It's funny and entertaining, sometimes, to play something terrible and weird or not-quite-fun. And there are people in my personal life whom I can talk to about that kind of thing, in face-to-face conversation. That's better than posting about it.
A textbook-like anthology of classic essays and articles about video game narrative design.
Amazing resource for games narrative and storytelling techniques.
Announcing a curated, thematic link page of important essays and articles about video game narrative.
Amazing resource from Bruno. Will link in upcoming post.
When I say that First Light is built for genre, I mean that every moment of the game feels like it is perfectly contoured over the model of the James Bond concept, folded and starched over the bodily form in ways that hundreds of professionals managed to accomplish over the course of several years. When I see the developing city emerge from the desert and the labyrinth of corporate managerial space capped with natural stone, I am prepared for genre to erupt at any moment.
Spectacular piece on First Light, James Bond, genre, and the current moment of IP acquisition and exploitation by Cameron.
The year baseball died and took everything else with it.
A beautiful little VN. Well worth your time. Gay and labor-interested and historical and heartbreaking.
Thus the video game writer is by nature a very political animal, whose job involves not only writing story but advocating for it and adapting it to changing circumstances as the project evolves. Often the role of producers and team leads in video game studios is to shield their teams from having to throw out work because of iteration; narrative really is no different.
Great post from Bruno about game narrative and how it functions. Highly recommend reading if you're interested in any of this.
The ninth console generation will be defined by corporate greed, mismanagement, and anti-consumer practices that could very well alter the course of the games industry itself.
Appreciate this piece a lot.
I truly don't know what the future holds for this industry if we continue down the path of the last five years, but I can tell you it won't be good.
I want to talk about games through crises and mass extinctions.
Outstanding piece from Paolo Pedercini analyzing the history of video games through an explicitly materialist lens of markets and populational trends. Pedercini makes the argument that games must be, ultimately, decommodified if we want the art form to survive, and moreover that that process of decommodification may already be underway. Excellent analysis and writing.
The writing I do for a game is our writing, not my writing; it's the game's writing. Its strengths and weaknesses emerge not from the strengths and weaknesses of my soul, but from the strengths and weaknesses in the relationships I have with the team.
laura putting it excellently of course, since she is a great writer.
In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem.
I still think this is one of the best pieces on how endings function in games and narrative more broadly.
Bluntly speaking, Bachelard said back in 1958 that games are not just graphics. They are architecture that create an experience. He would have made an excellent level designer.
More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.
Been poking through my old link docs from college. Will be posting a few classics. This is one of my favorite Bogost pieces -- he goes into why gamification is, most importantly, a method of ‘bullshit’. Not as just a generic slur, but as a method of obscuring labor with ‘games’.
communist construction under siege in a different twentieth century.
i made a video game. I will likely write about it on the Big Blog in the future
Dark Scrolls is a fantasy-themed action platformer that fuses shmup-style chaos with roguelite progression and is packed with charm, challenge, and secrets.
Dark Scrolls was made by some friends of mine! Check it out!
Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.
There's been chatter for the better part of a decade about "wholesome" as a marketing term. Small groups of people online criticize it, then participants in that scene are outraged. It continues, apparently, to attract an audience of people who believe that the term "wholesome" reinforces their sense of self.
Laura makes a great argument for "nurturing" as a genre title and opposed to the morally weighted (& politically fraught) term "wholesome".
I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.
Good piece on the recent Ren'Py generative AI debacle. For what it's worth, I'm making a game in Ren'Py and have no intentions of stopping doing that, but this sucks in a very particular way. I hate the modern age sometimes, you know.
What the heck's a Game Dad?
A cheap little handheld games console that plays every game you grew up with and all the ones you never got the chance to play. It has a proper D-pad and buttons and a good bright screen, and sometimes it has one or two analog joysticks as well.
Love this terminology and will be using it from here on out. Game Dad.
The Game Workers Conference is an entirely new game industry event made by and for the countless workers who make this massively influential industry and artistic medium succeed. The first iteration of the conference is being hosted by a partnership of various game industry unions and worker-cent...
Happening now! Some good talks so far.
Art and artifice in the fake 1990s