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killing

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

August 4th

…of a drag queen. A drag queen with magic hair, whose eyes control the whole of reality, and whose feet can fire high-caliber pistols. She looks like a French fashion illustration even while she’s carrying her daughter/self in one hand and killing angels with the other. To her, motherhood is just like everything else: a performance. And damn if she isn’t a great performer.”

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Have you read, seen, heard or…

August 11th

…Productive Failure

This week’s opening group of three authors all look at games that screwed something up somewhere, even if they’re otherwise solid productions and experiences. There’s great critical value in poking holes in successful games especially–how else are we to learn from previous mistakes?

  • “Killing Nuance,” by Reid McCarter – Bullet Points Monthly Reid McCarter takes Wolfenstein: Youngblood–and the rebooted series as a whole–to task for its style-over-substance approach and its increasingly muddled messaging. This one’s a damn read, friends.
  • Fire Emblem Doesn’t Just Need Gay Characters, It Needs Queer Life – VICE Todd Harper

…

May 3rd

…games that ever see the light of day in the press do more to harm indies than any rising tide of games being made. Hopefully, by the end of this project, we’ll be able to show a path forward.”

Critical Chaser

Five pieces in the closing segment this week–alternately provocative, hilarious, awe-inspiring, and moving–because I said so.

  • The Dark Truth about Pokémon: Are we Constantly Killing our ‘mon? | Fandom Jason Coles goes deep on the mechanisms and ethics behind teleportation and matter-data conversion. Gotta catch ’em all!
  • [56] Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order…

May 31st

…Initiative Jeremy Signor looks at the role and function of graffiti in Umurangi Generation.

  • What a video game about a futuristic Tauranga can tell us about our present | The Spinoff Dan Taipua situates Umurangi Generation in relation to our contemporary experiences of existential crisis.

    • ““Umurangi” is a poetic expression for red skies, and that’s exactly what Naphtali Faulkner saw last year as wildfires raged across New South Wales where he lives, destroying 18 million hectares of a bedrock continent, killing an estimated billion animals, and driving some species to the precipice of extinction. If we…

    July 19th

    …Epps talks to FGC members fighting for a better, more just, more inclusive scene.

  • What Killing Eve Can Teach Video Games About Writing Complex Queer Characters – Gayming Magazine Celia Lewis examines the ways in which queer narratives in games are still playing catch-up to other storytelling media.
  • The Gaming Community Still Isn’t Ready to Talk About Race – Gayming Magazine David André Jarrett takes stock of the state of systemic anti-Black racism in gaming along all its axes.

    • “Why did it take this particular tragic event for the world to finally stand up and…

    This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2020

    …in relation to the violent acts you have to carry out in order to play them.

  • Do We Really Need Combat? Systems of Interaction in AAA Games | Sidequest (Spoilers for The Last of Us Part II) Emma Kostopoulos reflects on combat in games such as TLOU2 and The Outer Worlds, arguing that offering players different ways of solving problems avoids awkward situations where the player-character is “a stone-cold killing machine right up until she need[s] to suddenly have conflicted feelings about murder”.
  • An Assassin’s Creed. An examination of violence as ideology in Ubisoft franchises | Medium (Spoilers…

    • January 3rd

    …Saturshot Ruth Cassidy asks what’s going on with All Of These Skulls just hanging out in Paradise Killer.

  • Killing Our Gods: The Reflection of the Divine Feminine in Super Mario Galaxy | Uppercut Grace Benfell considers Rosalina’s parallels to the Heavenly Mother in Mormon theology.
  • Déjà Vu on the Ishimura | Kim Bellwoods Kim Bellwoods chronicles Isaac Clarke as a character with no agency, no choice, no freedom, until he’s left the Dead Space games and their narrative and mechanical contrivances behind him.

    • “He’s never left directionless for more than a few moments. Various people…

    January 10th

    …or meant to be talked about forever.”

    Killing Paradise

    Two letters, crafted in dialogue with one another, on one of 2020’s top please-do-not-sleep-on-this-one titles. Have we ever run a tighter section in this roundup? I, um, I don’t know actually. . . maybe? Anyway, this is cool stuff.

    • Paradise Killer: Material Concerns – Uppercut Grace Benfell weighs the material and the divine in Paradise Killer.
    • Paradise Killer: The Horror of Normal – Uppercut Ty Galiz-Rowe ruminates on the uneasy ease with which a world can go back to normal after it bears witness to…

    January 17th

    …definitions on rules or enforcement, right? Nah, couldn’t be.

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

    Accountability

    I’ll be frank. It sucks that we need to keep including these articles, because it means that nothing of importance has changed yet. There needs to be accountability for how games media treats survivors (content notifications in this section for rape and the full gamut of personal and corporate abuses).

    • Killing us slowly – When your allyship stops short of doing the hard thing,

    …

    January 31st

    …Have Been a Stronger Game if Eivor Had Been a Lesbian | Gayming Magazine Stacey Henley reflects on canon, choice, and Assassin’s Creed‘s perennial unwillingness to commit to queerness.

  • Killing Our Gods: A Wound at the Heart of the World: On Lucah: Born of a Dream – Uppercut Grace Benfell meditates on the meaning and stakes of queer self-determination amidst the destruction rained down by heteronormative order.

    • “Queer liberation cannot be made by recreating puritanical, punishing moral logic with a rainbow flag. The way out then, is to imagine oneself as one is.”

    Tropes…