× FREE PALESTINE! × Currently playing Germs: Nerawareta Machi & UFO 50

gael ♱ 24 ♱ he/him

@underreallife / x underreallife@gmail.com

Welcome to UNDER REAL LIFE. Here's where you come to get to know me and my work better. For context, I've been writing about videogames on the internet since I was around 16, inconsistently and unprofessionally, yet always with a healthy level of edge. I'm older now, but some things never change.

IRL, I‘m just your garden-variety university student and a notoriously chill guy. I love learning and art above most things, always have. You could say this diverse array of interests has influenced my approach to videogame criticism: while many believe videogames to be some sort of Gesamtkunstwerk, I think compared to other art forms, they aren’t any more or any less special. That might sound harsh, but nothing is harsher than the aesthetic demotion videogames suffer under the exceptionalist perspective.

Other than that, I'm passionate about… way too many things. In no particular order, here are a few: learning Japanese (a long-term project I’m very consistent about), subcultural fashion (especially J-fashion subcultures), literary criticism (a significant amount of the most obstinate videogame discourse topics precede Tennis for Two, believe it or not), web aesthetics (I have this pretty big book that barely fits in my bookshelf called The Art Happens Here: Net Art Anthology), and weird, obscure, avant-garde videogames (last time I checked, they called them “altgames”—at any rate, not to be confused with "indies"). Nice to meet you!

FAV BOOKS
  • Anna Karenina (1878)
  • Giovanni's Room (1956)
  • Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1942)
  • El Jarama (1956)
  • Mrs Dalloway (1925)
FAV GAMES
  • Pathologic 2 (2019)
  • Gnosia (2021)
  • Problem Attic (2013)
  • Ladykiller in a Bind (2016)
  • Metroid (1986)
  • Ramble Planet (2014)
FAV MOVIES
  • À nos amours (1983)
  • Mamma Roma (1962)
  • La Captive (2000)
  • Linda Linda Linda (2005)
  • L’Ami de mon amie (1987)
  • Shrek 2 (2004)

Now, for those who are new and don't know what to expect from my writing, I thought it would be a good idea to write down a list of videogame crit opinions to get us on the same page about my beliefs. I don't have all the answers, so I'm more than happy to have productive discussions about them. I will add more as I remember/come up with them.

  1. This distinction between reviews and cultural analysis, or between reviews and videoessays, or between reviews and [insert sophisticated, nuanced, subjective, non-evaluative form of videogame criticism]—I never got it, though not for a lack of trying. When I was first introduced to the idea of videogame criticism beyond the scope of graphics, gameplay, and raw fun (and back when this ostensibly rebellious attitude towards those concepts presented any novelty to me), I was fully sold on the project of “cultural videogame critique”. Unfortunately, after a fair share of encounters with executions of this ideal, I came to realize this high-brow distancing from reviews was an empty, self-congratulatory promise.

    Isn't it convenient, monolithically projecting onto reviews certain attributes (hyper-consumerist, obsessed with objectivity, socioculturally shortsighted, techno-utopian) in order to flatter one's favored kind of writing upon comparison? And by means of the compartmentalizing required to do so, the avoidance of any interrogation of the inconspicuous presence of those same traits in the cultural analysis we so adore instead—isn’t that convenient as well? Really, how could anyone, myself included, be surprised when people who affirm themselves through the sweeping devaluation of an entire field they have spent little to no intellectual curiosity on produce writing so intellectually underwhelming?

    In other words: we could judge reviews as a whole based on what hype-fueled mainstream gaming outlets publish, or cultural analysis as a whole based on desperate pleas for cultural validation by means of stilted, insubstantial connections with high culture, or film as a whole based on whatever Marvel Studios churns out these days, but why should we?
  2. Regarding the topic of “technical limitations”, let’s think about this obvious truth: say, twenty or thirty years ago, any given videogame looked one way, but it was entirely possible for it to have looked a different way. This is easily verifiable by taking a look at a bunch of its contemporaries, all of them created by different people under different circumstances, and visually distinguishable from one another (arguably, more so than recent AAAs). “Old” is not a cohesive aesthetic category. The fog in Silent Hill 2 or Shadow of the Colossus didn’t one day appear like a weed their creators were unequipped to pull out from their code at the risk of unraveling the whole thing—as a matter of fact, someone had to put it in there. Tank controls do not represent an underdeveloped stage towards modern standardized control systems: one of them is, and the other will inevitably become, a former fashion of a previous time. Even so (partly because of it), both of these schemes are poetic devices with unavoidable capacity for meaning.

