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This week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup of the most important critical writings about games from the past seven days.

Herald of D’Ni

This week we start with design. Our first selection is about mingames, card game metas and the lost art of CD-ROM Multimedia Experiences.

“Rand Miller, who insists he hates acting, played Atrus in Mystery of efficiency and necessity. And since then he’s stuck repeating his amateur performance, because fans won’t have it any other way. It just wouldn’t be Atrus without the awkward vibes! And if I’m here for Rand Miller’s Atrus, how can I turn my nose up at Peter Gabriel’s spiritual guidance? How can I love Myst games and not their biggest risks? I’m already on the stone slab. It’s not at all hard to complete the circuit with my mind and have a relaxing time flying around in this Winamp visualization while a boppable song plays. This is the Zen of Myst games.”

Pen and paper

Let’s continue with the design, but narrow the focus in a few ways: to RPGs, to RPGs with at least some analog components, and to the push-and-pull between systems and experiences.

“If you prefer a game where the rules are only a rare interruption, don’t you want them to be a worth it interruption?”

Possibility spaces

Our next two choices align the stakes and circumstances of virtual worlds with the material worlds that produce them.

• Bio Domes | Unwinnable
  Phoenix Simms reflects on different rhetorics and applications of biomes and organic language, and their implications for worldbuilding and worldkeeping on both sides of the screen.
• Nine Sols, Two Utopias | Paste
  Perry Gottschalk reflects on the false promises and human cost of constructed utopia in Red Candles parody parable Nine Sols.

“Eugenics, whether through genetic modification, forced sterilization, or swarm consciousness, is simply genocide. The eradication of a cultural identity like Taiwan involves less explicit bloodshed, but it is still genocide. Nine Sols begs us to recognize the false promises made by these constructed utopias.”

Diverse vibes

The next three writers we’re introducing tackle different emotional themes in completely different games.

“I’ve argued before in this column that cosmic horror should get as far away from the racist legacy of HP Lovecraft as possible (also because his prose is pretty bad), and I think The depth still awakens goes a long way toward doing that, by turning the script of inscrutability on its head. These monsters aren’t incomprehensible—we have to make small talk with our personal versions of them in the break room. The horror of this game is effective not because we can’t really understand it, but because we already know it so well.”

Critical hunter

Some extra beats for your reading pleasure, but this time in hip-hop style.

“This list is not exhaustive, but it is exemplary. These games have soundtracks that are worthy of classic status. The music in each of these titles is used inventively. Some of these games have even renewed their audiovisual presentation through hip-hop aesthetics: out of the neighborhood and on the screen, to your surprise. Not to be outdone, other elements of hip-hop culture are vital to the style and even gameplay of these games.”