What if care, rather than skill, was at the heart of the culture of playing videogames? I wrote a few reflections on my time caring for my sister, who passed away recently.
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Edwin is also @EdwinEvansThirlwell@mastodon.online
@dirigiblebill
News editor . Previously etc. Recovering PhD. Vegan, he/him.
rockpapershotgun.comJoined March 2009
Edwin is also @EdwinEvansThirlwell@mastodon.online’s posts
Have stumbled on a small, extremely online community of people ranking gods like Marvel characters. Pour one out for Cupid, "a boy with a bow and arrow, and not great aim". Also Jesus, who "is pretty weak, apart from making food into more food, which farmers can do".
Final Fantasy 15's AI design is a hidden inquiry into the structure of consciousness and the limitations of body. I wrote and spoke to Square Enix's lead AI researcher Youichiro Miyake about the implications of the game's resistance to dualism. eurogamer.net/articles/2019-
A little fireside chat with the creator of DOOM about the secret rooms, guns and Evil Eyes we lost along the way.
One of the most interesting interviews I've ever done: developers of Civilization, Victoria 3 and "postcolonial 4X" Syphilisation discuss the 4X genre's portrayals of empire and history, bringing perspectives from India, the US and the Philippines.
A special one: I spoke to Red Candle about the making of Devotion, a brilliant Taiwanese horror game forced off sale after the discovery of a joke about China's president. Covers the game's gender portrayals, the storybook and TV sequences and much more.
Scoring Dwarf Fortress is like treating a glacier as a convenient source of ice cubes, but here's a little review anyway of the new Steam edition - a downright hospitable creation with such eldritch new features as "full mouse control" and "tutorials"
Soooo yes, today is my first day as News Editor for RPS, a site that hosts some of my favourite writing about games. I will try not to make a mess of this.
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Excellent news today, friends. Please say hello and welcome to Edwin Evans-Thirlwell, our new news editor:
rockpapershotgun.com/say-hello-and-
Decades ago in Baghdad following the Persian Gulf War, a self-taught programmer set out to make an Amiga adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the world's oldest surviving work of literature. I spoke to him about it for Eurogamer.
Who will exorcise the ghost of Tom Clancy? I wrote about the author's impact on games and Ubisoft's disinclination to engage with his politics. eurogamer.net/articles/2018-
For Eurogamer, I wrote about how demaking helps us separate great art from new tech and get off the endless, crumbling staircase that is the "next generation". Thanks to and @98demake for their insights.
For EG, I wrote about JRPG battle systems as poetic forms, and how this has helped me rethink the element of repetition. Piece doubles as an intro to the wonderful world of "micro-JRPGs", and especially the turns within turns of 's Cataphract OI.
For RPS, I documented my so-far futile efforts to reach the bottom of Yedoma Globula, a spelunking game consisting of 3D fractals that is one of the most wonderful, and horrible, virtual environments I've visited.
New high achieved for personal brand after Google decides that I'm my own father and have been dead for 100 years.
At Gamescom, where you can walk from the esports hub to a military recruiter zone to an anime body pillow stand in under 40 seconds.
I have a piece in edits that is about acts of protest within blockbuster online games. It needs more voices. If you've been involved with something like the below (especially if it concerns GTA and military shooters) I'd love to hear from you. DMs open.
Hello , you provide services to a site whose users revel in causing pain and death by abusing and stalking vulnerable people. You ended support for 8chan in 2019 because, per your CEO, "they directly inspire tragic events" - why not K*w*f*rms? twitter.com/marcan42/statu
Taming the Garden is a strange and painful, unnarrated anti-capitalist film about the trade in moving ancient trees from the places where they took root to the pleasure gardens of more affluent nations. youtube.com/watch?v=QombIw
If the idea of 200 hours of Xenoblade 3 gives you the Fear, you might like my latest in PCGamer - an exploration of micro-RPGs & the artistic or commercial questions that decide RPG playlength, feat & magazinesdirect.com/az-single-issu
My latest for the Guardian: a whistlestop tour of videogame Britains, all released following the Brexit vote, from Total War's turbulent 9th century to Forza 4's eerily evacuated countryside.
I spoke a little to about , an eerie virtual menagerie that, unlike today's live service games, is built to be playable and mysterious a decade from now, with no updates or DLC.
I'm thinking of organising a writing jam for alternative approaches to videogame reviews - challenging expectations for the form handed down by the larger enthusiast pubs and their audiences, basically. Just testing the waters to see how many would be up for participating.
In my first for Fanbyte, I spoke to 10 developers from across the globe about how their games re-interpret the "natural world" and wrestle with its colonial-capitalist baggage. Huge thanks to and for their edits and suggestions.
