Support my writing on Patreon or Ko-fi! Written for Critical Distance’s First Foot Forward February writing jam. Princess Peach’s Castle is an anchor without a ship. It has appeared in myriad Mario games since Super Mario 64, yet its architecture and exterior grounds always appear slightly different. Even the one…

Support my writing on Patreon or Ko-fi! I — WAVE (AGAINST THE) MACHINE “SECRETS ARE LIKE WATER WHEN IT COMES TO BRIDGES” -Owl Statue, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening I think a lot about the wateriness of videogames; the way they pool into recognizably repeated forms–like the unspoken but universally abided principle that behind every…

[Content Warning: Discussion of death and suicide in the context of videogames] Support my writing on Patreon or Ko-fi! While videogame violence has been endlessly debated in the media, online and within academia, writing on how death actually operates in videogames is comparatively scarce. In what does exist the paradoxical…

Support my writing on Patreon or Ko-fi! Menuing in videogames is an inevitability, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable in its own right. In fact it’s well known that some games, even entire genres, are almost nothing but menuing. But when it comes to switching between menus and…

Depictions of Indigeneity from Burgkmair to Rareware — The videogames of my youth are haunted. Not in the literal creepypasta sense, no. They are haunted by a figure who has taken on myriad faces, yet the skeletal structure behind them has remained, for centuries, much the same. I wanted to write a piece about colonialist themes in platformers…

Speedrunning history is at once well-documented and difficult to trace back to its origins. While it’s highly likely that many players in the 1980’s and before attempted to beat games as quickly as they could, it wasn’t until the release of Doom (1993) and the ability to share recordings in…

There is a right way and a wrong way to play with Hot Wheels. The wrong way is to purchase and assemble one of those orange plastic tracks with a loop-de-loop in the middle — for they never quite work the way they do in the commercials as real-world physics…

[Spoilers for Twilight Princess, EarthBound, Mother 3 and Cave Story] “It’s hard to believe that it’s over, isn’t it?” -Old Woman, Celeste It’s a statistical fact that most people don’t beat the games they play. A not insignificant portion don’t even start the games they buy, but that’s another topic…

Defining, Designing and Categorizing Emergent Gameplay — This essay serves as both a review of the concept of emergence in games literature and an elaboration on previous writing in an attempt to categorize various forms of emergent gameplay. The practice of speedrunning — completing a videogame as fast as one possibly can — as a typified form…