really long pieces for me to read to see if you can push our weekly “Sunday” update into Wednesday or Thursday. If you want to do the second funniest thing you can join our Patreon. Okay, that one’s probably not that funny, but it’s very warmly appreciated.

This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

Despelote

There’s lots of attention around the slice-of-life football-and-other-stuff-kicking game with the striking visual style, and for good reason. Here are three pieces unpacking it from slightly different angles.

• Despelote review: Football. Bloody hell! | Skybox
  Francisco Dominguez dwells on Despelote‘s melancholic dance between memory and metacommentary (Further Reading – Nicanor Gordon on Despelote, memory and community).
• Despelote Review | Well-Played
  Josefina Huq muses on the march of time through the playful perspective of an eight-year-old.
• Despelote review: miraculous slice-of-life soccer game pulls a hat trick | Digital Trends
  Moises Taveras plays a game that gets it.

“How often will I ever see such vivid recreations of latino boyhood on this scale? Or see the personhood of my neighbors or even the guy that worked the colmado around the corner from my old place? When I stopped going back to my familial home, opting instead to make a life with family and friends here, I forfeited my chance to hold those things tightly again. Despelote clings to them as tightly as possible, and in turn, I’ve affixed myself to it.”

Critical Cuts

A pair of strong, raw personal pieces on how a game fits into a life, how a life fits into a game.

• Wanderstop – the game that gave me permission to sit with my pain
  Matt Gaffen unwinds Wanderstop‘s painful therapeutic core.
• The fantasy of playing Final Fantasy | The Verge
  Joseph Earl Thomas tells his kids a story about the world (of Eorzea).

“Fantasies of full immersion glitter on repeat across the pandemic-ravaged synapses of your brain. It is a peculiar sensation, this forked road of desire and responsibility, children or game, both shortcuts away from sociality, or sex, or thought: two radically opposed sets of reality, two modes of impression upon the world, two diffracted futures in which you die anyway. The children laugh at your body, dying like that. The bath is too hot, then too cold. Then they splash murky water all the way from the bathroom onto your carpet and PlayStation controller as you try to explain the situation to your beleaguered team members via in-game party chat. Responses range from, Oh I get it man, to laments about the reproductive class ruining the real world and this one. Time is of the present, and you wonder, is the New World still new if it takes too long to get there?”

On Loop

This next pair both deal with time loop games, as well as their relation to memory, experience, and being stuck in a bad place.

• Trapped In The Loop of ‘In Stars and Time’ | Epilogue Gaming
  Flora Merigold muses on being caught in the loop on both sides of the screen.
• No, really, Returnal is about joy | Lia’s blog
  Lia offers an expansive excavation of the horror and ecstacy of Selene’s penance and metamorphosis (Further Reading – In addition to Lia’s own in-text citations, check out Sam Moore’s thoughts on the psychospatial topography of Control and Returnal).

“There is no regret left here. Selene is reaching for transcendance, for a form of religious ecstasy that leaves everything behind, even though she never quite gets there as that would require the game to truly end. Yet in that tension that doesn’t resolve there is clear pleasure mixed with the agony. She knows that what is at the end of the journey is worth every second of martyrdom.”

Well Preserved

Here we’ve got some interviews on preservation–of games and of health.

• This Emeryville archive pledges to level up gamer lore | 48 hills
  Leah Isobel chats with the VGHF folks about the past, present, and future of archival and preservation efforts for games (Further Reading – Joey Wawzonek on archiving Japanese print gaming media publications, documents, and artifacts).
• “Long COVID Mode”: Seeing the crisis through games | The Sick Times
  Kate Fishman chats with the academics, designers, modders, and artists building awareness through play of the risks (and mitigation strategies) for COVID and Long COVID (Further Reading – Phoenix Simms on chronic illness, disability, and status effects).

“Games uniquely incorporate emotional and social factors that influence how we take in information — making them surprisingly useful communication tools in a world in denial about the ongoing threats of COVID-19 and Long COVID. Whether through the cathartic storytelling in indie designers’ interactive theater projects or learning opportunities woven into popular video games, playing games can help people make informed decisions amid the Long COVID crisis. They can also bring us together in an absence of public health support.”