This is a great report, but egad, this conclusion - "Is it possible to make great art without unreasonable sacrifice?" Of course it's fucking possible. The artist-as-martyr thing is abuse-enabling pablum that can get in the bin. JFC. kotaku.com/inside-rocksta
Reading Emily Dickinson's Gorgeous Nothings, aka envelope poems, carefully opened and sliced polyforms that fashion sanctuaries of a sort from the ephemera of correspondence. poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine
I had a go at explaining the D&D licensing controversy for the Washington Post with help from designers, players and publishers, looking beyond immediate events to a possible table-top "renaissance".
Mundaun is out now - find my review in a future Edge. I enjoyed its mingled eeriness and cosiness: folk horror shaded by war trauma, the omnipresent spectre of the mountain summit vs reassuring domestic rituals - brewing coffee, discovering radio stations: store.steampowered.com/app/720350/Mun
For Wired, I explored the curious subgenre of the nomad city-builder, looking at how these games meddle with SimCity's understanding of the city in response to ecological disaster. With thanks to , and
It would have been my sister Bea's 27th birthday this week. In her memory I'm doing a two-mile swim in the Serpentine this September for . Please donate if you can!
OK! #Reviewjam 2023 is underway. The premise: create a videogame review that isn't quite a videogame review. Experiment freely with a well-worn critical form. The jam runs till 11.59pm UK on 31st Jan - I'll promote submissions in the replies to this tweet.
For this month's Edge, I spoke to Iraqi game developers about portrayals of Iraq in games and the state of game development in Iraq. With huge thanks to , and the makers of the wonderful , an Amiga game created in Baghdad following the Gulf War.
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Unravelling @ArkaneStudios' stunning action thriller Deathloop, as the developer reinvents the wheel it spent two decades perfecting. E357 is on sale now: bit.ly/EDGE357
I wrote about the hollowness and sneaking hypocrisy of much videogame corporate satire.
Early this morning my brilliant sister passed away calmly in hospital after a three year struggle with cancer. She was 26.
I spoke to the people who just can't stop modding Thomas the Tank Engine into videogames, remarking on the history of the train as a modernist horror trope and its estrangement into digital spaces.
According to the UN, to be a mum is essentially to pay society an invisible hand-out. Videogames often perpetuate this devaluing and disappearing of mothering work - I wrote and spoke to about one that challenges it, We Happy Few.
In the new Edge I wrote and spoke to about Disco Elysium, an electrifying reckoning with inner and outer Furies. I also interviewed about the making of Sunless Skies, from its encrusted parallax cosmos to its careful portrayals of marginalised people.
A game I have been savouring in spare moments - Dandara, inspired by the 17th century Afro-Brazilian warrior who fought colonisers as part of a community of former slaves. Snap between salt surfaces in a directionless world of thought, battling the manifestations of a Golden Idea
I'm writing another piece about crunch for Eurogamer. The idea is to explore what exploitative working practices actually "look and feel" in the game itself - to make connections with features within the experience, rather than treating crunch as an abstract, "industry" concern.
All I yearn for is that all the Lara Crofts get to appear in a college sitcom together.
NASA's art representing missions to Mars makes us look like the bad guys in Dead Space.
There is a ripped shirtless guy across the street beating a crate with a crowbar. Help, I've wandered into somebody's Half-Life porn.
I reviewed Sunless Skies and, predictably enough, thought it was rather brilliant - outer space as imagined by a Victorian naval officer turned occultist, with peerless writing and art. It harbours immensities, and plenty of tea.
My Heaven's Vault review won't be in print for a little while, but suffice to say it's an engrossing, accessible portrayal of archaeology and a smart, enveloping study of empire, its adjuncts and discontents. Ride celestial rivers to broken moons in search of relics to decipher.
My Work Is Not Yet Done is a fascinating exploration of faith, divinity and personal crisis via the mechanisms and conventions of a wilderness survival game. I spoke to its creator - once an aspiring priest - about the project's origins and tensions.
Absolver from is a game that lets you build your own martial art from around 200 beautifully animated punches, kicks and sword strikes. Three years after release, I went back to see just how many disciplines the game's community had invented.
RPS has published many extraordinary pieces from queer and trans writers. It is shameful and depressing to see one of its veteran contributors, Tim Stone, argue that trans rights are up for debate. rockpapershotgun.com/2020/11/06/wat
I spoke to about Ghost of a Tale's allegory of racism and its roots in darker children's animations such as The Secret of NIMH.
The anthology is now on Steam - an inventive, combative and poignant collection of short Tarot-themed games, from cosmic horror shopkeeping to perhaps my favourite VG club night outside of Hitman 3. I wrote about a few of the my favourites:
A vocal section of PCGamer readers think EA bribed me to write that piece on Anthem, Donna Haraway and transhumanism, and, well, I want to live in their world. Can you even imagine.
