March 2023 - Endless Open Worlds, Tender Gardens, And Alternate Timelines
I'm going to start with some housekeeping. I want to make sure that I'm writing and releasing things more consistently. I struggle a lot with burning out, as well as getting too ambitious and failing to live up to bigger expectations. So, with that in mind, I'll be taking a look at the current Patreon slate and seeing what I can reasonably expect from myself and what I can build up to. More updates will come as I figure things out. Most immediately, I'm planning on two Angel Looking Backward blog posts for April as a bit of catch up.
Anyway!
Writing in March
In this month's The Angel Looking Backward, I wrote about the game jam Gardens of Vextro. It's a really special, conversational project and I tried to approach it in the same spirit that it was created.
For BioShock Infinite's tenth anniversary, oh boy, I discussed how different Infinite is from its predecessors in baseline design philosophy and how that leads to some real weirdness when Infinite revisits the original game's setting in the expansion Burial At Sea.
On Safe Room this month, we covered Dino Crisis 2. We get rowdy because this is the first game that neither of us liked lol.
Bits and Bobs
I'm still, slowly, watching Mad Men and wrote a little bit on Cohost about recurring locations and television craft. The show is just really, really good and so much of that comes from its dedication to TV style formatting as well as more "cinematic" visual ideas.
So, my former employer Gamurs Inc. laid off an incredible amount of its workforce, including much of its freelance staff. This has been part of an endless wave of downsizing across video game press. Mikhail Klimentov, formerly an editor at the Washington Post's video game vertical Launcher, discussed the current state of esports journalism on his substack. I've never written about esports, so Klimentov is coming from a different perspective than mine. But we reach a lot of the same conclusions and quite a few things in his piece resonated.
Tomorrow, as of writing, is Chicago's runoff election for major. It's worth reading Yasmin Nair on the election's stakes, race, and broader Chicago politics. Nair is an outrageously good writer and thinker. It's pretty remarkable how this essay feels nuanced and outraged and tender all at once. She makes a strong case for the stakes of the election, while never pretending that it is an actual fix for the city's injustices. Words well worth sitting with before and after election day.
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