Welcome back readers.

Happy Nintendo Switch 2 week to those who celebrate? I got my thumb caught hard in the new joycon attachment mechanism within five minutes of opening the box. I did not get Mario Kart. Anyway, segue to Patreon! Support us for cheap and help us collect and communicate great writing on games every week.

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

This week our opening section captures ideas and impressions across a variety of written genres with a focus on new and recent games.

“Stone is one of the game designers to watch when it comes to designing in an eco-conscious manner. But they should also watch her because she is a master of crafting stories that entangle the mundane with the mythic. The familiar transmuting into the sublime. Sorrow’s tale is cyclical, like many things in nature, death and decay leads to new growth.”

Now let’s move into a horror-focused section, and more specifically its overlap with other genres and modes.

“To journey out in Adventure is to seek glory; climbing the Tower of Druaga is hard and requires secrets, but it will make the sense of conquest even sweeter. In these dark Ruins, though, there is only a dwindling torch, and the soft words of the Maiden gives you the hope that maybe, just maybe… she isn’t lying. That it wasn’t her fault. That you can save her. And have your heart’s desire.”

These next three selections pursue a collection of topics centered on archaeology, curation, exhibition, and preservation.

“Encouraging players to slow down and look away from the screen might seem counterintuitive, but I think that it’s actually a powerful way of getting people to more deeply engage with puzzles and digital space.  If note-taking helps scaffold archaeological mental models when interpreting analogue archaeological remains, then it can also aid players who essentially take on the role of archaeologists when interpreting environmental storytelling.”

Now let’s look at critical intersections between games and film.

“Even if we pretend that your average movie and your average game have some kind of comparable artistic value, one just doesn’t convert into the other. If there are no good videogame films, it’s because—even ignoring mechanics and gameplay and interactivity—the subject matter and aesthetics and narratives of games are not good material for filmic interpretation.”

These next two pieces investigate very different technological paradigms, but which nonetheless are grouped by popular nomenclature under the banner of “AI”.

“There were many different “eras” of Polygon, but each had a point beyond just churn. There are, after all, already dozens (hundreds?) of websites that clumsily paraphrase tweets and press releases. So who is served by throwing Polygon into the industrial vat of internet slop? (Perhaps a more apt phrasing: Who is enriched by it? No prize for guessing right.)”

I liked this.

• The Secret Diary of a Video Game Horse | McSweeney’s
  Kathleen O’Mara pokes fun at the hero’s (e)quest ( Nico Moisson explores gendering in horse games through poetry).

“Today, the hero left me standing on the edge of a cliff as he glided off with some kind of flying machine. I did see a staggering amount of horse bones at the base of the ravine, as though someone was crass enough to just run their horse right off the cliff. Unsure why he needed me to gallop at full speed for no more than thirty feet, but he always knows what’s right and good. I’m sure my contribution was necessary and strategic, not just something he tried because it’s cool.”