Gaming Under The Influence

The game awards nominees for 2021 have prompted us to summarize the tendencies we routinely speak against on this show. The issue reduces to a liberal vs integralist stance on art (and resultantly games)...

This week Alex describes his early experiences with Battlefield 2042. The boys revisit the easy mode debate: mechanics & systems should express the inner logic of the work, if this pleases players or not. A few details on our ongoing Valheim server.

This week Mike & Alex talk about the impact of Xbox Game Pass on the sale of third party games to answer the question: “what is the impact of subscription services on video game art”? It appears that consumers within subscription ecosystems are no longer convinced of [“commutative justice”,] paying a proportionate price for a good or service. The indirect impact on video game art is obvious: will creators be able to finance traditional works and flourish in order to produce more?

This week the boys ramble through their experiences with Valheim and the newly-released N64 emulators, all in order to answer the question: “how should the old be conveyed in the new”? Valheim iterates on a formula originated by Minecraft, with elements from soulslike and adventure games, to construct a new kind of thing, while Nintendo has simply enabled access to their intellectual property by new means.

In the wake of Metroid Dread, Mike & Alex discuss the enduring merits of the decades-old metroidvania progression style. The argument: 2D adventure games with metroidvania progression are innately suitable for developers with limited experience & resources alongside strong artistic abilities & a well-conceived world. Metroidvania also scales well to larger budgets & diverse art styles, potentially even 3D perspective, due to the universality of its conceits. It even encourages remote community participation, a sort of “extrinsic multiplayer”, in wiki culture.

Caught up with Valheim & older titles, Mike & Alex have already added a pile of recent releases to their backlogs. Tune in this week for a discussion of the most interesting games you may have missed in 2021 and why they are worth playing. Also features a more detailed discussion of Valheim’s special appeal: this is a game that synthesizes the radical possibilities of the survival genre (often lacking a meaningful goal, purposefulness) with circumscriptive soulslike combat against titanic bosses and hands-off storytelling about cosmic stakes.

Our discourse on the best games of all time has been forcibly interrupted by Valheim. This week the Green Dragon crew works towards a theory of survival games, specifying their appeal as a world building medium. We posit that the up-front fixation on the dialectic between player and environment makes the “inner logic” of created worlds the “remote or subject matter” of the genre (instead of individual personalities and human tensions in, say, TLoU2-style adventure games).

In response to IGNs recent treatment of the “best game of all time”, the boys at GreenDragonCVR return to the fundamental topic of why exactly games qualify as [one of the] “most advanced phase[s] of poetic depiction”. We will return next week with an alternative list, based on the criteria we articulate in this episode, of the best games of all time.

Alex & Mike persist with their discussion of Tales of Arise, this week expanding on the topics introduced last episode. Topics include the genre-literate design of the early zones & combat, the sincerity of Japanese video game story telling & how Tales of Arise engages with capitalism in a manner that puts Western game journalism about “politics” to shame.

Alex & Mike are pleasantly surprised by Tales of Arise. Conveyed by innovative and beautiful animation, a lean progression system and circumscriptive action combat, a high fantasy world on par with any [more expensive] genre peer has got the boys hooked. Tune in this week for a deep dive into the systems & world of Tales of Arise based on the first third of the game.