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February 4th

…That Best Describes Our Uncanny Reality – Waypoint Liz Ryerson surveys the spatial narratives and remarkable subversions that have been created through Doom mods.

  • How Dark Souls, Bloodborne and more imagine the cosmos • Eurogamer.net Andreas Inderwildi offers a richly-illustrated account of the cosmologies of a number of lore-heavy games.
  • In praise of video game castles • Eurogamer.net Phillip Boyes surveys the history of castles in games, from their roots in Tolkienesque D&D to their subversion in mid-1990s Final Fantasy games, to their relative denouement as a trope in game design.

    • “As every reader of…

    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    February 18th

    …Al-Aaser surveys a history of indie games that subvert their genre conventions.

    “DDLC is hardly alone in the way it combines the cute and the disturbing. Rather than seeing the game in opposition to its medium, it might be more useful to see the ways that it is part of that ongoing conversation.”

    Package

    In a fascinating set of articles on porting, remakes, and emulation, critics engage with the technology on which games run, asking how it should affect our reading of, and concern for, their cultural significance.

    • The retro gaming industry…

    Critical Distance Awards 2018

    …large community of viewers with a passion for game design. His series on dungeon design across the history of Zelda games has been just one of the remarkable undertakings of this channel in the past year, combining a broad scope with focused arguments, and managing to sustain a regular output of content for viewers despite the scale of the project at hand. On top of that, he allowed his audience a great deal of insight into the process of making sense of game spaces and design change over time, providing an insight into useful critical methods for people who write…

    March 11th

    …in becoming familiar with a place, and how those processes can be reproduced and disrupted in game design.

    “Disruption of the routine the game settles you into is as important as establishing it. It helps to crystallise what values you assign to a space.”

    Wayward

    Three critics look at the effort and affect of bringing things back from the past.

    • The SD card and the vintage video game revolution • Eurogamer.net Simon Parkin sheds light on not just the technology, but the work, that goes into resurrecting old games.
    • History’s Creed:…

    Dark Souls

    …In The Dark: The Power of Dark Souls“, Samantha Allen writes about her gender transition, and finds a mirror for her own experiences in the game.

    “Near the end of Dark Souls, you find yourself at the bottom of a spiral staircase in the New Londo Ruins. As you look down from the bottom step, you see nothing but blackness. The only way to figure out what lies below is to jump.”

    Artorias of the Abyss (Sealing the Gaps in History)

    Despite this compilation’s focus on analysis and personal interpretation, the deeply esoteric nature of…

    April 22nd

    …controversial, headline-grabbing scheme targeting online gaming misogynists.

    Standing out

    In more writing on inclusivity issues in games, three critics explore intersectional issues including gender, class, and religion.

    • Where The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt Goes Wrong in Depicting Women (and Why it Matters) – NYMG Elizabeth Ballou provides a thorough analysis of The Witcher’s problems with female characters as conquests.
    • A Microhistory of Play – Historian On Games Historian On Games experiments with personal history, to explore its benefits and limitations, and try to link individual experiences to intersectional and structural conditions.
    • Alcohol…

    June 17th

    Are you so bloody bored of E3? Well, this roundup of the week’s insightful critical writing is pretty much an E-zero. No consumer hype here, just earnest, authentic examinations of games that already exist.

    Fanfare

    First, a lovely little piece about music!

    • Final Fantasy’s Prelude is Simply Genius | Game Score Fanfare – YouTube Mathew Dyason unpicks the history of these famous arpeggios.

    Surroundings

    This piece on unconscious prejudice in games criticism could well be contentious.

    • Brick By Brick / Sekiro and Prioritized Aesthetics Doshmanziari argues that some coverage

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    July 1st

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    Trauma

    Two writers look at how experiences of racism and xenophobia are reflected in videogames.

    • The Origins of Assassin’s Creed | Unwinnable Yussef Cole reflects on the complex cultural position of blackness in the history of Egypt.
    • God of War & the Lessons of an Undocumented Immigrant | Unwinnable Marcos Gonsalez offers beautiful ruminations on trauma, using the violence perpetrated in God of War as a mirror on the violence suffered by many immigrant families.

    “Trauma does not move from point A to point B to point C. There is no coherence

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    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    August 5th

    …reality and history of city planning while playing the original Sim City.

  • Conveyor Belt Pleasures — CapsuleCrit Kavi Duvvoori describes the colonial, industrialist fantasies of a certain type of simulator.
  • Building a City Without Borders or Walls — CapsuleCrit Sylvia Artiga proposes an alternative kind of power fantasy – one where power benefits the many, not the few.

    • “The true fantasy of the city-builder is this: not just control of a tiny world that you can shape like a garden and watch like an ant farm, but an exercise in making abundance and the practice…

    August 26th

    …and Auteurs

    In writing about criticism, two pieces provide extremely useful background on how games are talked about.

    • Gamasutra – A reading list for game designers looking to expand their conversations Last week, Eron Rauch published a primer for game developers on critically evaluating games.
    • Auteur Theory and Games | Unwinnable Malindy Hetfield outlines the history of auteur theory, and its application in games criticism, and explains why it is sometimes a bad fit for the circumstances of game development.

    Bodies

    This week it struck me how strange it is that so little

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