Reading List August 2021 (Patreon)

Time for another reading list, folks! This time around, I seemed to watch nothing but absurdly long videos — most notably Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ seven hour monster that probably took me a week alone to get through. Each video and article is worth you time, though, so give it all a look!

Talking ‘bout Short Games

There were a lot of great short games that passed us by this month...and a few that weren’t so great. Here’s some of the best in covering short, tight experiences from around the internet!

RUINER Review by MandaloreGaming: Mandalore checked out RUINER, the gritty hyper-powered shoot’em up, and came away mostly liking the game with a few quibbles about the plot and some of the game’s design.

A Short Hike: Nature, Cell Phones, and Friendship by Games as Literature: Games as Lit did a literary analysis on everyone’s favorite chill bird game, focusing on a thematic switcheroo that let the game play with his preconceptions.

Design Ruminations: Subverting the Ending by Andrew Plotkin: Plotkin broke down the narratives to two fascinating short indies, Omno and Minute of Islands, ruminating on mechanical promises each game makes and how one affirms them and the other shatters them.

Realms Deep Roundup by Civvie 11: The huge boom of 90s shooters lately has been great, since they’re often as short as they are fun. And with Realms Deep, a PR event put on by 3D Realms, we got to see a whole bunch of new entries to get excited for, including several new demos that Civvie covered the highlights of.

Twelve Minutes Might Have the Worst Video Game Ending of the Year by Renata Price: Twelve Minutes, one of the more anticipated indies this month that I very nearly covered, has been getting shredded for its ending. And Price has perhaps the most succinct and savage takedown of the uncomfortable places the game goes.

Empathy for the Downtrodden

The next pair of articles hit on the same vein through very different games: articles about empathising with downtrodden characters in games that are all about processing the trauma those characters have experienced. Societal trauma, emotional trauma, physical trauma, all fall under the lens in these games, and also by their coverage.

Crime & Humanity in Yakuza by HeavyEyed: HeavyEyed discussed the empathetic way Yakuza presents its protagonists and contrasted them with the way other criminal characters are often depicted in media.

A Year Later, I Still Can’t Stop Thinking About Disco Elysium by Renata Price: Price dove deep into the compelling and layered wounds of both protagonist Harry Dubois and Revachol, the city he works in, at large. It’s a thoughtful, emotional piece that discusses the nature of trauma and how both city and investigator wrestle to come to terms with their pasts.

Weird Business

The video game industry is a bit of a wild west when it comes to business, and from a game entirely built on fraught relationships with internet celebrities to bizarre moneymaking strategies on Steam, this month highlighted some of the weirdest, if perhaps not always amusing, corner’s of the industry.

Asagao’s Affliction // Creative Retrospective feat. Cara Hillstock by Micah Edmonds: Edmonds used Asagao Academy, a dating sim featuring youtube gaming celebrities, as a springboard to talk about not just the parasocial challenges associated with the project, but those inherent in a lot of youtube-related work.

Investigation: How Roblox is Exploiting Young Game Developers by People Make Games: Games taking advantage of fans to create content for their ecosystems for free is probably something you’re familiar with, but as People Make Games details, Roblox manages to take the grift to a whole new level in the ways it exploits minors.

Why Steam Games Are Getting Mysterious Sale Spikes in Argentina by Patrick Klepek: Klepek covered the bizarre case study of why certain games are getting bought disproportionately from Argentina. Surprisingly, the reason is turning a profit on steam cards, and the specific economics at play is fascinating.

Everything Else

A Thorough Look at Resident Evil by Noah Caldwell-Gervais: Caldwell-Gervais’s breakdown of the entire Resident Evil franchise is masterful and fascinating. It’s also a novel-length behemoth that likely doubles the watch time of this reading list.

The Limits of a Card Name by Rhystic Studies: Rhystic went into the linguistic artistry that goes into Magic cards by highlighting a notable and absurd sounding card from the most recent set: Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar.

Designing Dark Souls Easy Mode by Darkfry: Darkfry waded right into the perpetual debate that’s hung over Dark Souls for years: Should there be a Dark Souls easy mode? And what would it even look like?

Plot. It’s a Problem by Emily Short: Short, creative director of Failbetter Games of Sunless Skies/Seas fame, had a fascinating blog post about the challenge of crafting a branching narrative in a game. Interestingly, the problem isn’t the logistics of a tangled storyline that folds back into itself. It’s committing to conscious decisions.

Map Design — How Breath of the Wild Gets it Right by Afterthoughts: Cartography fan Afterthoughts illustrated what makes a good map and how Breath of the Wild checks all the boxes.

Quake Renaissance: A Short History of 25 Years of Quake Modding by Robert Yang: As part of a three-part series, Yang ran down the entire history and unlikely comeback of Quake’s modding community.