by Natalia Lopes | Apr 5, 2022 | Essays, Features, Video Games
While having terrible nerve pain in my neck and back in October, I was stuck for a whole week sitting up on bedrest. This was when I picked up watching playthroughs of the Silent Hill series. It was Halloween season after all, so what better time to visit a series I had been meaning to consume since I was a teenager? The only exposure I’d had to the series was the occasional Pyramid Head and Bubble Nurse cosplayers wandering the hallways of various anime conventions, obligatory fanart, and casual mentions of the movies, most of which were received by fans with mixed reactions. I knew I had my hands full when deciding to visit the story and lore of Silent Hill, a series with eight main titles and several spinoffs, but I started with the one that was and still is the most highly praised of them all: Silent Hill 2. (more…)
Natalia is a queer Latinx illustrator making queer horror art, comics, and zines. She runs MystoPress, a micropress that is home to her eerie and nightmarish works, and has been funding her comics on Kickstarter as of 2019. When she is not freelancing or working on new projects, she teaches classes to teens and adults in non-profit art centers around North Carolina.
by Naseem Jamnia | Mar 7, 2022 | Essays, Video Games
I should begin by saying this is not an ode to silent protagonists. If anything, I’d like to argue that for a strong narrative-driven game, a silent protagonist is actually a detriment. How does one hook a story on a main character who has no or limited personality? In this essay, I will… argue that Joker, the silent protagonist in Persona 5/Royal, had no right to be silent.
Spoilers abound for Persona 5 Royal. (more…)
Sidequest’s former managing editor Naseem Jamnia used to do sciencey things, but they now slam their keyboard and call it art. By night, they play a lot of video games. And regardless of the time, they spend way too much of it on Twitter, @jamsternazzy. Also, their debut novella, THE BRUISING OF QILWA, comes out in August 2022!
by Melissa Brinks | Jan 3, 2022 | Essays, Opinion, Video Games
I was a reluctant latecomer to Red Dead Redemption 2. Before my husband insisted that I play it, I was certain I wouldn’t like it—I’d been disappointed by recent critical darlings in the AAA sphere, I’m always hesitant about Rockstar games (I conveniently forget how much I enjoyed the first Red Dead game as well as L.A. Noire and Bully, though their labor practices are still terrible), and who has time for a 60+ hour game, anyway? (more…)
Melissa Brinks is Sidequest’s editor in chief, co-creator of the Fake Geek Girls podcast, author of The Compendium of Magical Beasts, and an aspiring beekeeper. She once won an argument on the internet, and tweets at @MelissaBrinks.
by Melissa Brinks | Dec 13, 2021 | Essays, Features, Video Games
There are lots of things I like about conventions, but none of them are as important as shitty wrestling games. Specifically, shitty wrestling games at PAX. Even more specifically, League of Heels, a… thing that is very difficult to describe. Your favorite figures of the gaming industry (critics, commentators, journalists, developers, and so on) dress in wild costumes and step into wrestling heel personas. After some 45 minutes of introductions, lore, and trash-talk (this is not an exaggeration), the remaining minutes of panel time consist of an extremely rushed elimination tournament where those heel personas duke it out in a terrible wrestling video game. Sometimes hot dogs are thrown. Sometimes a fog machine and/or confetti cannon sets off a smoke alarm. It’s pure and utter chaos. (more…)
Melissa Brinks is Sidequest’s editor in chief, co-creator of the Fake Geek Girls podcast, author of The Compendium of Magical Beasts, and an aspiring beekeeper. She once won an argument on the internet, and tweets at @MelissaBrinks.
by Melissa Kagen | Nov 29, 2021 | Essays, Video Games
About a week after we returned from our honeymoon, my cute new husband took it upon himself to install a dozen hooks above the oven. Upon these hooks, we would hang our pans and coffee mugs, and also our hopes and dreams. We had spent the last year apathetic about our messy nest, unable to do much of anything, much less something so ambitious as hanging cup hooks. We’d watched spills on our two-degree-tilted counter drip slowly from sink to floor over the course of hours. We’d accumulated mournful cabinets overflowing with plastic takeout containers that we could not bear to recycle. But now, there could be cup hooks! (more…)
Melissa Kagen is a videogame professor at Curry College. Her book, Wandering Games, is forthcoming in 2022 from MIT Press. She co-edits the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds and can be found online at melissakagen.com or on Twitter @melissakagen.
by Emma Kostopolus | Nov 22, 2021 | Essays, Video Games
There are few sensations more familiar to seasoned gamers than death. Since death is a common consequence for failure in play, we consider death and its attendant rebirth a necessary part of the play process. Some of us even revel in our constant flirtation with death: at its peak in 2014, an average of forty-two Dark Souls II player characters died every second. It is through death that we learn how to play games successfully, but many games treat death as a simple rewind: when you fail, your character dies and reappears at a predetermined point in the narrative prior to the death, with no indication that the death ever occurred. Thus, while games are in many ways primed to open a discussion of mortality, most prefer to pretend mortality is a non-issue.
Roguelikes, as a genre, deal very explicitly with death as a central mechanic. There are no save points in most roguelikes, so death puts you back at the very beginning of the game, with your progress and some or all of your upgrades erased. But as with gaming writ large, many roguelikes treat death as a simple mechanic to indicate failure, and neglect its narrative opportunity. But two recent roguelikes have taken the conceit of cyclical, death-based play and baked it into their stories. And from these, a bigger conversation about our attitudes about mortality was born. (more…)
Emma is a PhD candidate in Rhetoric and Composition who studies how play impacts learning. Her words have also appeared in Critical Distance and Unwinnable. When not writing, she enjoys passing the controller between friends for runs of Silent Hill. She can be found @kostopolus on Twitter.
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