Video games are in an exciting position. This brand new baby medium, still in its infancy, is also the biggest media industry on the planet, boasting well over $150 billion in revenue each year.
Here, we look at how games tell stories – from multi-million dollar triple-A titles down to solo indie shit.
Check out some of the quick-start topics below, or scroll down for the full video game feed – updates every second Wednesday.
Feature: Wolfenstein
Terror Billy vs the Nazis
By Size
Triple-A or indie? Choose your fighter.
(Under construction)
By Genre
Strategy, shooter, or something in between
The Feed
Terra Nil: On the Video Game Ecosystem
Terra Nil is – actually something of a rarity for me, in that it’s a game that came out this year. A couple months ago, in fact. I try to stay away from games until they’ve been out for a couple of years, but – well, here we are! Launched March 28, 2023, Terra Nil…
Arkham Knight: The Iceberg Lounge
So I’m pretty into the Arkham games. I’ve written over a dozen articles about them since 2016, most recently looking at architecture in Arkham Asylum and Arkham City, and – you know, I just really enjoy them. It’s not just a story thing either – I love the gameplay. There’s something really satisfying about the…
NUTS: The Aesthetic of the Incomplete
Back in the dark days of 2017, I wrote about Dawn of War: Dark Crusade, a game where players take on the role of a faction from Warhammer 40,000 and battle for control of the planet Kronus. Dark Crusade is a strategy game played on two levels. Players move their armies around on a Risk-style…
Media Hierarchies and the Horus Heresy
You’re familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, right? Back in the 80s, there was an arm of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise responsible for creating and selling little fantasy miniatures, so that as you’re playing you can see your characters on the table. It makes it easier to manage things like distance and position during combat,…
Genesis Noir: On Polyphonic Space
Geoff Dyer is a contemporary English writer. He’s written a handful of novels, but is more known as a writer of weird, cross-genre non-fiction. Consider, for instance, his 2012 book Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room. In theory it’s an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, although the…
The Pursuit of Knowledge in Doors: Paradox
For much of human history, doors are sites of ritual power. Even in the modern, secular day, they supplement their obvious practical function with a symbolic or cultural load: they mean things. We interact with a battery of social conventions and values that are wrapped around and written over the physical actions carried out on…
Little Orpheus: On the Side-Scroller
Little Orpheus is a 2D side-scrolling platformer game from The Chinese Room. Released in 2020 as an Apple Arcade exclusive, it was ported to PC and all the normal platforms in September last year. If you’re familiar with The Chinese Room, you’ll know them for their titles Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture,…
Maid of Sker: Space and Intention
Space in video games is purposive. It has purpose. It’s designed to be navigated and explored as part of the gameplay experience – for a lot of games, the sheer exercise of getting through a place is the bulk of the challenge. We’ve been talking recently about Resident Evil – those games are all about…
The Gothic in Resident Evil
I’m not a long-time Resident Evil fan. This and Silent Hill – I really feel very underqualified to talk about any of these games, especially in terms of the longer running reception. Really the extent of my exposure is that I watched a playthrough of Resident Evil 7 in 2017, and then I obviously heard…
Arkham City: On Heat and Cold
Previously, we’ve talked about how the visual design of Arkham Asylum is built around the concept of repressing madness. Most of the game’s visual elements tie into that theme: they express either some facet of madness or its attempted repression. Arkham City, on the other hand, is a game about society. It’s a game about…
Jedi Fallen Order: On Place and Self
So we moved house recently, and while we were packing we had Star Wars on in the background. And I was thinking – you know, it’s obviously been difficult to talk meaningfully about Star Wars over the past few years. There’s so much outrage and manufactured discontent that it feels like swimming through soup just…
Call of Duty Ghosts: On the Afterlife
Ghosts, huh. People think of Call of Duty: Ghosts as the low point of the franchise – and that’s not entirely the game’s fault. It fell at a bit of a turning point for the series as a whole. If you’re not familiar with the production cycle for Call of Duty, these games essentially function…
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Death is a Whale 