Very grateful to have been nommed for my and work alongside some wonderful pieces - Nicole Carpenter's comprehensive unionisation primer, Gabrielle de la Puente's essays on Sable, The Long Dark and disability, PMG's principled and approachable reporting
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Here are all the @NYVGCC @NYGameAwards Nominees for the Knickerbocker Award for Best Games Journalism! Congratulations! nygamecritics.com/2023/01/10/awa
My piece on Overwatch's cultural conflicts and how they manifest in hero reworks is now online. Thanks again to , and for their thoughts.
Replying to
You can theorise "care" and explore its social and artistic dimensions much more comprehensively than I've done here - really, this is just me offering myself a space for further thought on the subject. I hope it's constructive reading.
My last long read of the year - on videogame blazes and how they navigate the gap between fire as an abstract, technological power and fire as a component of a living world.
A forager, a botany professor and a programmer walk into an article about the consolations of videogame plantlife. My latest for the Guardian - hopefully a nice distraction from all the cyberpunking.
Been looking forward to sharing this one - in my first for , I applied Ursula K Le Guin's carrier bag theory of fiction to the narrative structures of videogames, and in particular, the provocatively unheroic Pathologic 2.
This seems to an especially good year for horror games so, er, why not revisit one from 2016. My piece on Duskers, an endlessly deferred universe of horrible colours and seeping isolation.
I'm back in my London flat after seven months in a shielded household up north - haven't seen my partner or sat down in another building in that time besides the hospital. Feeling very raw but glad to reconnect with my life here. Let's all be gentle with ourselves this winter. x
I'm back in PCGamer (out in the UK today, I think) with an interview feature on the often-thankless task of optimising for lower spec machines, and how the playfulness of tinkering with the settings suggests a more sustainable way of thinking about videogame visuals.
Some job stuff: I've got a few pieces waiting to run, including one particular huge interview feature I'm quite excited about, but today is my last day as EG's temporary contributing editor. I'm taking a quick holiday next week, then I'll be starting a new role - more to follow.
For the new Edge, I spoke to , and other Ukrainian game developers, some currently in the armed forces, about self-preservation and mutual support under invasion, their sense of cultural identity and their hopes for the winter. magazinesdirect.com/az-single-issu
The UK army thinks gamers make better soldiers. In the new Edge, out today, I asked current and former soldiers for the truth of that, while discussing how games might better explore the rules of engagement in an age of legally dubious automated war.
Very pleased to have a piece of found text butchery in the new issue of Heterotopias - a curving meditation on the connections between slaughterhouses and videogame level design, facilitated by Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs.
Long COVID Mode is a series of mods for Elden Ring, The Witcher and Minecraft that simulate long COVID symptoms to raise awareness. I spoke to about their creation, and the challenge of living with a condition that eludes easy definition.
For & , I spoke to the unstoppable about how lonely it feels to be a creative, the democratisation and precarity of gamedev today, and the need for greater transparency and understanding between players, developers and press
I reviewed Nix Umbra, a glorious blackbox of a horror game shaped by folk and surrealist cinema. "In moving through this forest, seeking to know it, you are also reconfiguring it, provoking it."
Spencer here just casually putting out one of the most complete and electrifying (and voluminous!) readings of the ideologies and mythologies of Ubisoft's various wargames I've ever read.
Dear lovely editors at big corporate publications: speaking entirely out of self-interest, now would be a wonderful time to start raising your freelance rates across the board in line with inflation and projected cost-of-living increases.
I spoke to Amy Hennig, former creative director of Uncharted, about Star Wars, scoundrels, making games that are about more than sheer mastery, and how unions and streaming platforms might help the industry move away from cycles of win-or-die.
I reviewed Dead Island 2 - long-delayed descendant of the 6/10 game whose bikini statuettes and CGI trailers once launched a thousand op-eds.
I wrote about games in Cormac McCarthy and McCarthy's influence on games, searching for hope amid the entangled atrocities of The Road and Blood Meridian. Thanks to and for their work and thoughts.
I wrote the cover for this month's PCGamer, analysing the implications of Elden Ring's hybrid style for boss designs, build optimising, treasure as bait vs crafting resource, and From's famously oblique branching narratives. Although tbh, I mostly did it for this nonsensical pun:
My life is very complicated and painful at the moment - thank you to friends and colleagues for bearing with me.
Very rough poetic astrolabe/writing tool, printed with Roman alphabet transcriptions of greetings from the Voyager Record. Turn the rule (one hand curved like the plan view of Voyager's solar system path) to make translingual noise (?): abantu planeten noose sinifisela...
