This Week in Video Game Criticism: From Sleeping Dogs to Diaspora

This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Zolani Stewart on topics ranging from the instrumentality of NPCS to reading Sleeping Dogs as an Asian American. Let’s start with Austin Walker at Paste, who writes on Watch Dogs and Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system. His piece is comprehensive and meaty, moving from Mordor's approach to failure, its perpetuation of colonial enslavement narratives, and weaving succinct observations of Watch Dogs and both games’ presentation of NPCs, and the violence we perform onto them. Eric Swain also writes a piece that laments the superficiality of Watch Dogs, surveying the numerous problems with its themes and structures. At the blog videogameheart, Grayson Davis twists the connection between meat and health in videogames, and asks what it means for a game to reflect a vegetarian’s way of life. Kevin Wong traces lines between Sleeping Dogs and his experiences being an Asian American. He examines the struggle of the diaspora prevalent in his and Jackie’s life, and the negotiation of belonging and acceptance in the tug between cultures. It certainly touched into some of my own experiences as a Black Canadian. A rewarding and relatable piece well worth reading. Edward Smith looks our relationship to technology as a conceptual character in Alien: Isolation. Hazel Monforton examines Outlast in the context of surveillance, and Jon Peterson writes a history of war games in the early 20th Century, and the places women have taken in those spaces. And some good news: Stephen Beirne of Normally Rascal has ventured into critical curation on his own blog! “This Week We Read” takes up several writers, each with their own pieces to contribute. Take a look if you’ve gotten tired of reading in my voice. We're Good! That’s it for this week! We greatly value your contributions, so if you write something that you want us to see, send us a Twitter mention or an email! And to support the work that we do here, you can help us continue our curating work at our Patreon. Happy reading! And take care of yourself, friends. Stay strong, and stay powerful.