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Papers, Please

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This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2014

…Kateri penned a nine-part survey of all the sexual partners one can have in The Witcher and how they are portrayed.

In another direction, our own Kris Ligman posted the notes from an extemporaneous talk delivered at Lost Levels on reading Phoenix Wright of the Ace Attorney series as an asexual character.

Jorge Albor saw his own experience with race reflecting in Dragon Age: Inquisition, while Patricia Hernandez saw a very different type of culturally-inflected experience in Papers, Please.

Katherine Cross looked at one of the best characters from Christine Love’s Hate Plus, Oh Eun-a, and used…

Calling for Critical Compilations!

…Bioshock 2

  • Bioshock Infinite
  • Dear Esther
  • Deus Ex series
  • Dishonored series
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fallout: New Vegas
  • Fallout 4
  • Far Cry series
  • Final Fantasy VII
  • Final Fantasy X and X-2
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • Gone Home
  • Heavy Rain
  • Journey
  • Kentucky Route Zero
  • L.A. Noire
  • The Last of Us
  • Mass Effect series
  • Metal Gear series
  • Metro series
  • Nier Automata
  • Nier Gestalt and Replicant
  • No Man’s Sky
  • Papers, Please
  • Pathologic
  • Portal and Portal 2
  • …

    • New Call for Critical Compilations!

    …Death Stranding

  • Deus Ex series
  • Disco Elysium
  • Earthbound/Mother series
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fallout series
  • Far Cry series
  • Final Fantasy X and X-2
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • Fire Emblem series
  • Gone Home
  • Grand Theft Auto series
  • Heavy Rain
  • Journey
  • Kentucky Route Zero
  • L.A. Noire
  • The Last of Us
  • The Legend of Zelda series
  • Mario series
  • Metal Gear series
  • Metro series
  • Minecraft
  • Nier series
  • No Man’s Sky
  • Papers, Please
  • Portal and Portal 2
  • P.T.
  • …

    • The Stanley Parable

    …direct fashion. Writing for Art Blog, Maeve Griffon evaluates TSP as an interactive digital installation, and Guido Pellegrini comes from a similar approach, ultimately seeing the game, and perhaps the walking sim genre at large, as akin to a self-guided virtual museum tour.

    Speaking of walking sims, Grace Maich ran a comparison between Gone Home and TSP, and speculates as to why the former received so much more hate for being “not a game” than the latter. In a Gamasutra blog post, Kris Graft sees games like TSP, Gone Home, Papers, Please, and other indie contemporaries as depicting a…

    August 27th

    …between systems, stories, and critical experiences.

    • One Space Station’s Trash, Another Man’s Treasure | Bullet Points Monthly Khee Hoon Chan meditates on an accidentally engrossing loot grind abstracted out of System Shock 2023’s scrapping and recycling systems.
    • Venba and Papers, Please Flex the Same Emotional Muscle | Paste Yousif Kassab brings together two games which use labour systems to abstract their storytelling about people in transit.

    “Both ask you to stare at someone different from you and search for the thing that actually makes you the same. Be it your own flesh and blood,

    …

    This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2023

    …| Inverse Willa Rowe connects with He Fucked the Girl out of Me‘s raw and unflinching vulnerability.

  • Venba and Papers, Please Flex the Same Emotional Muscle | Paste Magazine Yousif Kassab brings together two games which use labour systems to abstract their storytelling about people in transit.
  • Is there an indie games bubble? | Roadmap Mag Gita Jackson chats with developers and creators about the state of indie games in a time of increased precarity.
  • Stray Gods’ story about moving forward leaves Medusa behind | Uppercut Crit Ty Galiz-Rowe finds something very off in the arc Stray…

    • January 7th

    …While we’ve got a larger-than-usual number of picks this week overall owing to my brief time away, it made sense this time to group them into a smaller number of sections overall. This week we’re starting with a ton of excellent interview-based material with a particular focus on developers–and yeah, that means the folks that work in QA, too.

    • The ascent of Indian video game development | Game Developer Aamir Mehar interviews a trio of India-based developers about their art, their experiences, and their goals.
    • Papers, Please: 10 Years Later | Game Informer Luis Aguasvivas chronicles the

    …

    July 12th

    …series, blogger Omar Usuf talks about death and permanence in games too, after coming face-to-face with a near death experience.

    Andrew Doull of the blog ASCII Dreams noted the response from Clint Hocking linked to above and responded with his own explanation of what makes rogue-like games compelling and interesting, talking about Spelunky and others.

    Found via Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Sunday Papers last week, this feature at The Escapist argues that games writers/journalists aren’t, and shouldn’t be, real proper journalists while there is such a shortage of them covering more important topics. I’m inclined to agree, but I’d…

    February 21st

    …to 2008’s This Gaming Life. I for one can’t wait for the as-yet untitled work. Rossignol also talked about online communities, the site Rock Paper Shotgun as a community [mirror], and a bit about how the infamous Sunday Papers regular feature ties into and reinforces the community.

    Kirk Hamilton finds out what it would be like “If my games could talk” with important implications for any backlog of games.

    With Bioshock 2 and other sequels having now had time to arrive and settle, sequels in general became a hot topic this week with both Mitch Krpata and Michael…

    July 18th

    …adds a third element to the mix – the computer.

    Found via Rock Paper Shotgun’s always worth reading Sunday Papers – as videogames (or at least hardcore/mainstream videogames) are a very dude dominated subculture I thought this tangentially related piece had real applicability to the industry and to videogame communities – How to ‘Make your dude dominated subculture more accessible to women‘.

    At the intriguingly named Wing Damage blog, Jesse “Main Finger” Gregory asks ‘Will We Still be Able to Play our Games in 20 Years?‘ [mirror] Another pertinent question might equally be will we even want…