This Week in Videogame Blogging

August 2nd

by

Welcome back readers.

Before we hop in, I just want to offer a quick reminder that the Friendslop Jam we’re hosting is underway, and you’ve got two weeks and change to get your writing in if you’d like to participate.

As per usual, I’ll also take a moment to plug our Patreon, which is the best way to help us continue our work charting a course through interesting games writing, and hopefully encouraging more of that writing along the way!

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

State Machines

As has become a semi-regular habit of mine, I’m starting with the industry-minded pieces at the top of the issue. This week that means both the games industry proper and games media.

“How large is the set of every possible video game? What can express the magnitude of that number? Contemplating this for more than a brief moment is humiliating. You must try to articulate what it would mean to step incrementally through every permutation of every genre, every instantiation of every potential design, every variation on every arrangement of art and sound and letters. It is not enough to say a person could go mad attempting to make sense of this. Everyone here is long past that, swimming in signs and symbols, grasping at fragments.”

Time-Tested

We’ll be moving into some genre-focused sections in a minute, but first let’s look at a different conceptual lens–that of historical context–in the formation of genres and series.

“Valkyrie Saga feels more personal than any of the actual N64 or PlayStation platformers ever could have, and maybe that’s the feeling I struggle to name with games like this. Whatever bugs, glitches, wherever the game pushes against itself, I am reminded that it’s connected to the heart of one person. We might, as reviewers, sometimes miss the forest for the trees when trying too hard to connect art and nostalgia to a specific past.”

Infernal Delights

Now we’re getting into the genre stuff. Let’s start with a very contemporary genre fixture: roguelites.

“I bit into red, green, and special Honeycrisp apples with sprinkles and white chocolate, but the hole only yawned and grew teeth. But I wonder, now, if there had actually been opportunities for me to turn into a black widow, or a willow, that I had been too self-absorbed at the time to notice.”

Saving Throw

Here’s a section on RPGs, both analogue and digital.

“Both of these games may not have the best stories in them, but they’re important in my own story. I may be able to overlook the flaws they have due to a baby duck syndrome I gained from them being such an early RPG for me. They have absolutely left a mark on my tastes. For many players older than me, this game might have just been a stop on the way to other games. For me, this game was an inciting incident for the journey of my own tastes.”

Marble Cheddar

We’re not the only ones hosting a jam–Nate Shearer just organized one on “cheesing”. I did not get to all of the entries myself, but here are some highlights.

“I want to locate subjective revelation, rather than emphasize quantitative judgement. I want to run my finger along a game’s rough edges, hit a snag, and nurse that feeling. I want to spend some time working through it. Perhaps the greatest joy in my 40 hours with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth: I had so many opportunities to do just that.”

Correspondence Course

From a jam to a letter series, Madeline Blondeau and Cind had a back-and-forth on Mario Kart World, so I’m including both halves here in a bespoke section.

“there are more people in Western gaming, right now, that would like to look at news, get upset, and say “play indie games!” than play actual fucking video games and have fun with them. Regardless of how merited that is or not, the fact remains – this will always be the Mario Kart World that released during the “2nd video game crash” or whatever people are going to call it. It’ll never be Mario Kart DS, or Wii. We’re never going back to that era of ubiquity or universal enjoyment in the West, at least not for a while.”

Fit and Finish

This group brings together a variety of inquiries (inqueeries?) of (gender)queerness and sexuality to their object texts.

“Portofiro struggles with perversion, Developed World variety. Capitalism pervades everything, turning sex, like the city itself, into a site for the contestation of labor and human dignity. Under the weight of its history as a colonised city, a twice-over dictatorship, and the subject of ongoing propaganda efforts and accumulating international debt, Portofiro’s ideals have shifted and morphed. What was work is now intimate and what is intimate is now annihilation.”

Tournament Arc

Next up, different formations of connection and community.

“I’m curious about the lives of diffracted Black folks I’ve met in passing or through play, who will never be famous, nor rich, nor recognized as change agents or activists, educators or writers, scholars or purveyors of a future in which we honor their deeds—in other words, most of us. I want to know what Becca and Sonnie and KaSun and them want but cannot access, and why their desire is scripted through this relationship to a Japanese media-mix object instead of the Church or music or, worse, the bare minimum normative futures of a politician who looks like us, leaving such little room to alter or even articulate the thing we call reality. And so we play Pokémon, through the refusals of most everything else.”

Critical Chaser

We’ll sign off this week with a list and a rabbit hole.

“I would call sorting nuts a Sisyphean task, but I think even Sisyphus could find purpose in his work. I believe it is more apt to say that it is a Promethean experience, in which I, having discovered fire (a crappy mobile game) am therefore punished for my knowledge in learning that thousands of games like this exist, tricking people into playing them under the closest you can get to false pretenses without getting fined by the FTC (and sometimes you actually do get fined by the FTC). My liver has been psychically pecked into oblivion by the realization that the industry exists in this way, making money off of self-referential ads and preying on people who so cannot afford to fall prey to the American medical system that they would attempt to ward off cognitive decline with naught but an app for defense. My liver eaten again by the knowledge that people would play a game so miserable as Nut Sort to earn a small amount of cash. Daily I am tormented by the righteous eagle of capitalism, that spectacular herald of violence, always making me aware of what it will take given the slightest opportunity.”

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