Spotlight:

Remembering Paste Games: 2010 – 2026

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Welcome back, readers.

This is a rather impromptu edition of the roundup. It’s not something any of us ever envisioned writing. Indeed, when games media has endured other layoffs and outlet closures we haven’t immediately rushed to memorialize them in this fashion (though maybe we should have done). But when an institution like Paste Games, an outlet that has provided a home to essentially all of our favorite games critics for well over 15 years, is unceremoniously shuttered, it doesn’t feel right to let things go without comment.

Paste has been publishing meaningful games criticism for as long as Critical Distance has been collecting it. In a real sense, Paste set the agenda for good games criticism that we recorded, week in and week out. Paste was a science lab, an incubator, a test area for the kind of thoughtful, incisive criticism we have always wanted to see more of and which more conventional outlets weren’t interested in publishing, and while many people are responsible for this effort, none were so consistently involved and invested in the success of Paste Games as Senior Editor Garrett Martin. It’s thanks to Martin and a revolving team of assistant editors, like Maddy Myers, Gita Jackson, Jenn Frank, Holly Green, Moises Taveras, and most recently, Associate Editor Elijah Gonzalez, that Paste was able to stand as such a indefatigable cornerstone of games criticism through the 2020s. Losing Paste, the house that Martin built, is like waking up to discover that water no longer exists.

There’s a lot one could say about this moment. It’s saddening, naturally; infuriating most definitely. The owners of Paste Media couldn’t see or seemingly understand what kind of tidal force Paste Games had become, and so games criticism as a whole is now poorer for it. Gently, the death of Paste Games, and of games media more broadly, was/is not from natural causes.

Today, though, we’re not here to simply wail and gnash our teeth at the loss of a giant in our space. There is room for that. But there is also room for celebration and reminiscing. And, in the spirit of Steven Santana’s Reading Manifesto, there is room for reading. We will keep Paste Games alive by reading, and sharing, and preserving the work everyone who wrote there put out into the world—a body of criticism that was deeply personal, highly political, and often incredibly piercing, that comprises the story of videogames in the modern era.

So, for this roundup, we came up with not one but two lists: articles submitted by Paste writers and our readers; and articles that previously featured in our “This Year in Videogame Blogging” roundups. Astonishingly, there wasn’t as much of an overlap between these two lists as I thought there’d be, and so between the both of them we ended up with an even 140 articles to share. And since this isn’t a typical roundup but a celebration, fuck it—you’re getting ’em all. Quips will be around with the usual later today. I’ll be back in a couple hours with the monthly Patreon roundup. Long live Paste Games! Long live games criticism.

Previous TYIVGB Honorees (By Year)

2011

  • On Videogame Criticism | Tom Bissell, Simon Ferrari
    It feels particularly poignant that the first entry in our list is a letter series between writer Tom Bissell and academic games scholar Simon Ferrari about the nature of games criticism and the tension between storytelling and mechanics both academically and within game development. This letter series was first published at Paste in February 2011 by one of Martin’s predecessors, Kirk Hamilton, and echoes of the discussion have reverberated in critical spaces ever since.
  • The Final Fantasy VII Letters | Leigh Alexander, Kirk Hamilton
    Speaking of letters, the next honoree from 2011 was this correspondence series between Hamilton and Leigh Alexander, who was writing primarily for Gamasutra (now Game Developer) at the time. Alexander plays the Virgil to Hamilton’s Dante as he explores the world of Midgar for the first time, with both of them interested in questions around nostalgia and legacy around Final Fantasy VII. (Letter 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10)
  • Portal 2 (Multi-Platform) | Kirk Hamilton 
    Finally, Hamilton allegorizes the complex and balletic physics display of Portal 2 to a Rube Goldberg machine, with the player as the domino. Unfortunately, time and link rot has taken away some of the visual elements of this review.

Portal 2 is simply a game that wants to be played—it desires nothing more than to be opened up and studied, mastered and thoroughly enjoyed. Its puzzles are begging for your brain; they can’t wait for you to say, “Ah-Ha!” before opening a door and plunging into space, tumbling head over heels towards your next brilliant and confounding challenge.

…

Okay let’s knock these suckers over, this is driving me nuts.

2014

After a couple of quieter years, Paste returned to TYIVGB with a collection of absolute heaters.

The Crew is not Eurotruck Simulator for the United States. Even though they’ve meticulously crafted this sprawling space, they don’t seem to understand that there’s joy in these mundane places. That’s where the magic is, but The Crew thinks it’s a better idea to offer wide shots of fireworks and stadiums and bridges like a poor man’s Michael Bay film. But it’s not the second coming of Burnout Paradiseeither. It’s too staid for that. It’s just a clipboard and a list.

2015

Videogames with character creators, often open-world games, pride themselves on their limitless possibility. In Skyrim, where I named myself Rihanna, people told me stories of wandering the map and getting married and owning houses and using it as a playground to understand themselves as themselves. I can only see the limits to those narrow imaginations. I can only see where the possibilities end.

2016

There is only the us, who are right, and the them, who are wrong. The player can only occupy the position of the monstrous master of all things, and the story they live out can only end in violence. If a story about the past is always about the present, I need to look to other games for other stories.

