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
Video Games for Difficult Times
There used to be this game magazine – not like PC Gamer, more a literary magazine – this online-only ‘essays about video games’ title. I forget the name of it, but it was around in the early 2010s. Their submission page had two instructions. First, no essays about BioShock. Second, no essays about how some…
Mosaic: On Bathos
Imagine an industrial building site, all diggers and dull earth. It’s sunrise, but the thick purple air is more readily attributed to the pollution burping out of honking machinery. The earth is subject to the various impacts of machinery. Trucks leave their heavy imprint, diggers tear and rend. Commuters trudge past on the other side…
I Just Want To Break Ships Forever
Job simulators, as a genre, balance two impulses. They are games about the experience of labour. One impulse is to depict labour as heroic – as something uplifting, as something we can or should take pride in. Job simulators explore the sense of fulfilment that people find in being able to do their job well.…
Art in the Age of Digital Reproduction
Frank Lantz, the Founding Chair of the NYU Game Center, has a new book out with MIT Press, titled The Beauty of Games. The blurb opens thus: “Are games art? This question is a dominant mode of thinking about games and play in the twenty-first century, but it is fundamentally the wrong question.” It’s a…
Masculinity in Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a 2010 sci-fi action game based around the 16th century Chinese novel 西遊記, or Journey to the West. It sort of plays like an early PS3 version of Horizon Zero Dawn: there’s been an apocalypse, there are mechs everywhere, and nature has grown up and over the ruins of…
Plagiarism and Community
Critical Distance is a games website that curates and archives video game criticism. In its mission statement, it says it was “founded to answer the question: ‘Where is all the good writing about games?’” It has the function of a review journal or one of the literary magazines, in that it’s a hub for readers…
Assassin’s Creed Unity: On Spatial Hacking
There’s this hbomberguy video about Yooka-Laylee, a 2016 platformer in the style of Crash Bandicoot or Ratchet and Clank – it’s a deep dive on certain mechanics that had gone out of style and that were repopularized by the game. One of the mechanics he lists, from about the nine minute mark, is purposeful movement.…
Assassin’s Creed Unity: On Extremists
When I first started this website, some of my early essays looked at how different games might expand on their themes. For example, I wrote a little about Beyond Eyes, a 2015 game about a blind girl where the world becomes visible only after it’s perceived by her other senses. You ‘see’ a bird only…
Labour and Intimacy in Night Call
When I started writing here, I had a bunch of things I wanted to discuss. I would write essays over the top of each other, queueing them up weeks or sometimes even months in advance. I just had a lot going on. That’s not really the pace any more. My work now is slower, deeper.…
Five Dates: The Problem with Dating Sims
This might actually be a good dating simulator. Or – it’s at least interesting. ‘Dating sims are bad but Five Dates is interesting.’ That would be the title of this essay, if I had more space in the header. Five Dates is a 2020 full-motion video game from Wales Interactive, the team behind Late Shift,…
Eternal Threads: On Choice
Eternal Threads is a 2022 branching narrative puzzle game, the debut title from Liverpool developers Cosmonaut Studios. It fucking rocks. Let me – I’ll just say that up front. This game slaps. It’s so good. This is not a game review site, but this game is amazing and I can’t reasonably talk about it without…
Sunlight: On Connection
There’s a running joke about Marnie in Stardew Valley – you hang out with this lady, and bring her gifts, and after you build up enough trust she goes yeah, you know, I think that maybe you and me are genuinely friends – and you go FINALLY and run into her room to retrieve the…
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Death is a Whale 