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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

…play express a national identity? How does your sense of place shift when you play with others from a different region? As a developer, what are the unexpected quirks of working with an international staff? Why do you think that videogame adventurers always need to tour the world’s hottest locations to prevent the end of days? Tell us about playing esports in different regions, traveling to promote a game, and the cultural particularities that come to light through play. How do games act as a sort of gateway to globetrotting? Robert What

“My life as an Instagram filter”:…

January 31st

…take for a piece of interactive fiction that revolves around instant messenger conversation. But there are so many other ways of addressing intimacy and relationships between two people.”

In another take on the power of non-romantic love, Sloane Cee shared a postmortem of a debut project that offers a compassionate approach to a trans coming out story.

As always, some developers’ attempts at representation leave much to be desired. Andrea Ritsu played Atari’s Pridefest and found no mention of LGBTQ rights whatsoever: Pride is portrayed instead as a celebration of rainbow-coloured joy, put in place to…

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)

…testosterone-soaked glory.

Daniel Starkey, in a retrospective article for Digital Trends, highlights some issues with the game’s combat mechanics, and especially, with its puzzles:

… puzzles aren’t always as clever as you’d hope: There are some brain-teasers, sure. One, for instance, involves a bunch of Tetris-style blocks that you need to piece together to unlock a door. And that’s well enough, but also can’t help but feel a little contrived. Many ancient civilizations built bizarre and ridiculous temples and structures, but none, so far as we know, made contraptions like this. Compared to all the thought…

June 9th

…familiar story in an area of e-shops for games. Early this year, Nintendo shut down the Wii Shop Channel. The company also intends to stop supporting all services for the Wii Shop Channel, which means that players will lose access to any purchased games that they haven’t already downloaded. And that’s how piracy has become necessary in preserving these games; there are just no other options in these instances.”

Heged Bets

That’s not a typo, just a middling-to-poor attempt at a pun on hegemony (sigh), because that’s precisely what these three authors have in their sights this…

November 2019

Welcome, readers, to the follow-up instalment of This Month in Videogame Vlogging. If you missed what this is about, check out the October edition which, yes, admittedly we posted only last week. But now we’re caught up, just in time for the changing of the calendars.

November brought with it the stirrings of the beginnings of the endings of the year and the decade, a time to think about maybe reflecting upon things soon. Fortunately, despite the on-coming wave of reminiscence, quite a few video makers continued their efforts highlighting how industry practices can change for the better

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This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2019

…cross a line that they cannot come back from?

Latent Politics

Given #1: When we say that “everything is political,” we mean that everything is informed not just by the creator’s opinions but the full weight of the society in which those opinions are formed.

Given #2: This includes the mechanics and messages in games.

Take, for instance, 2017’s Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice, which for all its (divisive) representation of mental illness still advances the idea that Senua’s suffering is the “price” for her gifts. As Grace in the Machine put it this past July:

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July 11th

…myself relating to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain in the toughest moments of our time. It’s also the story of how it came to an end in late 2020, and what followed afterwards.”

Material Stakes

Questions of art, exhibition, materiality, and embodiment abound in our next section with a focus on art installations, adaptation, serious games, and more.

Enter The Data Dungeon: Sex Work & Digital Domination | Immerse Lena Chen situates the goals of the online art installation/performance Play4UsNow in a digital landscape increasingly hostile to sex workers.
Getting physical with…

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.

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