ICYMI: August

Hi everyone!

Thank you again for another month of your support.

This has been a weird one, with a number of personal and family crises and a mad rush of two huge reviews to get out at the end of the month. It's made recording LPs and writing on my own way more difficult, but thankfully as August closes out and the nights get longer -- things are cooling down.

So, what all happened this month?

Well in the world of LPs, Booty Bandit continued her sojourn through the world of Gransys. Making new friends in Evil and Midori, and killing a whole bunch of cops (well out of the eyes of the Duke).

I also started a new One-Shot series, sharing my first two hours playing my first Total War ever thanks to Waypoint's Rob Zacny (who invited me on to Three Moves Ahead to discuss my experiences with Epic Troy).

The Megami Tensei project found Nakajima and Yukiko wandering around a new area looking for Tsubasa and getting absolutely demolished by very powerful demons. We'll get back to it this week, now that I've spent several hours grinding enough off camera to...well...survive.

Audio Logs continued unabated over at Paste. I started August out with epic JRPG opening anthems, because I was feeling rowdy and wanted to punch God. I got to write about the advent of House Music and it's influence on the Genesis...

Went deep into the original Command & Conquer soundtrack...

And after an exhausting week with family health emergencies, an entry about the songs that communicate sanctuary and home in video games. Something I think we could all use more of these days.

And then there was my review of Tell Me Why.

I never go into a review expecting to dislike something. Even if I have my initial inklings or issues, I always write them down, usually in the form of questions to think about as a low hum, and then more in-depth between sessions of marathoning the game and when it comes time to actually review the thing.

In this case the big one I wrote down was "Has DONTNOD earned the right to continuously use diversity as a tentpole?"

And, I'd you've read the review, I definitely walked away skeptical. I never played either Life is Strange, but I certainly sat through enough of the discourse and read about them. It feels unfair to say I think DONTNOD uses hot-button identity to push through what is a game that wouldn't be paid attention to otherwise, but with the marketing push and how Tell Me Why ended up, I can't say it doesn't also feel true.

It's not quite Overwatch, because DONTNOD does seem genuinely invested in "getting it right" but that only gets you so far. And I can't say this doesn't steal the thunder from other games actually dealing with these issues and willing to truly do the work.

I'm not sure where we go from here with regard to these sorts of issues of representation and identity, maybe we don't need to go *anywhere* in particular though. Maybe we just don't have to. Games will continue to come out, they'll include trans people, people of color, people with disabilities, and criticism will continue (I hope) be done. There will always be the small indie games, the games by marginalized creators that are hopefully messy and real. And alongside them we'll get more of these well-intentioned but ultimately spare and safe big releases. Like Austin brings up on this episode of Waypoint Radio -- the hope is eventually we'll have enough that a handful of games won't have to bear the burden of being everything. Will that be in my lifetime in games? Maybe not. But I'm willing to see what the future holds in this regard.

As for the future of my output -- I've got some more essays for here lined up this month. I'm finally ready to tackle Umurangi Generation, so I hope you'll look forward to that. I'm going to try and tackle less giant stuff in the coming months, it takes too long and takes me away from the smaller critical work I'd like to do. But Audio Logs persists, and there's a few more things that I'm curious about that may arrive in 2020.

We'll see.

And, of course, the Let's Plays will continue.

Thank you all again for all the support and encouragement. It means the absolute world to me.

Yours,
Dia