Reverse Shot A different angle on moving images—past, present, and future

The intrepid writers from our Touching the Screen video game column have joined forces for Reverse Shot’s first-ever year-end games roundup.

It is only through environmental context that its sparse narrative reveals itself, and even then the game is content to leave things unexplained by its wild, cosmic ending.

This is a game explicitly about narrative, adaptation, and the multifaceted nature of games as a medium. The game was produced by Remedy, a studio now blessed with not only the budget to fully realize their vision but also implicit permission to experiment from a gaming public weary of copy-paste open world games.

Part 2 of a special conversation on games and art featuring Destiny 2, Final Fantasy, Hitman, Tower of Druaga, Pathologic 2, and more.

In this special conversation for Touching the Screen, five critics discuss potential angles from which to approach video games as art.

If Breath of the Wild found new possibilities for player choice in exploration, Tears of the Kingdom offers enticing glimpses of what is to come as game designers rise to meet the challenge of endlessly creative audiences.

The titles forming this recent trend have diegetic time loops, ones built into their narratives and acknowledged by the characters.

Elden Ring is not just a single-player game but a sandbox, a hobby, a lifestyle. It sold 12 million copies in a single month. It is, bar-none, the event game of the year.

Faulkner evokes our uncomfortable relationship to the fascism that sits at the core of many games, a Pavlovian dopamine rush meant to mimic the very actions that imperialist militaries use to oppress, control, and murder in the name of jingoistic glory, and subversively offers an alternative path of interaction.

It is a narrative reframing that suggests not empowerment from disempowerment, but rather, redemption through the redefinition of acceptable terms of success. And by overturning the traditional power fantasy, a sympathetic understanding of identity disorders emerges.

This is a series firmly situated in a fraught and flawed framing of the past. The core games play out against a backdrop that could easily have been lifted from a Western Civilization syllabus, and that is a foundational problem.

Lots of huge, multimillion-dollar video games look very impressive from the dominant but qualitative perspective of judging digital visuals by how much they don’t look digital at all.

Far Cry 2 perpetuates and depends on colonial themes and values as much as any open-world game, with the key caveat that it works a critique (or, at least, a cynicism) of the colonialist project into its playing.

It’s easy to make something big with three-dimensional graphics, but it’s hard to create a true sense of overwhelming largeness, of the self as puny in comparison to something else.