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May 31st

…included in the latest installment of their FIFA series. Mary Hamilton talked about the predictably terrible reactions to this absolutely minor effort at inclusion.

In Fifa 15, the last instalment of the franchise, there are more than 16,000 players. All of them are male. (Many of them are not as good at football as the women’s World Cup players.) There are 23 players in a World Cup squad. This suggests that approximately 1.7% of the players in Fifa 16 will be female.

Elsewhere, Megan Condis looked at the consequences of Rust‘s decision to randomly assign skin…

September Roundup: Globetrotting

…lost to the realities of this real world and just making nonsense of that actual fact – a mere convenient escape into one’s own tiny insular universe of nutrasweet, neat little moments, carved up into easily traded / gameified / gambled micro-Fun™ units

Read it now

Peterz

80 Days: Once a Ghost, Always a Ghost

Peterz takes a similar approach in a personal essay on his blog, One More Continue. Peterz reads 80 Days through his own experience and through the writing of Paul Thoreau as a sort of super-condensed life of its own, one…

January 31st

…toward the social forces that turn a technology into a thriving platform. Meanwhile, back in the fictional realm, Austin Howe put JRPG landscapes in a socio-economic context.

Looking respectable

Gaming’s labyrinthine quest for institutional recognition seems to go on forever, and it can lead to some uncomfortable places. On the positive side, an avant-garde art blog covered a French festival featuring games as well as some remarkable digital art installations (part one | part two)

“One of the interesting phenomenons about game[s] is that techniques and experiments that were pioneered by artists, users and hackers feed

…

November 5th

…addressing cultural appropriation in Mario games.

  • ‘Super Mario Odyssey’ Review: Nintendo’s Surreal, Candy-Colored Triumph | WIRED Julie Muncy highlights the disconnected mashup of cultural symbols, alongside the absurdist extension of a playful internal logic, to explain the artful ridiculousness of this title.

    • “Mario gains an eerie power: anything that is made to wear Mario’s cap becomes Mario. Throw it on a dinosaur’s head, for instance, and that dino is instantly fused with Mario—and you, the player, find yourself playing as a dinosaur. Take control of goombas, electric poles, whatever else suits your fancy. Mario‘s vision of…

    God of War (2018)

    …men who yell and scream right back at him. The plot of any given God of War game is borderline gibberish. The women are mere window dressing and Kratos himself is thoroughly unlikable – he’s as cruel as he is callous, and his defining trait – angry dude avenging the obligatory dead family – is a most extreme example of what drives almost every male videogame protagonist these days. It’s base, vulgar, problematic – a celebration of excess and a codifier of the status quo.

    It is the Heavenly Kingdom of the Edgelords Eternal. All may bask in its…

    June 9th

    Welcome back, readers!

    E3 is next week? I guess? We’ve got a very timely piece this week on the damaging effects of hype, which I enjoyed a great deal and which you can find below. On the academic circuit, it’s also conference season, and I’m looking forward to reading the thoughts and ideas that come my way from those venues.

    This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.

    Inclusive Insights

    This week we’re starting with two selections on making games more inclusive,

    …

    November 2019

    …attempting to put players through experiences that contradicted “typical” expectations of enjoyment.

    • Artificial Loneliness – Jacob Geller (17:06)

      Jacob Geller uses the example of entering a “dying” part of the map in Red Dead Redemption 2 to discuss positive instances of experiential loneliness.

    • Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why – hbomberguy (2:10:51)

      I will probably never play Pathologic, but I did enjoy this, uhhh, feature-length video essay from Harry Brewis about how what makes it a compelling and unique game, despite its willingness to hurt the player.

    “It’s not a bad game,

    …

    This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2019

    …year’s most hotly-discussed releases. For the sake of my sanity and yours, let’s go chronologically!

    Bandersnatch

    Strictly speaking Bandersnatch came out at the end of December 2018, and also are we actually calling it a game? Whatever, nuclear option, everything is a game, your dog is a game, in 2020 we’re going to stop having this discussion.

    That said, as Emily Short points out in her rich analysis, some of Bandersnatch‘s interactivity comes across amateurish — almost like a film director was discovering games for the first time! Lana Polansky (formerly of this very site) was likewise…

    July 11th

    …write about games.

    • How China’s political influence is changing game development | GamesIndustry.biz Khee Hoon Chan investigates the impacts of China’s increasing political and market influence on Hong Kong and Taiwan-based indie developers.
    • ‘Devotion,’ the Taiwanese horror game deleted from Steam is back after two years | Launcher Shannon Liao talks to developers from Red Candle Games about their desire to tell a story about family and cultural pressures from an authentic Taiwanese perspective.
    • Final Fantasy 7 Remake Interview: Yoshinori Kitase, Naoki Hamaguchi, and Motomu Toriyama On Recreating A Classic | TheGamer Jade King talks to

    …

    Anna Anthropy on Games

    …all other culture-instead of “game culture.”

    When asked about her sexuality and how it affects her game (she’s known for games like Mighty Jill Off, for instance) she says this:

    A videogame is a space constructed out of communication, and communication is the realm in which flirtation and seduction happen, where desire and love are both expressed and explored. It’s a space for role-playing and for exploring fantasy. Of course it has an erotic nature.

    And there’s the complicity of the player, that the audience is a participant in the telling of the story.

    …