My Favorite Games of 2023
My character was a half-elf wild-magic sorcerer, and the first things he tried in any given scenario were the intellect-based skills of a wizard—arcana; history—even though he stunk at them. I had him functionally want to be a calm, studied wizard, jealous of their supposed composure, and it was fun to have the game seem to play along. He occasionally got to sass a wizard with a labeled “sorcerer only” line like, “I thought wizards were supposed to be smart?” Coming from him, that line had more jealous melancholia than snark.
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The Rising Case for a Videogame Canon
Being able to point to a specific year or hardware generation as the moment that the world was flooded with more videogames than someone could play in their lifetime matters less than the fact that is has happened. This embarrassment of riches is a cultural shift, throwing everyone into a library to rival Borges. What videogames one played used to be left to random draw, accessed by rental stores and holiday gifts. Now, each individual has near-perfect control in deciding what videogames will shape their understanding of the medium—the problem is one of filtering, a glut of noise that must be parsed to find worthwhile experiences that has infected most of our cultural forms. For videogames, with their ascendant cultural capital and large required time investment, figuring out what to play is crucial. That is why videogames need a canon for players, a common and easily accessible point of entry that gives basic literacy upon which to build. Being “widely read” is no longer a reasonable option.
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Game Sound
The opening half of Game Sound focuses on hardware breakdowns, similar in style to what I loved from I AM ERROR. It did everything I wanted it to: a detailed history of videogame generations–it even outscooped my living memory, as I confused the isometric proto-roguelite adventure game Toejam & Earl with its sequel, Panic on Funkotron, which the book correctly names a “music side-scrolling platform game”–and all the hardware is discussed chronologically in as discrete hardware cycles as can be made.
I’ve realized the Genesis’ FM synthesis is more interesting, to me, than the SNES wavetable synthesis. Game Sound gave me a way to not only interpret that hardware distinction, but internalize the difference.
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The Lure of Pokémon
Pokémon–videogames writ large, but Pokémon firstly and specifically–attach to a particularized aspect of humanity that manages discovery, exploration, and pattern recognition. There exists in a created world an understanding wherein repeated actions receive continuous, replicable, and most importantly comprehensible responses: this, to me, is the foundation of videogames and the font of their appeal. It is unbelievably rewarding at a base level to be able to uncover definitive rules about the world, and it contrasts directly with our impossibly complex reality. Thus, the true magic of videogames is in making seemingly complex systems actionable and navigatable through the employ of a sparse handful of verbs.
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My Favorite Games of 2022
Now that I had discovered the rumors, I was soon way out in the corner of the map, being taunted by enemies for “relic hunting” when I should be leading the Resistance. Beyond intrigued by what the Palace of the Dead could possibly be, I found a secret door and what seemed to supply an endless possibility of tough, small battles. Oh, what’s that, now there’s a rumor of a pirate’s graveyard somewhere out beyond the islands far to the south?
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YOU
Games tend to cater to an entry-level demographic each and every time, and the player is often expected to bring nothing with them into the experience….[s]o it sort of irks me that games get tagged with the “bad story” epithet just because they haven’t yet found a way to deftly handle all the issues literary fiction has struggled with for millennia. Just as English Majors the world over cringe at bisected and “translated” No-Fear Shakespeare—with English on one page and, um, English on the other—there’s a contingent of game players that are as fluent in accessing inputs and iconography as any scholar is with Early Modern English references and phrasing
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Procedural Storytelling in Game Design
The other huge strength of procedural generation, to me, is that it creates too many possibility spaces for the designers to decide what is best. I do not like spending my time in a video game trying to guess what the designer wants me to do. That can sometimes be inevitable, but it still frustrates me when I start seeing the various gameplay inputs as tiny puzzles with a golden-path narrative outputs.
I am not immune to this; when my own brain starts telling me to look for the optimal route so I’m rewarded with seamless narrative breadcrumbing and cohesively designed narrative, I know I am not treating the emergent story like my story but like a book that I have to tape back together to read.
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Dungeon H@cks: How NetHack, Angband, and Other Roguelikes Changed the Course of Video Games
If you’ve never heard of the Amulet of Yendor, I don’t know how or why you would search this out. But if you have even the smallest amount of interest in video game history—of uncovering the roots of the procedurally generated loot tables that underpin the gaming world’s new hotness—then Dungeon H@cks is required reading.
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Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
Video games aren’t a given—they didn’t have to happen—but they are so ubiquitous now that I am very surprised that stories about their origins aren’t more popular. Changeable software cartridges connected to a hardware platform that piggybacks off of a preexisting and console-agnostic television is an insane idea in a world of closed units like arcade machines. Pulling a piece of software from dedicated hardware that was designed to do nothing else and shoving to into a generic platform while trying to retain the original shape seems herculean:
To draw the four pursuers, programmer Tod Frye relied on a technique called flicker. Each of the four ghosts is moved and drawn in sequence on successive frames. Pac-Man himself is drawn every frame using the other sprite graphic register….
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