June 6th
…Epilogue Gaming Blake Andrea reflects on the tensions and balancing act between playing for the self, playing for an audience, and playing for the algorithm.
“El…
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Adrienne Shaw | Keywords in Play, Episode 14
…Temple’s new Graduate Certificate in Cultural Analytics. Shaw is author of Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture (winner of the 2016 International Communication Association’s Popular Communications Division’s Book Award). She has co-edited three anthologies: Queer Game Studies (2017, University of Minnesota Press), Queer Technologies: Affordances, Affect, Ambivalence (2017, Routledge), and Interventions: Communication Research and Practice (2018, Peter Lang). She is also the founder of the LGBTQ Game Archive and co-curator of Rainbow Arcade, the world’s first exhibit of LGBTQ game history (Dec 2018-May 2019 in Berlin, Germany). From 2011 to 2015 she was…
October 31st
…be portrayed in flawed and complex ways — the good, bad, and everything in between — without resorting to lazy stereotypes.”
The Empire, Peeled Back
Our next section highlights two writers charting different intersections of colonial empire with their object games.
- How The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles portrays the immigrant experience | Eurogamer.net Alan Wen finds authenticity in how The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles captures Ryunosuke Naruhodo’s experiences, mediated by the spectre of colonial empire, as he travels from Meiji Japan to Victorian England.
- Deposition, Acquisition, and Deferred Satisfaction in Zork I | Gold…
December 19th
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No Fungin’ Thanks
Though it looks like player communities are widely recognizing NFTs for the ecocatastrophic grift that they are, a number of game publishers are pushing forward. Our next two selected authors this week take a closer look at why that is.
- Ubisoft, Stalker, Molyneux: Why Are Game Studios So Invested In NFTs? | TheGamer Khee Hoon Chan examines why many publishers still see profit on the NFT bandwagon when even their player bases seem to be mobilizing against them.
- Steam might not like NFTs, but it laid the groundwork for them |
…
This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2021
…of game studios, the games press, and organized right-wing gamers shape the general orientation of the video-game economy — that is, how outside mobs of “fans” and “gamers” act as volunteer Pinkertons and scabs, goon squads disciplining both game developers and critics into keeping certain kinds of games at the center of the industry and the conversation.
[…] That’s how a Game Informer reviewer could get a life-threatening grand mal seizure from flashing lights in Cyberpunk, still give it a 9/10, and get mass harassed by fans anyway simply for talking about having the seizure.
- Horror Games…
May 1st
…Generation, Spoiled (Part Four) – No Escape Kaile Hultner wanders through the soothing fascist hellscape of the Gamer’s Palace.
“I can’t agree with Lucky or Serafinski entirely—despite it all, I’m still clinging to visions of a better world—but we could stand to learn from the commitment to resistance for its own sake. For if we only act…
July 10th
…out from the series’ most recent release speaks to that legacy.
“I’ll give credit to BioWare for their sensitivity towards bisexual fans, in a world where bisexuals are stereotyped as promiscuous and untrustworthy romantic partners. But as a bisexual fan, I can’t help feeling BioWare missed an opportunity to give bisexual fans one of the most complex representations of a bisexual character in video games.”
March-April 2022
…Lee finds their “gamer ego” tested by the flexible difficulty of platformer Overwhelm. (Autocaptions)
Kyle compares conceptual death in Elden Ring to Kierkegaard’s despair of the eternal from The Sickness unto Death. (Autocaptions) Citing examples from many renown gothic novels, thegamingmuse looks at how the Devil May Cry series echoes tropes of gothic fiction and architecture in its depiction of emotion, family ties, gender and sexuality. (Manual captions) … Open World
September 4th
…a lof of writing and/or mindshare that week. This time, it’s the game Immortality, and I’ve found that there’s a lot of agreement on what it does well and what invites scrutiny, with the differences in opinion coming down to which of these elements spoke louder to the writer. Here, in four installments, is a snapshot of that conversation, which I suspect will continue into future weeks.
- Immortality review | PC Gamer Kaile Hultner weighs the cost of art in the match-cut, as told by Immortality.
- Immortality review: a peeling apart of stories, power and film that
…
August 13th
…brain take five?”
Critical Chaser
Just bear with me as we close out with some fun stuff about games old and new.
- The very strange yet promising yet too-weird world of Eternal Champions | Eurogamer.net Jennifer Allen looks back at a 16-bit fighting game that stood apart from its peers for how hard it went.
- I broke Baldur’s Gate 3 by playing as a party of bears | PC Gamer Christopher Livingston causes problems.
“Since bears can’t pick up the short bow that’s lying conveniently nearby to shoot Lae’zel’s cage open,…