Search Results for “narratives” – Page 4

September 19th

…narratives, mechanics, and thematic resonances.

Ultima 4 [1985] – Arcade Idea Art Maybury appraises Ultima 4 as one of the more successful early installments in an ongoing canon of games which try to capture some aspect of Dungeons & Dragons‘ essence, focusing on the game’s innovations and experiments with scale, structure, and moral philosophy.
A is for Jump – GlitchOut Oma Keeling is thinking about platformers–their simplicity, their strangeness, their ubiquity, and most of all their narrative flexibility.
The Spectre of Gacha Oblivion | Bullet Points Monthly Kazuma Hashimoto considers the ways in which Nier is

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This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2021

…threatened or have already been destroyed by those recognizable voices. One group, in response, mounted counter-narratives. They turned digital, memetic formations and lost futures into weapons pointed outward. There is no joke here, regardless of the memes and shitposts involved: the material damage is as real as ghosts, or the stock market.

We Need To Let Go Of Silent Hill 2 – Uppercut Jessica Hill reflects on the ways in which our continuing rumination on Silent Hill 2 holds the wider genre back and poisons its attendant discourse.
Silent Hill 2: Deconstructing Daddy | KRITIQAL Oma…

Regina Seiwald and Ed Vollans – Paratexts | Keywords in Play, Episode 19

…relationship between fiction and reality. The insights generated have subsequently been applied to video games and digitalisation more generally (also XR/AI/MR), particularly in the context of paratextuality and Cold War narratives.

Ed Vollans’ research interests explore the promotional culture of the entertainment industries, how they promote, market and position themselves within the wider popular sphere. Specifically focusing on film and videogame promotion, his work has explored the emergence of trailers for the games industry, and audience reception of film promotion.

As a joint venture, “Keywords in Play” expands Critical Distance’s commitment to innovative writing and research about games…

October 30th

…of Fall – Uppercut Sarah Thwaites chats with Adam Robinson-Yu about capturing the autumnal vibe, artistically and thematically.

“With an artist unable to see their value and a young scholar stubbornly struggling to find tuition money, the park had a depth that I was not expecting. Both plights also feel at home in the sensation of change and acceptance that autumn is often associated with.”

Victory Lap

We look now at the narratives being revised and re-revised at the triple-A end of the industry.

Apocalypse on Repeat: The Last of Us, Part…

This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2023

It probably doesn’t bear repeating that 2023 was a roller coaster of a year. The highs were very high, the lows were very low, and we spent a lot of time rapidly oscillating between the two points. Was 2023 the “best year” for videogames? Only if you look at the number of hot releases that came out this year. But as always, if you broaden the scope of your view, deeper, more complex narratives emerge. For instance, several certified bangers came out in 2023, but those tentpole releases were punctuated by mass layoffs across the industry, with the total

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Fallout 3

…Cook describes in “Hero of the Wastes”. When there are so few people, killing even one feels like genocide, and saving even one feels incredibly important.

Of course, the Washington D.C. setting of the game provides a touchstone for the development of personal narratives. Chris Person, whose once lived over the spot Vault 101 would be if it existed, found the game deeply affecting because of its connection to his childhood haunts. Michael Abbott, who only visited D.C., detailed a similar experience in “Second Thoughts”, in which he also ponders his meta-experience of the game. Bobby Schweizer relates the…

February 28th

This will be my last This Week In Videogame Blogging before jetting off to San Francisco and the Game Developers Conference. Taking my place for the next two weeks will be enthusiastic contributor Eric Swain.

First up this week, Michael Clarkson makes a case for Santa Destroy as a valuable and necessary part of the original No More Heroes, and it’s omission from the sequel is all the more regrettable.

Zeke Virant is a new blogger who wrote in to let us know about a piece on ‘Expanding Sound in Videogame Narratives’ [mirror] which sounds a lot

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October 24th

…slap in the face.

Also at Kotaku, the new Australian editor Mark Serrels talks with games writer and academic James O’Connor about games stories, discussing Gears of War and Call of Duty’s meta-narratives.

Margaret Robertson spends Five minutes with Minecraft and comes up with the best, most succinct description of the game I’ve yet read:

Minecraft is a game where you mine stuff and make it into other stuff. In Survival mode, which is mostly what the people who are talking about it are talking about, it’s a single player game set in a vast…

December 5th

…a waste of time.

Kris Ligman writes about the ambiguity of gender in video games on her latest piece on PopMatters. She uses Daily, the androgynous love interest in the indie title Dungeoneer: Beautiful Escape, to drive her point.

“You could never say that it’s entirely revolutionary as a literary device, but the fact that it’s rare enough that it might be remarked upon in an article like this points, I think, to certain potential oversights in how we conventionally write about gender and sexuality in video game narratives.”

Also on Popmatters is a piece…

January 16th

…Politics of Submission: The Romance of Enslaved’. While we’re talking about that game, Eric Swain at The Game Critique writes about ‘Enslaved’s thematic failure’ and links to a couple of other thoughtful and interesting responses to the game. Here’s Swain’s takeaway: “Enslaved is the game that finally made me think about abandoning single player games and their strictly authored narratives.”

Alex Raymond reminds us why Final Fantasy VII is such a memorable game [mirror], looking back at the world-building done in the games intro sequence:

FFVII has a reputation for being huge and confusing (and I certainly

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