"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…the most of the depressingly mundane.
“Unlike New Vegas, Fallout 76 doesn’t actually have fuckable robots. But it does have a robot plotline centered around doomed love . . . and is that really so different?” I distinctly recall 2010’s NieR making waves at the time of its release for featuring a middle-aged father as the primary protagonist, but we’ve had older dudes at the helm of …
Rugged Women
…deeply with it. Nier: Automata could speak to them as individuals in a way it might not have while reading subtitles.”
Y’all don’t need me to give you another reminder that shit is kind of fucked up right now around the world. But how are players–and developers–making sense of uncertainty, or even charting a path forward founded on hope? Two authors this week tackle these questions.
…and responses to popular games and the critical themes they intersect with.
“The questions were very surprising and I answered in complete honesty and good conscience. It took me some time to understand that I just couldn’t make it by my own and that I had to accept help.”
…Death Stranding
…the articles! They’re good.
“There is no canonical explanation for why the YoRHa androids’ powerful bodies don’t plow through the foliage unfettered. However, their antagonistic relationship to the fauna speaks to an incompatibility with the world they are thrust into; only deepening the
…
…Tellers
Next up, three pieces on worldbuilding, narrative themes, and storytelling tools. …
…seen, I tell myself in the daytime, as I walk around my neighborhood and mentally match the bursting pink and white cherry blossoms with their striped and spotted gray bark. I’m doing this for the aesthetic, I tell myself at night, collecting and arranging pixels that will one day disappear as completely as this spring’s blossoms.”
This one was too lyrical to not be our sendoff for the week.
“You…
…in NieR: Automata have gleaned from the human ruins of gender, beauty, war, and philosophy.
“More than its commitments to ecological fidelity in the game’s rules and its representations, I think ECO should be lauded for staging issues of environmental crisis in online social space where it invites both collaboration, as well as sabotage.” Get out your reading glasses now …
Art and Artist
…it went Super.
“A metal heart beats at the center of a wild world, a steel poison creeps through plant-covered capillaries. It’s legitimately poetic, but relies entirely on imagery to make its point. Even the notoriously silent Super Metroid is more explicit.” The Berlin Interpretation of dating platforms. “By her count, she roped 22 men into her devious yet amazing scheme. Since it’s been a couple of years, she claims, she couldn’t…
Critical Chaser
https://mcdn.podbean.com/mf/web/af7m38/24-florence-smith-nicholls.mp3 Download “Keywords in Play” is an interview series about game research supported by Critical Distance and the Digital Games Research Association. This epsiode we speak with Florence Smith-Nicholls about the paper “The Dark Souls of Archaeology: Recording Elden Ring” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.10949). Florence is a game AI PhD researcher based in London. They also work as a Story Tech, a member of the writers’ room at the indie studio Die Gute Fabrik. Building on their background as an archaeologist, they have contributed to the field of archaeogaming through experimenting with archaeological approaches to titles such as Elden Ring and Nier: Automata.
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