"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…| Eurogamer.net Grace Curtis offers a climber’s perspective on a tense game about climbing.
“Ten minutes of play in this instance do a lot: the game puts us on the spot, tells us a story, and gives the player a challenge they cannot overcome in a game they cannot beat….
…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!
…
…| Unwinnable Deirdre Coyle’s here with a good and fun (Halloween?)-flavoured list. I dug it.
“It’s not the Zombies that keep me, personally, coming back to these early installments in the Resident Evil world. It’s the texture of the city and the people that inhabit it. Umbrella’s not just a spooky villain that slips it’s sinister hands into every innocent pie: they’ve managed to build the stage and run the play.” While both …
Deep Delvings
…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.”
…many twists and turns along the way delving into innovation, regulation, and obscenity laws–of horny Mahjong arcade games in Japan.
…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…
…to the Frozen Flame—something that’s both a valuable gem and emblematic of the instability and constant flux affecting the process and systems of stakeholders in game preservation.”
As a a slightly academia-poisoned reader originaly trained to read criticism with an unambiguous thesis statement in the first paragraph, I sometimes struggle with writing that asks more from me. So while I tend to worry a bit more when put to the challenge of collapsing Skeleton’s work into a one-sentence-summary, there’s nonetheness a note that resonates in my soul (albeit in a very different geographical context) about feeling invisibly, pointlessly…
…advances at a speed fully customized to the viewer’s mood or fancy… Each piece of paper embodies a corresponding instant of time which remains frozen until liberated by the act of turning a page.”[4] The book, too, is a moving object, one which reacts to the viewer’s interactions.”
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…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…