June 22nd

Welcome back readers.

Fifteen fresh picks this week. Your readership and support keep this train running, so come hang out on our Discord, and consider taking a look at our Patreon.

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

Third Date

Our first section this week brings together critical discussions of both dating sims and adult games, analog and digital, with audience and author perspectives.

• Date Everything claims to be a dating sim, but it doesn’t love or understand its own genre | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill finds the recent Date Everything to be ahistorical, noncommittal, and inconsequential.
• Why You Should F**k With Horny Tabletop Roleplaying Games | Them
  Linda Codega explores the many exploratory, recuperative, and cathartic returns of adult TTRPGs in conversation with designers, sex educators, and more (Further Reading – Luis Aguasvivas on Molly House).
• Yes, It Was Worth It: An Argument For Quality Porn Games | BP Games Inc.
  Zoquete reflects on the development and thematic goals of their game Deathblossom, and why stripping out the porn in pursuit of a mainstream audience would be missing the point.

“I said that “anything creative has its creator inside of it” and in my case, Deathblossom is a perfect example. The characters and story emerged from my own confrontation of mortality, forays into existentialism, and struggles with identity. The dubcon, deepthroating, and giant horsecock gangbangs with a towering femdom bull-skeleton come from the same place, and to me each half of the story is incomplete without the other. There are many places in the narrative where I can point to choices I made and recognize myself there in a uniquely honest and authentic way.”

In Play

Here are a couple of pieces on recent games, with looks at human authorship and community care.

• How The Roottrees are Dead ditched AI and became a hit | The Verge
  Jay Castello chronicles a happy outcome for a mystery game that shed its LLM baggage in favour of human artistry.
• ‘Promise Mascot Agency’ Shows the Power within the Pinky | PopMatters
  Wallace Truesdale looks at the bigger picture of community care in Promise Mascot Agency (Further Reading – Hiero de Lima on feminine agency in the same game).

“It becomes clear in Promise Mascot Agency that its citizens are not incapable; they feel disempowered. They’ve taken a lot of heavy punches under Mayor Maeda. Still, they want better for themselves and their town, a place bursting with history. What they needed wasn’t to wait for their evil mayor to turn a new leaf, it was a spark to contribute to their revitalization. Once these residents find themselves in a place of support, you’d be hard pressed to find someone unwilling to give it.”

Beam Katana

Our next two pieces are both engaged with the work of Grasshopper Manufacture, and both pieces take as their focus kinds and deployments of violence.

• The blurred line between satire and reality in No More Heroes’ treatment of women | Medium
  Ashley Schofield unpacks whether No More Heroes is “in on the joke” of its own misogyny (Further Reading: De’Angelo Epps on No More Heroes‘ thematic arc).
• The Killer Is Happy / The Killer Feels Nothing | Stop Caring
  Artemis Octavio unravels the violent dichotomies of Killer7.

“Violence is, and forever will be, a burden. It is easy to laugh, to play, to engage in the ‘theatrics’ of violence when one is not a killer – when one is the subject of violence and not the executor of such. As much as Killer7 broadens conversations of violence, it ends by hyper-focusing on how killing affects people on an individual level – in its climax, it shows what happens when killers have a moment of consciousness, along with the pain and devastation that it brings.”

Red Check

Lots of continuity between these next three picks, all of which revolve around choice structuring and narrative design.

• in 1000xRESIST, you’re not choosing | a weapon to surpass blaming yourself or god while knee-deep in the dead
  Chuck Sebian-Lander muses on 1000xRESIST‘s structural unwillingness to instill a false sense of choice.
• Re-learning Narrative Design Lessons from Children’s Books: A Preview | Essay Games Blog
  Nicholas O considers the impatient player as a narrative design challenge.
• Immersion, Empathy, and Fate: What Remains After What Remains of Edith Finch | Unwinnable
  Simon Liu re-examines the relationship between immersion and interactivity, and how digital games create investment in their characters and stories (Further Reading – August Moulang on desire paths and game design).

“If Edith Finch were a film, we could watch each character’s death, but we would not be the one walking them toward it. Such staging of deaths and Edie’s fantasization of them, is where the game’s target emotion blends with the player’s own curiosity. Edith Finch is meant to be played in such a way that players gradually stop caring about the deaths of the characters, and even become curious about them.”

Substratum

Next we’ve got three deep critical reads on very different games.

• The Ghosts of Fascism in The Legend of Zelda | The Bunker
  Matteo Lupetti interprets a hauntological Hyrule Fantasy.
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Spiritfarer and Saying Goodbye | Press Play Gaming
  Chris Lawn reflects on grief, art-as-escape, and end-of-life care.
• Tea for One | Reverse Shot
  Esther Rosenfield concludes that Davey Wreden’s latest and coziest has a subversive bent to it after all (Further Reading – Matt Gaffen on the same game).

“Understanding Wanderstop, and cozy games in general, necessitates understanding the concept of extrinsically motivated and intrinsically motivated players. An extrinsically motivated player will do things in a game because of the promise of a reward, while an intrinsically motivated player will do things because they offer a different kind of satisfaction. It’s the difference between a player who will rush through quests in a Spider-Man game in order to acquire upgrade materials and unlock more gadgets and skills, and one who will spend their time swinging around the city simply because it feels good. Alta is a stubbornly extrinsically motivated character, and Wanderstop is designed to challenge her.”

Critical Chaser

Two more for the sign-off this week.

• Confetti’s Cozy Corner: Black American games industry trailblazers who inspire me! | Gayming Magazine
  Milady Confetti shouts out Black creatives and professionals in the industry for Juneteenth.
• SiIvaGunner Is An Elaborate Game Music Joke Collective And One Of The Best Parts Of YouTube | Aftermath
  Chris Person profiles the decentralized not-for-profit art collective in everlasting pursuit of the highest quality rips.

“In our case, the salted earth we struggle against is the collapse of a media ecosystem. In SiIvaGunner’s case, it thrives in the foul topsoil of YouTube. They have managed to survive thanks in no small part to a lot of work and because they have each other. It is democratic and constantly trying to be better, with each contributing according to their ability – from lowly ripper, QoC, to art, planning, and everyone in Backroom. And even, or rather because, it makes no money, it represents the best of what the internet can be.”