rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

i think it's a strength of that game that it goes hard on that stuff! i know what you're getting at though, there's a lot of headlines like that that are way more of a stretch

yeah the problem is too many gaming articles about the politics of games

I don't think any of the stuff we're discussing here re: Polygon's output is really about "the politics of games", tbh.

as in, holding tight to even the slightest patina of progressiveness in a game and then discussing the whole thing solely through that lens is not really analysing its politics in any meaningful way

i just don't think critical writing has to be a tight mathematical thesis where you get to the QED, what's wrong with riffing on whimsy?

there's many ways that a piece of writing can be bad but i don't think the tenuousness of its conceits is one of them

"Riffing on whimsy" is p much the opposite of what I'm discussing here, tho - finding a political hook for a game and discussing how well it lives up to that hook is very much a formula! And when that formula gets adopted as the main way to write about p much anything you're going to be leaving out a lot of interesting stuff.

Like I'd be totally down for, say, an article that actually goes deep into British imperial history based on some Ace Attorney plot points but that's not what that is.

With Polygon, there's so much of this kind of output, and some of it fairly half-assed, that I do wonder if the editor is just shrugging their shoulders saying "thoughtful... enough?" It's just in the games writing, it's like everything from comic book hot takes or a middling streaming movie review every week.

As said, they have to make filler content for everyday of the week...

Like maybe they're still trying, or maybe they're just buzzfeed, I don't know anymore

overall tiring trend in media of the phrase "all art is political" collapsing from meaning "all art has a political dimension" to "all art must be analyzed based on whether it has Good or Bad politics"

What makes it sadder is that when Polygon was trying to be weirder apparently that just didn't bring in enough money.

Gotta say they still occasionally do good work, tho: Kazuma Hashimoto is always worth reading, a queer Japanese voice who can contextualise stuff in Japanese culture from that pov. Not video games at all, but I really enjoyed Kendra James' memoir piece on being in an Ornaldo Bloomps fan community, too.

posted as yet unread:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/sid-meier-and-the-meaning-of-civilization

this looks fun
http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2021/10/23/detail/an-excavation-of-light-single-player-rpg-museum-experience

haha, this is and is not worth reading:

https://artreview.com/this-videogame-is-killing-the-planet-battlefield-2042/

One of his video essays, more or less:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gvn9Pg4lUy8

Some interesting stuff in here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-01/arcane-s-redfall-misfire-for-xbox-panned-after-7-5-billion-microsoft-deal

As the author suggests:

If you're wondering why a lot of video game publishers are announcing games years in advance these days, this is the main reason! PR-driven secrecy hurts the industry more than people realize: pic.twitter.com/Gwz8puuc4M

— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) June 1, 2023

hoping companies will get the message that genocide is bad for business

Wait, I don't understand how that article quote relates to delaying video game announcments...

It's not about delaying game announcements, but more about why more publishers are announcing games earlier than in the past so they can avoid situations like with this one where the people applying were under the impression the game would be like Arkane's prior work as opposed to a multiplayer thing, which had to be kept secret since it wasn't announced yet.

oooh ok.

Heh, the part about it being difficult to attract talent to Texas because it’s Texas is definitely a problem from my slim view of things. Cool state.

Yeahhh, kinda felt like that was the bigger issue there. Well, that and for some weird reason not just being able to tell hires what they're supposed to be working on in the interview process, without giving away trade secrets, guess that's too hard or something

Yeahhh, kinda felt like that was the bigger issue there. Well, that and for some weird reason not just being able to tell hires what they're supposed to be working on in the interview process, without giving away trade secrets, guess that's too hard or something

― Nhex

oh like anybody does the job they're paid to do, if i wanted to have privileges like doing the job i'm paid for i'd, i don't know, form a union or something

youtube documentary on vampire survivors including an interview with the creator:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XQVdR8mJrds

i love that a zero-budget game by one guy and some asset packs can blow up.
interesting to learn that the bad pixel scaling was left in intentionally.

oh i'm excited to watch that. love vampire survivors

Gah 2 minutes in and he's talking about going through a big box full of C64 cassettes and they use imagery of 3.5" floppies to illustrate that point. WHY CAN'T I GET PAST THAT SORT OF THING?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVzSHVS-CT0

That was cool. Simultaneously makes me want to play it and glad that I can't.

https://www.eurogamer.net/diablo-4-season-1-is-a-hell-of-my-own-making

I'm grimly fascinated that after the initial round of politely enthusiastic release reviews for Diablo 4, you now get these kind of articles from terminally Diablo-pilled people basically going "please don't ever play Diablo 4. I am completely incapable of taking my own advice on this because it's too late for me, but trust me"

that describes every service-based game these days. the reviewers don't get the real experience

A different take on the thread subject, I think. I found this thread with comments from video game fans living in far flung and often tough locations that make being a gamer really hard:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/15whag9/physical_games_are_almost_gone_where_i_live_and/

There's some of the usual posturing and debate, but mostly lots of stuff about the practical challenges of game costs, dwindling physical media, download speeds, lack of stable power, low wages/weak economy. Caught my eye.

Thanks to Leee on the Last of Us thread for recommending that Something Rotten podcast. I've listened to most of the LoU2 episodes, and while it's often chaotic or incoherent (per hang-out podcast protocol) and I often disagree with their takes (which are steeped in not just general cynicism but also the sort that comes from spending way more time with this particular game than the vast majority of people) it's also often very incisive, and it's all been worth it for the (more or less) last installment with Cameron Kunzelman, who I was unfamiliar with, and whose smart presence sent me scrambling for a pen and paper to note down all the other stuff I wanted to pursue. Kunzelman's book, for example, The World Is Born From Zero, and his other writing on video games, or writers like Stuart Hall, who I also don't know. Not to mention Jacob Geller's video essays, or the epic game analysis videos from Noah Caldwell-Gervais.

For example, I was watching one of Caldwell-Gervais's videos on the Souls games, and he brought up a very interesting point, how almost no matter what action game you are playing, from Last of Us to Doom to Spider-man to Uncharted or whatever, but especially conventionally story-driven games, no matter how easy or difficult, everyone ends up at the same place, more or less the same way. But in Dark Souls, et al., no two players - and in a lot of ways, no two playthroughs - are the same, and how you reach the end is as ambiguous as what the end even *is*, which makes the games particularly rich, mysterious and entrancing. As a more or less casual gamer I'd never really considered this aspect.

I've also got a bunch of books about games queued up. Blood, Sweat and Pixels; Masters of Doom; All Your Base are Belong to Us; Extra Lives. Go figure, there are a lot of books out there about video games.

Interesting interview with old heads in the industry: https://kotaku.com/activision-ageism-video-games-cliffy-b-warren-spector-1851220345

Not as in depth or groundbreaking as I'd like but it approaches game development from a different angle.

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/24070454/banishers-ghosts-new-eden-review

Sounds like my kind of game, gotta keep an eye for this if it goes on sale

https://ff8isthe.best/2024/02/the-game-magazine-that-spent-two-years-taunting-a-final-fantasy-viii-hater/

hehe

lol that last pic, amazing

so petty lol

Yeah great pay off at the end there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqYKT3emSzA

Longform on the pipeline between journalism and development: https://aftermath.site/games-journalism-game-development-ign-kotaku

wasn't familiar with that site; seems good, but it also made me kind of sad to read this as someone who consumed so much games writing in the '00s that so much of it is lost

wow. booming post.