Games Related — Dinaburg Writes

The Night of Baba Yaga

The standard distinction between Roguelike and Roguelite is that a Roguelite retains some sort of incremental in-game character growth (perhaps if you make it to a certain point in the game, a shortcut unlocks so you can “start” your run without completing the simple opening areas–think Mario 1 warp zones). Roguelikes are, like Rogue, games wherein each time you start it is functionally like the first time you ever played: no retained items; no character skill-growth; no item-pool unlocks; no bonus monies. Attempt one hundred is the same as attempt one.

David DinaburgNovember 23, 2024Thriller, LGBTQAI+, Japan, Twist

Gamelife: A Memoir

I do not know what it would be to read Gamelife without also having lived a life of meaningful games. Childhood is long, we have all shed potential lives that didn’t quite fit. Games fit me. The life I settled on, the one that Gamelife rips into the open air, is Secret of Mana: The way it felt to pull the rusty sword out of the stump; to be exiled from your village; to find the seeds; to revive the Mana tree. It was not the first game I loved, but it was the first game that no one else at school talked about or cared about. The first game that was just mine.

Gamelife puts you back there, if there exists as a place for you to return. Who can say what unsummoned memory might pierce you if Secret of Mana was instead filled with football practices or piano lessons? Game memories flood back not as diversion or waste but as hobby, habit, real experience. Your limited time on earth was spent non-frivolously, seeing and touching and being other than you.

David DinaburgNovember 13, 2024Video Games, memoir, memory, childhood, nostalgia

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.

David DinaburgMarch 16, 2024Video Games, Top 5

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.

David DinaburgSeptember 17, 2023Non-fiction, videogames, NES

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.

David DinaburgJuly 19, 2023VGM, videogames, video game music, music theory, game design

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.

David DinaburgJuly 4, 2023Video Games, Pokémon, Anthropology

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?

David DinaburgJanuary 10, 2023Video Games, Top 5

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

David DinaburgDecember 5, 2022video games, fiction, travel, italy, Greeze

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.

David DinaburgNovember 14, 2022Video Games, Procedural Generation, Chatscript