This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Mark Filipowich on topics ranging from a Marxist discussion of RPG elements to a Leigh Alexander mediation on two Kanye West games. The Forest Patricia Hernandez expresses disappointment with Tomodachi Life's heteronormativity over at Kotaku and breaks down just how structurally invested the game is in straightness:
[E]ntire sections of the game are gated until you let characters romance each other. And since only folks of the opposite gender can romance each other, I think it's fair to say that Tomodachi Life is really invested in heterosexual relationships. When Nintendo is probably the first company that comes to mind when someone says "family friendly" in the gaming industry, that's a problem.
Zachery Oliver's second of a two-part breakdown of remastered classics cuts at the necessity and hypocrisy of modernizing the past. Speaking of preserving the past, Tomas Brown analyses how museums function in games for Play the Past. Chris Franklin discusses preservation and curation of games in a time when most of the process is digitized. Specifically, he touches on how important it is that critics distance themselves from the AAA Public-Relations Complex:
I'm as guilty as anyone when I spend two weeks writing about a half-baked Thief sequel instead of something smaller but arguably more intimate ... we do it because the information most people want right now is to know whether their hype in Watch_Dogs is validated.
Finally, Gaines Hubbell of Higher Level Gamer encourages scepticism to any critical approach that leans heavily on auteur theory. Listen close and you can hear the thud from the mic dropping:
Authorship is always a tricky issue for critics of all medias. Auteur theory does not work for content from major studios, and it works only occasionally for content from indie+ studios.
The Trees Aevee Bee applauds the way that Fire Emblem: Awakening adopts fantasy pulp writing tropes to videogame structure: "Fire Emblem isn't any more or less designed than any other narrative but it is designed with respect to the technology of a video game." As if I needed another reason to finally play that game. Conversely, Lindsey Joyce, the curator of last week's TWIVGB, finds that Child of Light fails to reconcile its writing tradition with the demands of immersion. At Tap-Repeatedly, Amanda Lange reads the disconnected episodes of Kentucky Route Zero as an endless, dreamless night:
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