Bumping my Airborne Kingdom review because I think this game deserves more discussion - would like to read thoughts from a critic with knowledge of the period, culture and language it invokes (to my untrained eye, medieval Islam and modern Arabic script). eurogamer.net/articles/2020-
The wags at Eurogamer let me review a Zelda game, which I thought was pretty delightful on the whole.
My review of Roadwarden, to which I have handed the coveted Eurogamer gold.
A fun excerpt from my Voyager research: at one point, NASA realised that starting and stopping the craft's tape recorder (used to buffer data before transmission to Earth) caused it to rotate around its yaw axis. Committing things to memory affected its motion.
I'm temping as a features editor at Eurogamer for a few months (will still be freelancing alongside). It's lovely to be back FT at the EG, though I strongly suspect that the aim is to instigate a Denethor of Gondor-style reign of mediocrity before they hire a new editor-in-chief.
Cool/alarming work thing: I've been commissioned to write a book! Not one of my dubious literary experiments - a piece of journalism about a videogame. Details to follow. I'm planning to keep regular freelance going alongside, but will pitch a bit less over the next few months.
If you're making a videogame that does something quite deliberate, radical and/or just plain weird with the concept of nature, I'd love to hear from you for a piece I'm writing. DMs are open, email is in bio.
My review of Dishonored 2 will be a few days yet, but suffice to say it's a wonder. As crafty as Thief, as storied as Gone Home.
I explored the accidental eco-politics of Anthem's Javelin suit mechanics with reference to Donna Haraway's famous work on cyborgs and "becoming-with", rather than against, other creatures and your habitat. Thanks to for the opportunity.
I'd like to interview Iraqi and Iraqi-born game developers for a UK magazine article. We'd talk about how you got into gaming, challenges you've faced and your current projects and ambitions. I can arrange a translator if needed. Please mail dirigiblebill@googlemail.com for more!
A quick look at Death of a Wish, the vicious and balletic follow-up to the wonderful LUCAH: Born of a Dream
I for one welcome our new overlord.
I'd like to play an urban horror sandbox in which you try to commit petty crimes in a city prowled by something like Batman, with all the latter's supernatural, fascist and psychoanalytic elements strongly emphasised. Militsioner meets Arkham, I guess?
I wrote a little about the uncanniness of Resident Evil 2's police station, one of gaming's most revisited spaces.
Got to review Tenderfoot Tactics after all, which finds an unlikely kinship between managing a battle and tending a garden. Protean flat-shaded aesthetics and a wonderfully hushed, intimate audioscape. Full print review to come, but suffice to say it's worth your time.
I wrote about how videogame portrayals of fusion and solar energy wrestle with the sun's history as an emblem of empire. Beware longread.
For Eurogamer, I wrote about the lonely solidarity between path-finders in Death Stranding and my own native Yorkshire Dales. eurogamer.net/articles/2019-
I'm not able to review it, but if you're fond of fl0w, Gris, Tetris Effect and fantasias in general, you'll probably get a kick out of , which launches today. Navigate a blissy, bioluminescent reef by triggering and sliding along and between ripples of sound.
Some thoughts on the current popularity of time-loop games versus the attention economy and climate change anxiety, based on a chat with Into The Breach designer Justin Ma.
I've got a couple of big pieces in today's new PCGamer. Firstly - How to build a black hole, my feature on the art and science of videogame gravity, from Mario and Newton to Kerbal and Einstein. Thanks to and
Weekend ramble about 90s game demos, shareware horizons and the art of getting more out of a disposable artefact than you're strictly supposed to. eurogamer.net/articles/2021-
I wrote about how each Final Fantasy game constructs its own concept of time through combat, and looked at how later games have tried to reinvent Active Time Battle. Content warning for some slapdash readings of Einstein/Newton, NFL and F1 racing. eurogamer.net/articles/2020-
A little GOTY piece on the dignity of seeing clearly in Disco Elysium, a game about grieving for the future.
If you're after a leisurely Sunday read, my PCG feature about mazes, labyrinths and their history in/utility for videogames is now online. Sadly, the web version lacks the box-outs, where I had interviewees give me a walking tour of the levels discussed:
Just learned that two of my oldest friends have Covid, despite being double-jabbed. Please continue to wear masks and observe social distancing guidelines if you can, especially if you feel comfortable venturing into public spaces. We are all connected to vulnerable people.
Had a great chat with the creator of Kerbal recently in which he pointed me towards A Slower Speed of Light, a game in which light is gradually slowed to near-walking speed, allowing relativistic effects such as Lorentz transformations to become visible: gamelab.mit.edu/games/a-slower
I am suddenly working on a print piece about labyrinths, mazes and videogame design - not sure there's enough time for proper interviews, but if you're working on or playing something with more than its fair share of twists and turns, it'd be good to hear from you.
