Video Games as Literature

We have the (extremely dated) technology.

Many full time creatives have “invisible safety nets” like bread-winning partners, trust funds, external support, etc. No shame on anyone, but it creates a false vision of success. The cost of going to cons alone on top of hoping to eat as a freelancer are untenable, IMO.

Also in keeping with today's #SciFiMonth prompt ("Previously, on SciFi Month"): can you believe I've been participating in SciFi Month since 2014?! It's hard to believe we've been doing this for over a decade! Here's a history of my SciFi Month blog posts:
www.videogamesaslit.com/search/label...

ScifiMonth 2025: freestyling Close your eyes. Feel that strange sensation whooshing over your skin? That's the dislocating feeling of being whirled away to another place and time. November is here, which means ScifiMonth when we share our love of a favourite genre with an amazing crew of geeks across the verse. Let's do this!

November has started - suit up, hop aboard and blast off with us for a month of sharing our love for all things SF! #ScifiMonth2025

Not to mention the video games I might not have played if not for #SciFiMonth: No Man's Sky, Unsighted, and many more. 💙 #SciFiMonth2025

But this event has introduced countless female and other marginalized authors to me who are actually vastly improving the genre overall. Down with Asimov and Burroughs, the new gods of scifi are Wells and Anders and Jemisin and so many more! 🙌

Actually, #SciFiMonth has prevented me from completely giving up on the Sci Fi genre. I was so bored by most "classic" scifi that I almost felt the genre was dead to me. 🧵

YouTube video by The Rift Dragon's Dogma Online Is FINALLY Bigger Than Dragon's Dogma 2...

Another cool Halloween release - the fan-run Dragon's Dogma Online now has all of the content up to the start of Season 3 (the last Capcom ran) and a further-improved translation.

Downloads/info/etc on the community DDO Discord server here.

Only big thing left for them to restore: Bitterblack Isle

I'm planning 🤞 to read The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum and Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. In terms of video games, I've already started playing Slime Rancher 2, and I'll be playing Outer Wilds with the Literary Game Club. #SciFiMonth #SciFiMonth2025

Happy #ScifiMonth when we share our love of a favourite genre. It’s a casual cruise across galaxies and timelines this year, and we can’t wait to see where your travels take you!

As always we have daily prompts and Friday Fives plus a picture bingo and a read along of Ancillary Justice 🚀

a video game scene with a person standing in front of a giant robot ALT: a video game scene with a person standing in front of a giant robot

For 20 years, the legacy of #ShadowOfTheColossus lives on, echoing through countless games (including our own!). Thank you, Team Ico, for inspiring monster-climbing greatness in so many developers' hearts. 💛

We can't wait to see what's next with PROJECT: ROBOT! 💛

What's the second game pictured here?

Have you read A Wrinkle in Time yet?

From the TOTK community on Reddit: [TOTK] Made a Hestu costume for my daughter Explore this post and more from the TOTK community

I am blown away by this amazing TotK Hestu costume! 😍
www.reddit.com/r/TOTK/s/I7X...

Happy 58th birthday to video game composer Yoko Shimomura!

Career Highlights:
- Mario & Luigi series
- Kingdom Hearts series
- Super Mario RPG
- Street Fighter II
- Super Smash Bros.
- Radiant Historia
+ A lot more!

Final Fantasy XV! 💜💜💜

A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers The start of 2025 found me anxious to discover a book that captivated my attention. Reading, which was once a beloved pastime, had not interested me in some time and I was desperate for a book to g…

First book I completed in 2025 was A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. I loved this one...a book that is short and sweet and strays from the usual cynicism found in the science fiction genre. Read more here:
prismaticponderings.wordpress.com/2025/10/17/a...

He uses the word "agenda" as a curse word. Like he doesn't know that every company, group of friends, etc has an agenda. You work at a library? Then you probably have monthly meetings with your coworkers to go over the agenda. You play DnD with a group of friends? Let's firm up that gaming agenda.

And he didn't even link the source. He used a crappy google redirect link. 🤦‍♀️

A lot of people are also mad, though, because "remodel" and "completely demolish" are slightly different things. 😅

3.1 Rejection of expertise, ironically including our own Being in a colonizing discipline first demands and then encourages an attitude that might be called intellectual hubris. Furthermore, since you cannot master all the disciplines that you have designs on, you need confidence that your knowledge makes the ‘traditional wisdom’ of these fields unworthy of serious consideration. Here too, the AI scientist feels that seeing things through a computational prism so fundamentally changes the rules of the game in the social and behavioural sciences that everything that came before is relegated to a period of intellectual immaturity. Sherry Turkle (1984, p. 230) Every field that comes into contact with AI discourse becomes infected even within AI as a field of study (recall Table 1). Our colleagues have embraced these systems, uncritically incorporating them into their workflows and their classrooms, without input from experts on automation, cognitive science, computer science, gender and diversity studies, human-computer interaction, pedagogy, psychology, and law to name but a few fields with direct relevant expertise (Sloane et al. 2024). Meanwhile, technology companies have rushed to invest in ‘AI ethics’ or ‘AI safety’ to ethics wash their claims, thereby “laundering accountability” (as Abeba Birhane explains in Arseni 2025) and “distracti[ng] from real AI ethics” (Crane 2021), while censoring academics and thus, violating academic freedom (Gebru and Torres 2024; Gerdes 2022; Goudarzi 2025; Munn 2023; Ochigame 2019; Suarez et al. 2025; Tafani 2023).

We also go through many arguments that can be used as counters to typical false frames forced upon us, such as:

1. the powerful nonsense that we as experts know nothing

(Section 3.1 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...)

3/n

A portion of every dollar spent on Harry Potter merchandise goes to anti-transgender campaigns.

God damn I might know something about this but I may have signed an NDA and some NDAs are written without any end date so you have to keep your mouth shut until the end of time.

a cartoon of a frog and a black frog with a swirl on their face ALT: a cartoon of a frog and a black frog with a swirl on their face

Poliwrath is a Pokémon that I've always weirdly liked even though it's kind of dumb. Like do I need a giant buff tadpole? Not really but I enjoy him 💙

This is the sort of thing you should be all over if you're interested in cultural studies and games. I'd be all over it if it were a shorter commitment. No place like it in the world.

So does Plcebo actually do anything or...

Japan's gaming industry moves to improve accessibility Many in the industry are developing equipment and systems that allow people with disabilities affecting their hands to still play such as by using their feet and eyes.

"The Japanese gaming industry is working to improve video game accessibility by developing equipment and systems that allow people with disabilities affecting their hands to play by using other parts of their body, such as their cheeks, feet and eyes...." [1/2]

This sounds like a cool idea for an anthology -- too bad there were so many barely-relevant, super-popular stories in it.

Review of ‘Spores of Doom: Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird’ edited by Aaron Worth I expected to find terrifying toadstools, freaky fungi and murderous mushrooms in this book, another in the British Library Tales of the Weird series. It’s not a particularly good collection,…

Today's #bookreview is 'Spores of Doom' 🍄🍄🍄

nsfordwriter.com/spores-of-do...

He just assumes this is what all rich people are like.