Phoenix Simms

Unwinnable — "In all of her work there's a deep sense of care and respect for how people, both individually and collectively, are impacted by society's systems of power." An interview with debut Michif author tonia laird about decolonialism, reconnecting with your heritage, and how multimedia storytelling can impact your prose writing.

Unwinnable — I miss AA and AAA being unabashedly bizarro in their design, whether they're story-driven or not. A state of play and by extension my column. Moving forward, I'm focusing on more indie projects.

Unwinnable — So, I replayed Silent Hill: Homecoming for the first time since it came out when I was in high school. A lot of the themes of church and state, hypermasculinity, and mental health surprisingly held up. But this also struck me as rather chilling in the sense of "the more things change, the more they stay the same". Regardless of your reception of this underdog title in the series, it's worth a revisit just to see how unfortunately relevant the intergenerational trauma is in its representation. Scarlet, the giant haunted doll boss, has one of the most intense sequences in the game regarding this aspect of SH:H's storytelling.

Unwinnable — I wrote here about different design aspects of Blue Prince we found evocative. For me, it was the references to surrealist childhood books like The Mystery of Harris Burdick and parallels to Agatha Christie's disappearance.

tier-review.com — Nathalie Lawhead joined us on Zoom to talk about their work, interactive fiction, internet subcultures, social media and lots more.

Unwinnable — My latest for Unwinnable, musing about the concepts of cosiness, wholesomeness, and how these terms are becoming more rigid and narrow in gameplay and design thinking. There are many ways to envision cosy atmosphere and care in games, there are titles doing this. I also discuss how Tales of the Shire is an example of marketing goals taking precedence not just over the game's representation of cosiness, but as other games media professionals have noted, was the driver for crunch culture at Wētā Workshop's studio. If care doesn't happen at the development level and its philosophy for designing play, how can we expect the end product to genuinely reflect a caring and wholesome experience?

Unwinnable — Back on my voice over labour rights and gen-AI grind. Ever since researching for the piece I wrote for Container Magazine, "The Continued Devaluation of Voice-Over", I continue to periodically keep abreast of how the cult of gen-AI and toxic social media culture intersect. This piece below covers a few incidents about these topics and at its core is about how vital honing our emotional intelligence and critical thinking skills, especially with regards to media literacy, is.

tier-review.com — At its core, AOTK has an anti-establishment philosophy, much like the avant garde. Especially with its penchant for remixing, and therefore subverting, bourgeois expectations of art objects and texts.

Unwinnable — How do you design a truly solarpunk game? Kara Stone knows the way. Known Mysteries is the first solar-powered streaming game project of Solar Server games and a narrative game in the current paradigm of eco-conscious and decolonial CanLit.

tier-review.com — Grace and I discuss curating an exhibit focused on artists' games and how terminology does a lot for both planning, pitching, and designing such an exhibit.

Unwinnable — There's a curious folding of time and space, or at least our personal perception of time and space when it comes to ludic memory.

www.tier-review.com — Lovely Lady RPG's strongest narrative exists in the concept of the void, but the game's self-aware tone often sells itself short.

Unwinnable — There's a poetic quality to having deliberate pauses within a game world.

Unwinnable — Do status ailments and their treatments in games perpetuate toxic mythology about diseases and disabilities?

ghost.io — Heisei Pistol Show is a time capsule of a game. One that intersects with the Menhera community's philosophy of vent art and is a case-in-point that games were always queer and avant-garde.

ghost.io — OVERWHELM is less about punishment and more about vindication. Vindication that sometimes even perseverance, that vanguard of individualist hope in particular, will fail.

Unwinnable — When you strictly define games as a commercial product you devalue the prominent place games and their rhetoric now have in our current zeitgeist.

Paste — If you love survival horror, then you should know how important creative freedom to take game design risks are! Silent Hill, Clock Tower, and Famicom Detective Club (which is seeing its return with Emio after a several years hiatus) all exist because they're projects creators and their companies took risks on! Check out my short history of horror games and creative risk at Paste Games.

Unwinnable — Nikhil Murthy's Syphilisation emerged as a way to address some enduring colonial-imperialist assumptions in the 4X classic series Civilization.

ghost.io — Grief is mundane, despite how profound of an emotion and process it is. Grief can also be cumulative and collective.

Unwinnable — Dragon Age: Veilguard is being released during a period of global climate change, which makes some players view the game and its devotion to world building with an ecological slant.

Paste — Grief has become an increasingly common subject for videogames, and the ones who depict it best know that grief is shared and communal.

Unwinnable — Mothra is at once an icon of ritual and tradition as well as one of feminine transgression. For Unwinnable's special-themed issue "Kawaiiju" I decided to analyze how the Queen of Kaiju is inextricably tied to the history of empowerment via kawaii culture and philosophy in Japan.

ghost.io — "Shadows, as a collective entity, are natural and need not be characterized as Other." Grace B. and I have created a journal of games criticism called The Imaginary Engine Review a.k.a. TIER or TIEReview. We are intersectional killjoys releasing issues monthly on independent, obscure, and/or retro games. As the first point on our about page says, we write on the margins, for the margins. Check it out! And if you like what we're about, consider supporting us by subscribing or spreading the word.