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Like, I was taking a look to see if there were any sort of critical analyses of some pretty good AAA JRPG I played a while back, andβ€”

  • "this game is about death, and how people respond to it"
  • [Paragraphs of rambling about gameplay mechanics without trying to analyse the implications of them in the slightest?]
  • "this antagonist faction represents despair and doomerism"
  • Here Let Me Tell You About Scenery

And, like, yeah, this is worth talking about, but. What are games doing with their themes. Great, it's saying Wow This Is A Subject That One Should Think About, but what is the game suggesting we should change in our lives, how we engage with the world, or our politics? What biases have the creators brought in? How does the plot of the game potentially tie in with the hang-ups of the directors or even the execs at the publisher? What kind of extra geopolitical ramifications did the localisation team add to the game when they gave everyone from the pastoral, medieval country with lots of greenery Welsh accents, and then made the shitty little steampunk imperial power from a desert continent Scottish-coded? What should we be interpreting from the fact that the spoilers look distinctly like a grungy mid-'00s vision of Future America-Lead Humanity applied to the culture of the current-day US?


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in reply to @kda's post:

Speaking as someone who works on this specific category of thing, I think a part of the reason is: There's less audience for it. It's hard to do and the people who want to pay attention to this are working at the uni, not a general audience.

Which is a bit of a bummer!

Yeah, that definitely checks out? Definitely when it comes to my own… engaging with media, genres where it often takes >100h to even just engage with the core of some given work don't tend to get my interest for, like, critical purposes? So the fact that there isn't much of an audience does make sense.

Though the fact that games have a reputation for being Not Even Serious Artβ„’ is probably also a contributing factor. :x There're absolutely novels out there that require massive time commitments, let alone long graphic novel and manga series, but "each work is Really, Really Big" + the combination of gaming's external reputation and the internal culture of it seems to β†’ a ton of the depth in… …all but the most historically genre-defining sorts of games being more or less ignored.

well yeah, this is one of the challenges of working in a uni environment. 'Are games art' is an embarrassing question, it's a question that indicates a complete alienation from the existing discourse/framing of the space. It'd be like asking 'is blood important' in a medical space, like, we have this question answered, thanks, move on.

I have some audience for my work, but it's very narrow, and I try to do it with 'minimal readings' - like 'hey, I'm going to explain paratext because I don't think you should have to read a book to understand my video'