2017

Part of it is that, as a culture, we view things in terms of majority and minority, that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Unfortunately this mindset becomes warped to the point where many vilify those in the minority who ask for literally anything. After all, why should they be prioritized when they comprise so little of the population? But while at first glance that may seem reasonable, it often means our most vulnerable citizens’ specific survival needs are not met, and as a result they are all but removed from the public eye. We’re an inconvenience that gets oh-so-conveniently erased. We become invisible.

2018

The most biting criticisms it received are about the labor conditions that created it, which is important and good. But in the month after those critiques, indigenous people have had to watch as this game, this character (and Dan Houser for creating him) are praised. And when literally any games critic or journalist could have written this piece, it’s once again up to me, the indigenous woman, to raise these issues alone. And there’s the equally inevitable silence from developers, journalists, and gamers themselves after this piece is chewed up and forgotten in the constant churn of games discourse.

2019

I feel genuine worry for my pupils. Their lives have been filled with such secreted pain, despite, or more often, because of their station. I see it in their classroom performance, know they add every failed exam to their burden, and I want them to succeed. It’s why I carefully set them up for success on the field and engineer mealtimes where they can spend time with classmates I think might have a positive influence on their lives. Friends they can grow to rely on and be there for. When they express a novel interest, I try to shape their curriculum towards that goal.

2020

Everytime the game is played Lev must repeat the cycles of trauma for the cisplayer’s eye, perpetuating the idea that trans identities must exist in a state of cis-inflicted violence just to be considered. Meanwhile the game is largely praised for its queer representation. Critics and developers elevate the trans voices who validate their feelings while ignoring the critiques.

Perhaps Lev’s cycle of violence isn’t just a disservice for trans narratives, but derisively a poisonous reminder of the status quo.

2021

Queer existence isn’t defined by suffering, though, and Kainé and Emil’s lives are no different. Emil acknowledges he often conflates Kainé with his sister, and their relationship certainly echoes this kind of sibling bond. After being banished from the village, Kainé and Emil camp just outside it, where they exchange stories of their childhoods and memories. These interactions are the closest thing to a community the two can achieve. They demonstrate that, despite her fierceness, Kainé isn’t defined by her anger. She is gentle and kind, and is more than a skilled killer.

2022

Fascists don’t get to have the last word on art. Children are smarter than they give us credit for. The more they don’t want us to see something, the harder we’ll try. And when it resonates with us—when that “bad art” changes our life trajectories—we will only grow to resent the system that suppressed it harder. We’ll fight harder for the queer teachers and the drag queen brunches. We will plunge your expensive zeppelins into the ground, steal your children, and give them the happy childhoods you denied us.

2023

The Eye is also a tool. It’s a springboard to other places, as evidenced by your own Sleeper’s journey to get off of it. It could be home, but it isn’t necessarily built to be it. It’s impermanent, a half-step in your journey rather than the destination at the end of it. It’s a place people meet to exchange goods and services. It’s a place to get a job and fake it till you make it. It’s a framework to fashion something else for your life. I can’t think of a better series of statements to better sum up Twitter, which was never the endgame, even if it began feeling like it. When I came to Twitter, it was for the jokes. It’s the people that’ve kept me there for longer than I could’ve ever imagined. I would stay on the site forever if it meant holding onto what I’ve built there, but on the other side of 11 years of it, maybe I’ve done everything I needed to do there. Maybe it’s time I let go, and be content with what I have, which if you ask me, is beyond measure. Maybe it’s time I leave the Eye.

2024

There is a common attitude, especially in video games, that limitations “get in the way” of art. Silent Hill 2‘s developers have even expressed frustration at Silent Hill 2‘s final product. But no game, not even Remake, has really matched Silent Hill 2. In many ways, I want more games like Silent Hill 2, but I don’t want it again. And certainly not like this. It wouldn’t be what it is without the context that made it. The limitation is the art.

2025

And even though I’m not sure this moment works from a narrative perspective, it’s the part of the game that I just can’t stop thinking about. If you can’t figure out how to end your video game, maybe you should just have the characters admit it and start dancing. It makes about as much sense as anything else.

Reader Submitted Favorites

Backmatter

This of course is not a complete archive of what got published to Paste Games over the years. There’s a little bit of recency bias when it comes to which eras and people are represented, and we suspect the list will grow as people make more suggestions. This memorial will serve as a living document to what Paste Games meant to our community. But what strikes me, looking at everything from a bird’s eye view, is how similar the conversations we’re having in the mid-2020s seem to the ones being had in 2011, 2014, 2019.

We can draw a throughline between what we were writing about—what we cared about—over a decade ago, and what we care about today, and I think that’s something special. But it shouldn’t take the death or restructuring of an outlet, or the layoffs of a bunch of incredibly talented writers, to bring us this kind of revelation. Bringing it back to Santana’s Reading Manifesto, “reading fellow critics works enriches not only our lives but our ability to articulate ideas, to refine rough thoughts, to be introduced to perspectives, ideas, and thoughts not previously considered because we simply could not look beyond ourselves without another speaking to us from outside.”

These roundups exist to help us stay sharp, to be able to take a longer view of the critical landscape and progress arguments and ideas forward, rather than stay stuck in the same circular debates over the same few items, over and over and over again. My hope is, you’ll read the articles linked above, take inspiration from them, and find new avenues of criticism to pursue. In so doing, we can keep the spirit of Paste Games alive.

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