Reflections
Latest
The Beautiful Disaster: Why B-games are essential to gaming as art
Somewhere between the pixel-perfect polish of AAA blockbusters and the raw sincerity of indie games lies a forgotten space — the middle space. It’s where ambition meets limitation, where games dare to be too strange, too sincere, too flawed to fit the mold. These are the B-games: beautiful disasters that stumble toward brilliance, shaping the future of gaming not through perfection, but through risk. In this reflection, we explore why this messy, magical middle is not just worth preserving —it’s essential to gaming’s claim to be art.
Video
Latest
Stray (2022) | It is the end of the world… as we know it
It is the end of world… as we know it What can a game where you play as a cat tell us about...
Critique
Latest
The Hammer’s Edge: How the Division Trains Players in Authoritarian Logic
The Division disguises authoritarian conditioning as tactical gameplay. Through mechanical complexity and dopamine-driven progression, it trains players to see state violence as skillful, necessary, and rewarding —while foreclosing moral alternatives and rendering community resilience invisible. It’s not propaganda; it’s pleasure-based ideological rehearsal.
"Games are a series
of interesting choices"
-Sid Meier-
Most recent
The Hammer’s Edge: How the Division Trains Players in Authoritarian Logic
The Division disguises authoritarian conditioning as tactical gameplay. Through mechanical complexity and dopamine-driven progression, it trains players to see state violence as skillful, necessary, and rewarding —while foreclosing moral alternatives and rendering community resilience invisible. It’s not propaganda; it’s pleasure-based ideological rehearsal.
Read More
Small Boxes: The Silent Poetry of Unpacking
How Unpacking transforms cardboard boxes into profound storytelling about identity, belonging, and queer love through wordless environmental narrative.
Read More
The Beautiful Disaster: Why B-games are essential to gaming as art
Somewhere between the pixel-perfect polish of AAA blockbusters and the raw sincerity of indie games lies a forgotten space — the middle space. It’s where ambition meets limitation, where games dare to be too strange, too sincere, too flawed to fit the mold. These are the B-games: beautiful disasters that stumble toward brilliance, shaping the future of gaming not through perfection, but through risk. In this reflection, we explore why this messy, magical middle is not just worth preserving —it’s essential to gaming’s claim to be art.
Read More
Some Roads Only Lead Underground
There is a highway beneath Kentucky where debt becomes geography. A forest in Pennsylvania where communities hunt their own children to keep their dreams alive.”
Video games aren’t just entertainment—they’re cartographers of America’s invisible mythologies.
From Kentucky Route Zero to Night in the Woods, they map the emotional terrain of decline, nostalgia, and resistance.
Gardens, not arenas: E-sports and the Narrowing of Videogame Culture
Esports dominate gaming culture, but at what cost? This essay explores what we lose when competition becomes the only way to play
Read More
Stray (2022) | It is the end of the world… as we know it
It is the end of world… as we know it What can a game where you play as a cat tell us about...
Read More
Subscribe to the Critical Reflection newsletter!
Get essays, articles, experimental critiques, and video mediations that treat games not as products, but as cultural artifacts —fragile, powerful, and worthy of care— straight to your inbox.
Thanks for subscribing!