Search Results for:

history

February 27th

…closely from the previous section, these next three featured authors explore critical tensions in the thematic and ideological threads that tie their games of study to our own world, past and present.

  • Uh-oh! Stormblood’s Politics are Kinda Bad! – No Escape Kaile Hultner is back from another trip to Eorzea and the Scions are uh *checks notes* doing a colonialism? And some nationalism?
  • Feeling History in Blasphemous: Monstrosity and Spectacle through Time | Play the Past Jack Orchard continues his study of Blasphemous, this time looking at feminine monstrosity, trans saints, and the ways in which the

…

March 13th

…site, we’ve got a new Keywords! This episode’s guest is Dr. Esther Wright, discussing her forthcoming book Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity.

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

Empires and Authoritarians

To open this week we’re looking at intersections between games and state power, along axes of game design, story worlds, and labour organization.

  • Empire [1977/1984] – Arcade Idea Art Maybury considers a strategy game which, in line with its simple title, offers

…

April 3rd

…new topics in player experience and sound engineering; check ’em out!

  • Ethically designing unethical worlds | Game Developer Ruth Cassidy talks to the makers of several notable simulation and strategy games about the tricky balance of presenting a world with problems without producing a system made out of different problems.
  • A History of Hup, the Jump Sound of Shooting Games | WIRED Bryan Menegus presents a thorough historical examination of That Grunt.

“Pessimistically, it might seem like the rock-star developers of the time threw a sound into their splashy new game because they could

…

April 17th

…best bosses and locations drew inspiration from an unlikely source | Inverse Cian Maher takes inventory of how Elden Ring is absolutely suffused with influence from Irish mythology and points out, among other things, that you’ve probably been pronouncing “Siofra” wrong.

  • Your Apocalypse is Bad and Wrong and I would Know | Medium Nicanor Gordon faults the white western model of apocalpyse fiction in games for, among other things, a linear and deterministic view of history and an (ahistorical) emphasis on cruelty over community.

    • “To live in the Global South is to brave apocalyptic conditions enacted…

    April 24th

    …pushing technological boundaries, but what about the side-projects and spinoffs? To understand these smaller titles, it’s important to situate them in their respective times, places, and platforms, like our next two featured writers do here.

    • Pieces of History – Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles on Wiiware | PixPen Sam Howitt situates a pair of experimental Final Fantasy spinoffs in the context of the WiiWare platform’s humble 40MB size limit.
    • Hi-speed fantasy – Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster Kimimi finds something refreshing in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest‘s stripped-down, tightly-paced approach to the JRPG format compared to its more grandiose contemporaries.

      • …

    May 1st

    …the particular pleasures of Rollercoaster Tycoon specifically and management sims more broadly.

  • Why ‘Sid Meier’s Gettysburg’ Stopped Making Sense | VICE Rob Zacny considers how the lens of popular history has shifted away from Firaxis’ Civil War simulator.
  • Eastern Front 1941 [1981] – Arcade Idea Art Maybury pens an indictment less of a particular game from a particular era by a particular guy, but more generally of our outsized fascination with the question of “what if the Nazis won?”

    • “It’s a deference to an idea of “rationality” that lets you escape interrogating the underlying premises…

    May 8th

    …Market in the 80s | The Genesis Temple Damiano Gerli offers a detailed and demystifying history of the complex and heterogeneous market shares of consoles and micros across Europe.

    “Indeed, forty years ago, well before the digital revolution and on-line markets, each nation had a different and unique approach to the industry: this included the number of “gaming” systems available. This is especially true for Europe, a market that followed quite a different set of rules than the US. In order to try and figure out how the European market worked, along with how it shaped the…

    June 5th

    …at a Dreamcast racing port with an especially convoluted publishing history, which bears all the appearance and reputation of a bad game but which, for a very specific historical racing audience, might still have something to it.

    “What I mostly imagine would keep folk invested in the game though – besides whatever love of the setting and the classic cars they bring in with them – is the satisfaction of overcoming all the odds in order to squeak out satisfying wins. And believe you me: Scoring wins really does seem to come down to the very last…

    June 13th

    …let’s now shift gears to a pair of historically-minded perspectives on archives and cultural imperialism.

    • Archives and Historical Accuracy in the Elder Scrolls Online | Play the Past Alvina Lai explores the social and political importance of archives, as briefly expressed in an ESO daily.
    • The Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake Can’t Shed Its Orientalist Roots | Fanbyte Saniya Ahmed unpacks the orientalist development history, authorship, and pastiche of the Prince of Persia series as a whole.

    “Although Ubisoft’s Indian studios took charge and are regionally closer to Iran, their cosmetic and

    …

    June 19th

    …Queer Melancholia in the Post-Post-Apocalypse of NieR:Automata – NiCHE Kaitlin Moore ties together the destabliziation of the environment, time, history, embodiment, and human subjectivity in the world of NieR Automata.

  • Being Trans is the ‘Dark Souls’ of Gender: An Exploration of Parallels | Epilogue Gaming Flora Eloise, in an expansive critique, relates the experience of coming back to Lordran to the experience of coming out as trans.

    • “Being trans is a way of becoming your own mental self-defense instructor, developing techniques that disarm, diminish, and defuse the slurs, the dog whistles, the cheap shots, the awkward…