videogame criticism – bigtallwords

Oct 3, 2016Mar 1, 2017

A Very Thin Blue Line: This is the Police, Noire, Repression and Administration

“Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.” (Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent) This is the Police is a game of frustration. Playing it isn’t frustrating; the rules are actually pretty straightforward and only slightly grow over the course … Continue reading A Very Thin Blue Line: This is the Police, Noire, Repression and Administration

Jun 21, 2016Sep 19, 2017

A Family That Plays Together

[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s June 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] Videogame fiction, like a lot of adventure fiction for young people, places the central character in the position of rescuing a loved one. Often the loved one our hero must rescue is a damsel in distress with an implicit … Continue reading A Family That Plays Together

Apr 4, 2016Jan 18, 2017

Bloodborne and Back Pain

[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s March 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] In the last week or so my background viewing over meals and housework has been a Let’s Play of FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, a gothic horror fantasy spiritually succeeding the same developer’s infamously difficult Souls series. I’m not likely … Continue reading Bloodborne and Back Pain

Jan 12, 2016Sep 19, 2017

Nuking the Family in Fallout 4

I don’t play Bethesda RPGs. Not because they aren’t good; in fact my second-hand opinion is that they’re very good. I’ve developed this opinion after a lot of critics and writers I respect have engaged with Bethesda RPGs in very intelligent ways. To see what I mean take a look at Michael Clarkson’s critical compilation … Continue reading Nuking the Family in Fallout 4

Jun 11, 2015Sep 19, 2017

Girl at the End of the World

Tropes are difficult to work with. They’re broadly useful to tease apart patterns but because they interact with one another, each individual instance of a trope will slightly escape perfect definition. Encountering this uniqueness is where we have to do the work of reading and figuring out just how texts co-mingle to communicate something greater than the … Continue reading Girl at the End of the World