If you read this blog, you know I talk about a lot of general stuff, usually through the lens of games. This blog is a Talen Lee blog, where I write about videogames, board games, sometimes my study, historical tabletop roleplaying games, occasional media studies insights like I actually studied that or something, phd angst, and the life of a former fundamentalist abuse victim. It is a big ole pile of jelly in the jam.
One thing I do on this blog is get old games that didnt’ get a lot of critical prestige or were from platforms that you, my mostly-not-PC-playing audience that is younger than me, did not play, and talk about them, showing you things you might not have thought about while introducing you to things. There’s a tension at the heart of this kind of process, because on the one hand I have to introduce you to something, then show you something deeper in that thing.
But I control that discussion. You don’t necessarily know anything about the game until I introduce it, and then you just kind of have to nod along to me as to whether or not what I’m talking about is even present in the artwork in question. Part of this is the space involved in videogames, and part of it is the sheer volume of content in this space that you can’t track it all. I could tell you the last third of Assassins Creed 3 features a speedboat and odds are good you’d probably have to believe me.
Spare a thought then for Vincent Kinian’s Game Exhibition, which in november addressed this very question: how do people who’ve never played the game engage with critical reflection on that game? How does deep game examinations that want to put the genuinely obscure in a meaningful context handle the fact that the art they’re presenting cannot possibly give the audience the same access to art that say, a sculpture or painting has. It’s a really interesting quandrary, gone in depth in part in the article about Cave Noire.
If you like the kind of stuff I do on this blog in general, you should check out Vincent’s stuff for much more specific consideration of just games. It’s good stuff; I don’t read weekly, but I do from time to time (every few weeks) trundle in and have a read of a few articles.