Out of Bounds

This section is about breaking out of the walled garden and its endless, algorithmic carousel.

• A Guide To Freeware Games That Will Run On Anything | startmenu
  Adam W surveys the abundant riches outside the walled (and increasingly expensive) gardens of commercial games (Further Reading – John Thyer on why videogame consoles ain’t what they used to be).
• We Can’t Rewatch Our Way Out of This | Inner Spiral
  Alli looks to to the liberatory potentials of communities of play outside and against the algorithm (Further Reading – Diego Nicolás Argüello talks to Argentine players about subscription services, ownership, preservation, and piracy).

“In the future, my hope is that we can start to transform those personal joys into a collective reality, and to insist that our advanced tech and creativity be used to set us free, not cage us in. It’s a challenge to corporations, yes, but also to each of us, to support the art and media that bring us actual joy, broaden our horizons rather than retreating into safe nostalgia all the time, and to make space in our lives for unproductive, no-strings-attached way. If we can do that, even in the smallest of ways, we begin to wipe away the gray walls of commodification and let in bright flashes of colour and laughter. Bit by bit, what is a stagnating landscape can become a playground again. And perhaps one day we’ll look around and find that the genuine fun we longed for was here all along, growing in those cracks, waiting for us to notice and join in.”

Tunnel Visionary

Here we’ve paired up pieces on design practices and connections to other media forms.

• Jack and the Beanstalk – “Magic bag of beans” | Super Chart Island
  Iain Mew observes the curious confluences between games, film, and pantomine theatre in an eye-catching fairy-tale game for the ZX Spectrum.
• Space is not a wall: toward a less architectural level design | Radiator Blog
  Robert Yang aims for a more holistic approach to playable spaces.

“Don’t let architectural envy do your thinking for you. Organization, realism, and minimalism are just tools. Instead, think critically about what your specific game experience needs, and design for that.”

Bon Gommage

This set of picks are varied in topic and structure, but all connect their games and texts to the cares of the wider world.

• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 explicado – Análisis a fondo de la historia, finales y temas del juego | GamerFocus
  Julián Ramírez unspools Clair Obscur‘s major themes and curious absences (Further Reading – Wallace Truesdale on Clair Obscur‘s meditations on structural violence).
• The GTA 6 trailer makes Rockstar’s changed politics very clear | Polygon
  Maddy Myers contemplates the fruits of a changed developer culture at Rockstar.
• 45 Years Later, Balatro Perfected A Beloved Cantonese Card Game | Inverse
  Shannon Liao connects the viral deckbuilder to another card game from her childhood.
• What’s A Gun For? | Unwinnable
  Wallace Truesdale is on point with this look at F.E.A.R., gun culture, and supernatural horror (Further Reading – Skeleton on F.E.A.R.‘s post-9/11 cocktail of gunplay and paranormal intrigue).
• The Banality of AI Hell, or: We Were Worried About the Wrong Thing | Unwinnable
  Emma Kostopolus identifies the problem as not a hyper-intelligent machine that outcompetes us, but a banal one that we submit to.

“The example of System Shock is particularly relevant here – in the original game, SHODAN fashions herself a god and attempts across entries in the franchise to reshape reality to better suit her vision (mostly through murder). The computer has decided that it knows better than humanity, because it is faster, smarter, better and it gets a fair amount of the way towards accomplishing its cruelly utilitarian goals before getting shut down. But the crux of all of this is that the robot is smarter than us – it can solve problems faster than we can and handle complex information in ways we simply cannot. The reality of AI is something quite different – the robot isn’t smarter. It’s making us dumber.”

Critical Chaser

Wind your way through this week’s closing act.

• Degrees of freedom in live-space | Cordite Poetry Review
  August Moulang wanders off the beaten path.

“Desire paths emerge and persist through the power of collective hum. They remind us of the power of divergence in building commonality; a rebellion against the ‘good enough’ that honours organic, human-centric and instinctual design. In games, rigidity suffocates and disengages. Increasingly, players seek stylised and embellished replications of their lived experience, their immersion pulsing like heatwaves out from the central device – choice.”