Tag Archives: criticism

My Time With Dee Dee

My Time With Dee Dee, Vol. 2: Learning to Love the Male Gaze

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Those of you who have been following for a while may recall that friend of the site Matt Sainsbury from Digitally Downloaded has been beavering away at a series of visual novels based on his site mascot for a while now — you can read about the first one here.

I finally got around to making some time for the second volume — and a look at the third one will be following shortly! — so I figured it’s high time we talk about it. Because, much like its predecessor, it does an excellent job of raising some interesting and relevant talking points without becoming preachy about it.

Volume 2, subtitledย Meet Lo and Nettie!ย focuses on the topic of the male gaze, which is a term bandied about so often these days that its original meaning has become somewhat obfuscated. Let’s see if three cute girls can sort that whole mess out, shall we?

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Community, One-Shots

Let’s Respect Each Other’s Tastes (Or: “This Game Isn’t For You, and That’s Okay”)

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Whenever any creative person sits down to compose something, they inevitably do so with a particular audience in mind.

Sometimes that audience is as simple as the creator themselves; they want to write something that simply expresses themselves, and if it happens to resonate with anyone else, that’s a happy bonus. Sometimes a creator makes an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible — though it’s very difficult to please everyone. And sometimes that audience is a specific group of people.

Whatever a creator decides to create, we should respect their intentions. And, by extension, we should respect the audience it ends up attracting — even if we find ourselves outside that group.

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One-Shots

Destructoid’s Valkyrie Drive Review is More Than Just “Bad Games Journalism”

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This week, Destructoid’s Jed Whitaker posted a review of Valkyrie Drive Bhikkuni, a PC port of a Vita game produced by Senran Kagura creator Kenichiro Takaki’s new studio Honey Parade Games.

The review, such as it was, angered a lot of people — and with good reason, since it began with the headline “Dynasty Warriorsย for paedophiles” (later edited to “Dynasty Warriorsย for aspiring paedophiles” and finally “Dynasty Warriorsย for aspiring paedobears”) and didn’t improve from there, demonstrating throughout that Whitaker was unwilling to engage with the game in good faith and raising serious questions about his professional rigour in covering a title.

Whitaker’s article isn’t the first to follow this mould; it’s just the latest. But it’s a problem. It’s more than just “bad games journalism” — something that can be laughed off. It’s a problem that needs to be tackled.

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One-Shots

13 Reasons Why the Games Industry Needs to Stop Idolising Anita Sarkeesian

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Although self-described feminist pop culture critic Anita Sarkeesian has abandoned her Tropes vs Women in Video Games project, she hasn’t stopped exerting her influence over an apparently enthralled games industry.

Writing on May 19, 2017, James Batchelor of industry publication Gamesindustry.biz reported on Sarkeesian’s speech at the 2017 Nordic Game conference, an annual event that describes itself as “the leading games conference in Europe”.

Sarkeesian’s 45-minute speech was called “Diversity is Not a Checklist”, and, broadly speaking, was an exhortation to the industry to better represent the diversity of its audience through playable characters, and to tell stories that “recognise the systemic oppression” that women and “people of colour” face.

Not, in itself, aย bad topic to explore — though as we’ll discuss in a moment, it disregards one of the key reasons many people turn to video games as entertainment and represents just a single perspective. The main problem is, as with much of Sarkeesian’s previous work, her lack of knowledge and awareness regarding the industry outside the most high-profile parts of the Western triple-A and “in-crowd” indie spheres undermines a great many of her arguments. And, unsurprisingly, Batchelor does not take the opportunity to analyse her remarks in his report, instead simply parroting them uncritically.

Enough is enough. It’s time the industry stopped hanging onย Anita Sarkeesian’s every word — or at least started thinking about the things she is saying a little more critically, and researching her claims rather than accepting them at face value. Here are 13 reasons why.

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One-Shots

MoeGamer: The Third Birthday

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Somehow, I onlyย remembered recently that I actually share a birthday with this little corner of the Internet.

Sure enough, if you check the first ever post on here (complete with old-style Midori and Yumi) you’ll see that it was published on April 29, 2014. That’s three full years of this site being in existence, after it launched on my thirty-third birthday. And while itย hasn’t been three years ofย constantย content — the regular posting schedule is something I’ve only introduced relatively recently, beginning with the introduction of Cover Gamesย around this time last year — it’s still quite an achievement in the cutthroat world of “writing about games”.

MoeGamerย is something I’ve come to do simply because I enjoy it. Butย it originally came about as a result of the state of the modern mainstream commercial games press — and how apparently there wasn’t a place for someone like me in it any more, despite working in the field having been a lifelong dream.

So let’s look back at howย MoeGamerย came to be, why it exists now and why it’s important to me personally.

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One-Shots

Japanese Games Didn’t Just Suddenly “Get Good”

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MoeGamer’s mission statement, which you’ll find over on the right, is “to provide comprehensive, interesting, positive and well-researched coverage of niche-interest and overlooked, underappreciated titles that tend to get a raw deal from the mainstream press”.

This has been my stated goal with the site from its inception in April 2014 — yes, we’re coming up onย MoeGamer’sย third birthday! — but my strong feelings towards it actually extend further back than that: to my JPgamer column and regular JRPG reviews atย USgamer,ย to the visual novel and JRPGย columns I hosted onย the now-defunctย Games Are Evil…ย in fact, my love of Japanese games can be traced all the way back to theย 16- and 32-bit console eras in particular. (In the 8-bit era I was largely gaming on Atari computers!)

I’m not alone in my love of Japanese games and the feeling that they tend to get rough treatment at the hands of both the mainstream press and an ill-informed public —ย though to be fair to the latter, one tends to lead to another. Over the last few years in particular, there’s been great growth in “alternative” gaming sites aiming to specifically cater to niches underserved by the mainstream press. Friends ofย MoeGamerย like Operation Rainfall,ย Digitally Downloadedย and the recently launchedย j-ga.me/s/ย all carry the desire to celebrate underappreciated titles — titles that, in many cases, have strong followings and communities surrounding them that are at best ignored and at worst ostracised and ridiculed by the mainstream press — and all go about this task slightly differently.

One thing that brings us all together, though, isย the sense of exasperation when a Japanese game that, for some reason, it is “acceptable” to enjoy comes along and even mainstream critics are forced to admit the things that sites like us have been arguing for literallyย years. And with 2017 being such a strong year for such games already, that has been happening quite a bit lately.

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From the Archives, READ.ME

From the Archives: A Question of Genre

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How do you describe a piece of interactive entertainment? Chances are the first thing you mention is the way it plays, or the supposed โ€œgenreโ€ it is part of.

Final Fantasyย is a JRPG; Gears of War is a third-person shooter; Mario games are platformers. And this isnโ€™t only true for mainstream games, either โ€” even the most esoteric indie games tend to be described in terms of their mechanics.ย Fezย is a puzzle-platformer; The Binding of Isaac is a roguelike shooter;ย Minecraftย is an open-world building and survival sim.

While you may then elaborate on that by describing the setting โ€” sci-fi, fantasy, cartoonish crazytown โ€” itโ€™s highly likely that this is not the first thing you mention. Interactive entertainment is pretty much the only artistic medium in which we do this.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the siteโ€™s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

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