"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…and ideology. Also, today I learned that our site doesn’t play well with corrupted text effects.
“I know nothing about Ivy’s story in Soul Calibur, or the Power Rangers that I use in Battle For the Grid, but I’m drawn to them and the fragments they represent; the parts of…
…off with a hearty serving of critical pieces charting the highs and lows of recent (and not so recent) horror games big and small. So. . . I’m doing that. Enjoy!
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…a path of least resistance through a narrative that while I feel could be more challenging, largely evokes a nostalgic, nuanced zest for building life.”
I don’t know about you, but I put together, like, two and a half different costumes this year. One month isn’t enough, so here are a few more horror and horror-adjacent highlights.
…section also examines play, this time in shared contexts at two levels of scale–between loved ones and on streaming platforms.
“The VTubing space offers more than acceptance: It’s a world where trans women can transition instantaneously.”
…FFX is about faith’s sacrifice, the things systems and people do to maintain belief, it is also about the point when faith shatters. Refreshingly, FFX’s pace is slow in this regard. There is not a single moment where Yuna’s belief breaks. […] Ultimately, that is what gives FFX its ferocious, echoing power. It knows that faith and its communities are malleable, that they can grow and shrink. It is when Yuna and her friends believe in each other, rather than Yevon, that the world begins to change.
…point of focus just on kind of doing textual analysis of the games themselves. In certain instances, especially when they were talking about the kinds of broader cultural references these games were making, or the historical kind of claims they were making, sort of sometimes led to critics or writers kind of maybe overdetermining intentions or connections or reading connections based on their own kind of experience, interests and kind of disciplinary approach, which, obviously, is a fundamental part of what we do in games studies or in historical research, obviously. So it’s not a kind of sort of criticism,…
…space wives in Elden Ring.
“Ultimately, the world Destiny 2 envisions, despite all of its smaller and less permanent stories which deepen and complicate our viewpoint, puts Guardians on top of a very tall vertical hierarchy—a tower if you will—below which reside other (Lightless) humans, Cabal, Eliksni, Vex, and Hive. As Guardians, we are allowed to use…
…Tsushima and Sifu. Nonetheless, we can also see that the past few years has seen a healthy appetite for more diverse games, with publishers like Nintendo also making a conscious effort to promote developers from around the world in its digital showcases.”
This next one, from Kevin Bunch and Kate Willaert, takes us way back in time, to the early 1980s and the Atari 2600, and to a programmer who until now has ben lost to history. Pretty cool read!
…invasiveness. Fifteen hours into Dark Souls, I wormed my way back through Undead Parish, an area that once gave me grief, and I noticed myself deflecting unthinkingly, one-shotting enemies. I had learned how to survive efficiently, saving my energy for the true battles ahead.”
Now let’s look at both the limiting and evolving depictions of femininity in games and adjacent spaces.
…in Common Than You’d Think | Uppercut How does a game make space for you to engage with it, and what can devs learn between installments to make a better on-ramp for more players? Next up, Caroline Delbert settles into a long-awaited sequel that invites her to engage with it on her own terms, at her own pace.
“CBT uses a model called SMART: setting goals that are “specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-limited.” My own therapist first drew my attention by discussing their incremental approach, something that appeals to me as I keep learning to live…