Search Results for:

khee hoon

September 1st

…player completion.

  • Sunless Skies Rewards Imagination | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan contemplates how procedural, cyclical, and roguelike design elements give meaning to narrative and consequence in Sunless Skies.
  • Donut County, A Game About Being A Bottomless Hole, Is Fun But Somehow Shallow – Kotaku Nathan Grayson reflects on how trending indie title Donut County flirts with the beginnings of critique of gentrification and gamification, but leaves him wanting more.
  • The Very Weird, Charming ‘Donut County’ Does A Lot With Very Little – Waypoint Danielle Riendeau finds a lot to love in Donut County, interpreting the desire it…
    • Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    September 30th

    …as the Year of the Bad Employer | GamesIndustry.biz Brendan Sinclair rounds up the developer exposes and shutdowns from the past year and offers some thoughts on future trends (hint: unionization).

  • When did we forget people – not brands – make games? • Eurogamer.net Wesley Yin-Poole charts a course-correction for how we talk about labour and labourers in the games industry, with reference to the Telltale fallout.
  • Going Through the Motions of Work in Fortune-499 | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan explores how Fortune-499 lampoons corporate culture without ever sacrificing its sense of the whimsical.
  • Years In the…

    • October 21st

    …those which are, how they are being represented or misrepresented.

    • Sims Players Want More Diverse Options From Fan-Made Creations | Kotaku Gita Jackson investigates the whiteness of The Sims 4‘s gallery.
    • Japan is a place on Earth – Timber Owls Ashley breaks down the cultural blind spot the west has for treating problematic Japanese media as emblematic of the culture as a whole while simultaneously falsely elevating the west as morally superior. You really should read this one, folx.
    • Butterfly Soup and The Myriad Asian Identity | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan finds lots to love in

    …

    October 28th

    …on this topic. I’m also sorry to see Netrunner on the way out, but appreciate the reminders documented here about what makes the game so great.

    • Three Shades of Depression | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan profiles a trio of titles on itch.io that offer thoughtful examinations of depression.
    • The Final Days of ‘Netrunner’ – Waypoint Alex Spencer eulogizes a card game that gets representation right in a lot of ways, and which has built up a supportive and inclusive player community in ways that many other games struggle to accomplish.

    “White male characters weren’t

    …

    November 25th

    …the melodic writing and focus instead on timbre and harmonic color.”

    Built Experiences

    Three authors this week offer very different perspectives on the ways in which games are put together–be it their styles, their worlds, or their business models.

    • Cheap Golf is an Ode to Inelegance | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan muses on a scrappy little game that marries low-fi golf with an insidious advertising algorithm.
    • Fumito Ueda’s Architecture – YouTube Jacob Geller analyzes the ambivalence and decay of Team Ico’s world design.
    • Artifact’s Monetisation Is A Mess – Timber Owls Lilly presents…

    December 23rd

    …measure after a long history of banal violence and misogyny.

  • Gingy’s Corner: Seiyuu Danshi | Unwinnable Gingy Gibson parses out how a VN about being a voice actor successfully balances the tension of time management with the pleasure of choice.
  • The Contradiction of Language in Subserial Network | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan reads between the lines in Subserial Network.

    • “Phrases like “boolean”, “circuitry” and “ocular recalibration” are repeated liberally; they’re words that, in our own reality, has a note of impersonality and detachment. But in here, they carry a different connotation. They are infinitely more…

    January 6th

    …of that metagame are often stacked against us.”

    Materia Slots

    Two authors this week set the materiality of games front-and-centre, to weigh in on the implications of portable gaming and the conundrum of preservation in a rapidly-obselescing, archive-unfriendly industry.

    • The Importance of Preservation | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan reminds us that the game industry is singularly bad at preserving its cultural legacies.
    • Road Trip | Unwinnable Jeremy Signor muses about the malleability of portable gaming and its bleed-through into everyday life.

    “The thing about handheld gaming is that the game stays…

    February 3rd

    …– Polygon Khee Hoon Chan chronicles Nintendo’s antagonistic relationship with its own legacy and with the preservationists who seek to keep its works alive.

  • ‘Kingdom Hearts III’ is a Big, Beautiful Mess – Waypoint Julie Muncy positions a review of Kingdom Hearts III as an opportunity to talk about copyright reform. Hell yeah.

    • “Combining Disney with the aesthetics and gameplay priorities of Final Fantasy at its most eccentric, Kingdom Hearts takes the vanguard of modern entertainment capitalism and turns it into something bizarre. Mickey Mouse, and Disney alongside him, is grist for one of the wildest…

    Mass Effect Trilogy

    …assumed to be sexually promiscuous. Khee Hoon Chan makes the point that even amongst the alien relationships, BioWare is still reinforcing “unhealthy notions of attraction and sexuality” (and raises the very good question of why we can’t romance a krogan). One of the most hotly discussed romance options from the series is Tali, a quarian who has to wear a special suit that obscures her face at all times. If the player romances Tali, they do eventually get a sex scene of Tali sans suit, but one that was so unsatisfying that fans made a new one. What fans were…

    April 14th

    …is playing VR.

  • Broken Reality Represents The Drudgery of Internet Culture | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan explores an Extremely Online game.

    • “Progression becomes a compulsive and meaningless act, the only reward being the opportunity to experience more of the game’s outlandishly charming universe. It’s hard to tell if this gnawing tedium is intentional on the developer’s end, but it at least succeeds in conveying the profound pointlessness of social media approval.”

    Queer Spaces

    Queerness is revealed everywhere in games–but it can take some digging to find, buried as it often is under a

    …