The point of this exhibition is pain. The pain of shifting focus as an observer. The pain of how, after so many decades of feminist analysis, I can read fifty articles about how modern art and film are just like Silent Hill 2 - full of conjecture about art that looks similar by important cisgender men - and not see any of the works by artists I know are direct aesthetic parallels. Here are a few of them.
Read MoreWhat's so powerful about Lofi Ping Pong is how it understands its subject. It is a sad and challenging game wrapped in soft textures; less ping pong sim than twitchy rhythm game. Unlike its inspiration, here we can’t be wholly insulated. Our ironic detachment breaks every time we miss a beat, thrust back into consciousness and the glow of our monitor.
Read MoreSUPERLUNARY triumphs in the moments between pain and reconciliation, characters reaching out to one another as the only thing keeping them from falling inwards. It is not a sad game, not exactly, but its stability comes at a premium. Every pocket of intimacy exists inside a ship built for war, and even with the torpedos removed that fact is hard to ignore.
Read MoreDear Future is an asynchronous massively-multiplayer photography game about exploring an abandoned city. I have been trying to write about it for several weeks and have found myself incapable of doing with any organization or distance. What follow, instead, are orchestrated recollections and half-formed conclusions of my time with the game. A half-step towards the understanding I'm searching for.
Read MoreIs this nirvana? What intimacy can 4K matchmaking systems create more meaningful than sharing a GameBoy in the backseat of a car? Capitalism won’t allow that experience to be enough. It can’t monetize a memory, a yellowed cartridge, the worm lights illuminating unlit and unconnected screens.
Read MoreDeath Crown’s simplicity is its draw and its curse, illuminating both fatiguing elements of the strategy genre but also how that reduction has created a game in search of itself.
Read MoreEven the Ocean sits unfortunately between an early indie hit and a decade defining classic. It is the studio’s most technically accomplished game to date but lacks the emotional heft of its siblings; a delight in itself that falls shy of the incredibly high bar Analgesic have set for themselves. But as a transitional piece it is one of the best modern examples we have of thematic development across games, made more interesting through Anodyne 2's parallels.
Read MoreVideo games are built on violence. Violence towards their creators at the hands of industry overlords. Violence towards their fans through the cultivation of toxic communities. Violence to the planet by the manufacturing of useless hardware and the ballooning footprint of server farms. Violence as the primary verb through which we understand our interactions in these digital worlds. The argument of whether games should be violent is over, violence has won.
Read MoreThe 10mg Collection (2020) is a series of 10 micro-games by as many teams, collected together as a showcase of smaller experiments within the medium. A Dizain poem is a form comprising 10 lines of 10 syllables each, with an ababbccdcd rhyme scheme. This collection of poems is an attempt to bring these two things together.
Read MoreGames, even abstract ones, convey elements of the people that birthed them. They reflect the concerns and interests of a period and can be as enlightening about a culture’s values as any text or document.
Read MoreGhostrunner may as well have fallen backwards into cyberpunk for want of a theme. It can wrench nothing from this stone that has not already been alienated by other derivative works, and squanders its movement on inconsistent combat and weightless platforming. It is perhaps the perfect game to prelude Cyberpunk 2077, both clinging to imagery they don’t understand, hoping for depth by association.
Read MoreWe are all going to die before we clear our backlogs. Life is too short to spend on games made under abuse. It’s too short to criticize Ubisoft’s workplace and then devout a week of coverage to each of their games. There is so little we can control under capitalism, but what we can do is decide what media we spend our time with.
Read MoreQueerheart (Afterglow Games, 2019) is an attempt at a digital gallery. It compiles vintage adverts, poems, clips of silent films, alongside original works taking a variety of forms. Click around the halls and you’re taken to different non-spaces: a vaporwave poetry corner, some hotel rooms hiding text-to-speech memoirs, a tv playing clips of early queer cinema. It is the inversion of the white cube – vibrant, messy, enveloping.
Read MoreGames media as it exists today is entirely incapable of healing itself. It exists as a half dozen atomized outlets, each an appendage to a larger media company, reliant on platforms and technologies far outside their control. Games media is in an eternal suspended animation, its budget always getting cut, staff perpetually in line for the chopping block, access and resources held over writers by studios and media empires. It is capitalism in microcosm. The holes will never be patched, the sense of impending doom is baked into the fabric that holds these outlets (momentarily) together.
Read MoreIndiepocalypse is a monthly zine and collection of indie games featuring weird, quirky, and creative explorations of the medium. Here are some thoughts on issue 8, featuring: 1980s interfaces, angels, and a computer making friends with bumblebees.
Read MoreWelcome. We made it. 2020. Wow, what a year. A lot has happened as I’ve been trying to write this list, but what’s important is that video games are good and here and should definitely be allowed to exist.
Read MoreI’m not asking Abzu to just be Journey, but if it is already working from that point of reference it’s strange how little Abzu understands why Journey worked at all. If Journey was a ballet Abzu is a SeaWorld show. Flashy, controlled, at times inspiring, its artifice fully on display.
Read MoreThe Last Survey is a two (arguably one) man play about justifications and the failure of modern liberalism to try to both hold on to capitalism and appear sympathetic to our concerns. It holds you in this limbo and dares you to justify your way out.
Read MoreWe need more games like Tonight We Riot and Anarcute, and more which go beyond what either of these is capable of saying.
Read MoreMutazione imagines a beautiful and complex life founded on small, self-sustaining community and a respect for the natural world. It is charming and warm but also plain about the challenges of sustaining a community like this. It reckons with the contradictions of colonialist greed and asks if things couldn’t be rebuilt without hierarchies and violence.
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