June 29th

Welcome back readers.

This afternoon we’ve been figuring out, to some mild psychic damage, just low long our Discord server has been around (the answer is about five years!), so come and say hi to all of us olds! While you’re at it, consider our Patreon!

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

Pride is a Riot

This week we’re opening with some queer-aligned pieces exploring gender play, asexuality, protest, and more. It looks like Eurogamer has more stuff for their Pride Week in the pipe so hopefully I can report back next week with more to share.

• We Gay We Pay – The Player Side of Protests for RuneScape Pride | Gamesline
  Franny collects from stories from the OSRS community pushing back against the little herb running Jagex.
• Playing With Myself: Asexuality At Play In Course Of Temptation | BP Games Inc.
  MorganH offers an ace perspective on the appeal and introspection of porn games, in both general terms and specific examples.
• How far have we really come since The Sims? A short, sweet history of being bi in games | Eurogamer.net
  Keza MacDonald chronicles the arc in games from playersexuality to more holistic bi representation.
• Crafting My Womanhood in Virtual Worlds | Inner Spiral
  Alli muses on avatars, identity exploration, feminine representation, and the virtual self (Further Reading – Skeleton on femininity in play).

“There was no concrete moment of “I am female” epiphany, but each positive interaction and each moment of comfort in that avatar skin moved the needle a little further towards understanding my own identity. Gaia Online was essentially my gender sandbox. It gave me the courage to later explore femininity in more serious ways, because I had a validating experience there.”

Unimpressed

Our next two picks turn their perspective on the games press, critiquing its principles and practices in both micro and macro.

• One Year Later | Breaking Arrows
  Steven Santana takes inventory of an ongoing laundry list of failures and inaction in games press, whether its standing up for Palestine or protecting writers from abuse (Further Reading – Liz Ryerson on The California Problem).
• We Need to Stop Rewriting our Reactions to Resident Evil 5 | Unwinnable
  Gerard Visco reckons with the whole of RE5‘s critical arc.

“My motive here isn’t to shame you for liking this Resident Evil 5, because if gameplay were the only factor here I would also like this game. My goal is to have an honest conversation about the past. For some, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I’m writing this because while the discourse around Resident Evil 5 has changed, part of that discourse seems to be people pretending they weren’t fully on board with the story being told over a decade ago.”

Polygon Mesh

Fresh critical perspectives on recent games.

• Death Stranding 2 | The White Pube
  Gabrielle de la Puente connects past to present (Further Reading – Ed Smith on the original game).
• If You’re Not The Ref, Lose The Whistle | Unwinnable
  Wallace Truesdale shouts out Rematch as a football game that Gets It, while scrutinizing a subset of players who don’t (Further Reading – Francisco Dominguez on Despelote).

“if you ever find yourself in Rematch repeatedly calling for a pass from a teammate who is facing two defenders, and you feel your brow furrow when the ball is lost, be upset. Poke fun at them. Give them a tongue-lashing if you can be constructive about it. But don’t report them, or even threaten to report them. It makes you a loser even before the game ends.”

Pixel Filter

Fresh critical perspectives on not-so-recent games!

• Feudal Japan Is Better With Robots: Revisiting Legend of the Mystical Ninja | Gamers with Glasses
  Alexander B. Joy reminisces about old-school Goemon as a site of nostalgia without the self-seriousness (Further Reading – Cind on Kabuto Park and moving out of the shadow of Pokémon nostalgia).
• Demonic sci-fi RPG Illusion City is one of those timeless pixel art games that still looks incredible in GIFs 34 years later | PC Gamer
  Kerry Brunskill highlights some killer art direction in a a PC-98 cyberpunk banger of yore.

“Illusion City’s animations are almost decadent in places, but never meaningless. These tiny movements, rendered in such low resolution I can pause to count the pixels, help the setting stand out amongst the other RPGs and cyberpunk tales of the early ’90s (and the 2020s come to think of it).”

Critical Chaser

Two good ones from TIER this week, focused on Anthology of the Killer (Further Reading – Tof Eklund’s prior writing on the same game).

• Laughing at the absurd, the ugly, and the awful | TIER
  Kevin Fox, Jr. positions Anthology of the Killer as, spiritually, an Adult Swim game.
• Every Second is a Narrow Gate | TIER
  Grace Benfell maps out the architecture of historical violence in Anthology of the Killer.

“Killer gets at something real that stretches from the mundane exploitation of city life to historical violence. It is about what lies beneath, either the systems that undergrid our lives and the more literal catacombs under our feet.”

Critical Chaser

Where is all the good writing about making games? Well, some of it is here.

• Rulebooks for Radicals
  Greg Loring-Albright shares some thoughts in zine-form about the relationship games do have to social change, and details the how and why of making your own.