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January 10th

…monstrosity in games alternately along gender/misogyny and cosmic/racist axes.

  • Game Log: Tales of Berseria – Digital Ephemera Dan Cox weighs tropes and tensions of femininity and monstrosity in an uncommon feminine-led installment in the Tales series of JRPGs.
  • Zarf Updates: Four (or five) recent Lovecraftians Andrew Plotkin explores the mechanical and thematic diversities to be found among games associated with a Lovecraftian, cosmic horror influence, as well as the various ways in which these games address or don’t address the racism inexorably tied to the tradition.

“A lot of Lovecraftian games start out with

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December 2020

…room for players to creatively (if privately) role-play. (Autocaptions)

  • The only winning move is not to play – Mr Wendal on games (6:12)

    Mr Wendal looks at the effect of some curious instances where the player is punished for following a game’s instructions. (Manual captions)

  • Cloudpunk, or has God Already Decided? – Curio (34:08)

    Eric Sophia argues that both Ion Lands’ Cloudpunk (2020) and Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320) are texts that critique the notion of agency within the binding social and economic systems that they were produced under. (Autocaptions) [Note: spoilers for the endings

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    • February 28th

    …Love You Man! Reflections on Twenty-Four Years of Male Friendship and Gaming — Gamers with Glasses Jason Mical and Roger Whitson discuss how normative masculine sociality informs shared play experiences and vice versa.

  • Pokemon Omega Ruby’s Contest Spectacular is one of the series queerest moments | Gayming Magazine Latonya Pennington examines the ramifications of magical girls, Cosplay Pikachu, and queer coding in Pokémon‘s Gen VI remakes.
  • Memory Pak: When Harvest Moon Taught Me About Death | Nintendo Life Kate Gray looks back at a Harvest Moon installment with a touch of permadeath.
  • Bowser’s Fury Is About a…

    • The List Jam Roundup

    …Personal Playstyles

    Similarly, these entries use the list format to explore and highlight moments of realization, strategies and reflection in their own moment-to-moment play of games, highlighting that as much as we analyze videogames as a designed artifact, we ultimately don’t have any special insight into what players actually end up doing unless we ask.

    • List of Mods I Have Installed In My Current Stardew Save by dumplingsquid
    • An Incomplete List of Games that made me Trans by moniker ersatz
    • A Non-Exhaustive List Of Video Game Deaths (That Just Happens To Be Ten) by Velcro

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    March 7th

    …Ultima VIII utterly pale in comparison to those that separate the PS2 from today. If that wasn’t enough to crumble you instantaneously into a pile of dust, the PS2 actually overlaps with the tail end of big-box retail game packaging. I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m trying to delete it.

    • The incredible boxes of Hock Wah Yeo | The Obscuritory Phil Salvador celebrates the long-gone era of weird and wonderful game packaging by looking at the work of possibly the artform’s greatest master.
    • Ultima VIII (or, How to Destroy a Gaming Franchise in One Easy Step) | The

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    April 18th

    …of engaging with cop media in 2021-present-year–even when said media slaps in every other conceivable way.

    “The fact of Harry DuBois’s copitude colors the game for me – or rather, it draws the color out of the surrounding, much more interesting items within the game. “Don’t be afraid to get weird,” a loading screen tells me (or something to this effect). “People let people in power be weird!” Except you and I both know that nobody is just “letting” this cop be weird. Rather, the cop is forcing his weird shit on people under the implied threat…

    March 2021

    …that came before them.

    • Gris and the Beauty of Grief – Cyril Focht (22:13)

      Cyril Focht reads the colour-coded platforming world of Gris as a journey through Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief. (Manual captions)

    • I Loved Persona 5, And I Hate Persona 5 Royal – Joyce-Stick (49:09)

      Joyce takes issue with the reversion to status quo politics implied by the new ending of Persona 5’s ‘Royal’ rerelease. (Manual captions)

    • Dark Souls 3 is Thinking of Ending Things – Jacob Geller (26:52)

      Drawing parallels with the internalised meta-chaos of Charlie Kaufmann directed film I’m

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    April 25th

    …examining the RPG tradition in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, both at large and in specific, bringing attention to games and series that often haven’t attracted a lot of attention in western-centric discourses.

    • Before Genshin Impact: A brief history of Chinese RPGs | Felipe Pepe Felipe Pepe offers a beginner’s guide to the Chinese tradition in RPGs, which stretches nearly as far back as the genre does elsewhere and connects with a considerably larger player base.
    • The anti-RPG that’s more RPG than most – Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster Kimimi delves into the realm of Taiwanese RPGs with

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    June 6th

    …Paso, Elsewhere is not an interesting game because it stars a Black protagonist or because it’s made by a Black person. It is interesting and compelling because you look at it and you instantly know it’s the next game you need to play, period. And it’s Black as hell. The ‘and’ is important because I can’t imagine… because part of my personal nightmare for this is being so proud of the diverse perspective that it represents from a variety of vectors and the diverse team that’s bringing it to life and it’s just getting put into this box because of…

    September 19th

    …narratives, mechanics, and thematic resonances.

    • Ultima 4 [1985] – Arcade Idea Art Maybury appraises Ultima 4 as one of the more successful early installments in an ongoing canon of games which try to capture some aspect of Dungeons & Dragons‘ essence, focusing on the game’s innovations and experiments with scale, structure, and moral philosophy.
    • A is for Jump – GlitchOut Oma Keeling is thinking about platformers–their simplicity, their strangeness, their ubiquity, and most of all their narrative flexibility.
    • The Spectre of Gacha Oblivion | Bullet Points Monthly Kazuma Hashimoto considers the ways in which Nier is

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