"Where is all the good writing about games?"
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Our next picks consider videogames and history from within the political moment. Intelligame thinks about Pendragon’s portrayal of restoration and hope in the context of the US Election Day, 2020. (Autocaptions) Kyle Kallgren looks at the 1940s-60s messaging around nuclear weaponry which influenced the aesthetic of the fallout series, and how the perpetual trauma of misinformation resonates in this time of pandemic. (Manual captions) Backward and Forward
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…this week intersect with cyberpunk along different axes, looking at 2077, other games, and the genre itself.
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Let’s start this week with a focused look at trans representation in recent and contemporary games!
“We’ve come a long way from Capcom plugging their ears for decades when Poison’s gender was brought up and Nintendo deadnaming Birdetta in every video game she’s in. Some characters have made great strides in positive trans representation, however, others were clearly written without a single queer person in the room.”
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…in that it is the like underpinnings of our history in games studies. And there’s still a lot of debates, even if people don’t use those terms, there’s a lot of debate between whether we should talk about platform and form or whether we should talk about representational content and cultural meaning as if those two things are opposed. And for me what queer studies does is that it shows us that those two things are not separate. Y’know I’m not as interested in representation, I’m interested in design, I’m interested in computational tools. I’m interested in that stuff that…
…just a little more exaggerated?”
Next up, we have a series of design-focused articles covering a range of topics, from narrative structure, to genre conventions, to spatial navigation, to cynical corporate strategy.
…| Waypoint Grace Benfell examines in Mass Effect‘s Asari a tangled tension between queer possibility and regressive heteronormativity, and how these things come to a head with the Ardat-Yatshi.
“In theory, the asari represent a break from traditional, human modes of gender. In practice, they recreate specific queer discourses of human history, offering either assimilation or death to its queer analogs.” This week we have the pleasure of concluding our issue with two critical art exhibits, author and critic-curated, respectively, situating two well-known and well-loved games into overlooked and underappreciated contexts.
Critical Chaser
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…of contemplated. So, I think people coming from that background, they might kind of find this idea of applying aesthetics to games really challenging.
Thi: So, this is actually, you can totally see this. So not just in philosophy, but in all kinds of cultural criticism, especially if you look at the history of the reception of games, in academia, and in kind of like places like the New York Times, or whatever, you keep seeing this idea that comes from Kant that like art is supposed to be disinterested, aesthetic experience is experienced, it’s like freed of practicality….
…that end in “day”) is always a good day for critical meditations on how popular media alternately props up and critiques the police as an institutional locus of power and violence. We begin this week’s issue with two highlights examining this topic as it relates to a pair of very different well-loved games.
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…Show ‘n Tell: Pagan Ultima VIII Pt 2 – Brendan Vance (1:06:19)
It’s hard not to get pulled into Brendan’s enthusiasm for the environments, assets, soundtrack and adversarial difficulty of the oft-maligned Ultima VIII: Pagan, in this edited Let’s Play. (Manual captions)
Transparency argue the case that the infamous laughing scene from Final Fantasy X is “one of the most misunderstood and unfairly maligned cutscenes in videogame history”. (Autocaptions)
Rounding out this lengthy mid-section on
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…concept that informs our next section in different ways across its three selections, as their respective authors situate the artistic, political, and thematic consequences of games in their specific time and place.
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