    Remakes and remasters' raison d'etre is accessibility: not in the sense of “ease of access” (a complex and multifaceted project), but in the sense of “familiar, comfortable; like other popular modern games”. And when these popular modern games become old and unfamiliar, a lucky few will get their own remakes, too. “Tank controls have aged poorly, haven't they? Just take them out, it’s a quality of life improvement that doesn’t alter the integrity of the original,” says the same person who proclaims videogames to be art. But they have it coming: the most timeless-masterpiece-gold-standard videogame of our day is due its obsolescence narrative sooner or later. And when that happens, do try to remind them, for your own amusement if nothing else—that is, if you can google it without exclusively getting results about its remake.

updates

November 9th, 2024. I'm not dead, just reading. University keeps me busy as usual, but I want to write something soon.

Social media usage doesn't come naturally to me these days. I've seen too many people I respect tacitly subscribe to a posting style guide that repels me; it's hard to relate to the sensibilities of the average Twitter poster. Hopefully, it will be at least somewhat different on Bluesky, so you guys need to follow me over there and be cool.

Literally me

Oresama's Miyavi has influenced my style like nothing else.

"but, for me, this underlined the point that these games perhaps weren't, in a sense, actually about what they were about. they were containers signifying the capability of larger meaning that could theoretically exist. they were meaning machines capable of eliciting empathy (a rhetoric that got even more intense later on in the 2010's around VR), but exactly how that empathy manifested itself was a placeholder. if games were to have a greater purpose in society, they simply must be able to do this. that capability of evoking empathy and containing larger meaning mattered far more than what specifically was being expressed."

— Liz Ryerson, The Californian Ideology

Hardest fit pic ever taken. To the right, a bloodied man curling into the fetal position in an abandoned warehouse; to the left, a corpse's feet peeking from behind the gothest man on this side of the Gorkhon. If you pay close attention, you can see the photographer (me) brandishing a knife at him. Dangerous, stoic, mysterious—one can only aspire to this level of coolness.


Isn't this knit just beautiful?

So here's how they do it: picture a cast of beautifully drawn anime guys who have the most fire fits you can imagine. I'm really into fashion so I see them and go, "Man, I need to play this game!" That's how I end up playing an otome game, and that otome game turns out to contain some of the worst writing I've ever read. That's how they get me, every single time. And I like otoges as a concept (and in a few select cases, in practice, too), but the amount of terrible writing I've forced myself to endure for the sake of engaging with the genre is frankly unreasonable.

"子供の足の私 / I have child's feet" by Mari Katayama.

A remix of two pictures (one of a different frame, the other of the picture) I took at the Tate Modern back in May. Lovely display.

Casually met a cult leader in Germs: Nerawareta Machi. She seems to be cool with me for now. I'll keep you guys posted.


[Review] The Forgotten City

"Thus, the player’s presence in The Forgotten City’s world renders it meaningless."

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[Review] Fire Emblem: Three Houses

"This avatar, a pure extension of the player, embodies a cult leader to a degree few others I know have reached (the irony of this happening in a narrative that calls into question that exact dynamic wasn’t lost on me). Whether a cause is just or not depends on the side the avatar defends. I mean, even the Black Eagles route, regarded as the most immoral of the three in general, makes a laughable attempt to antagonize the other side beyond the original frame of moral ambiguity. You always made the right choice, did the right thing. Any student you want on your side wants to be on your side. They aren’t loyal to anything, and you’ll find them expressing polar opposite opinions on different routes. They’re sunflowers to the sun."

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There Aren't Too Many Videogames: Indiepocalypse or the Eugenics of Art

For a couple of years now, there’s been a lot of talk about a so-called Indiepocalypse. Developers and players alike worry that the exorbitant amount of videogames that are released on Steam every day are saturating the market, making it harder for indies to get their rightful spotlight. And I get it, to some extent. Indie Game: The Movie sold us a fantasy that’s out of reach for most, and that realization is just now dawning on those developers who were inspired by it. I’m empathetic to these folks, but my empathy has a limit. You can find it right at the scapegoat some of them found for this structural problem: bad games.

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[Review] Life is Strange 2

"A lot of these videogames are so insecure about their alleged lack of gameplay that they introduce small doses of interactivity here and there. Sometimes in the shape of quick-time events, other times in the shape of sterile puzzles. Life is Strange 2 has both. I remember the first one appearing when you try to convince Daniel to come with you. You have to win this microgame multiple times for him to do so as if you “kept trying no matter what”. And look, that’s the problem with this videogame imposter syndrome: it always leads to puerile ludic metaphors."

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[Review] Hypnospace Outlaw

"In this videogame, you don’t use social media as we know it, but the philosophy behind it—hyper-vigilance, centralization, inescapable corporate ownership and control of user-generated content—is the basis of this world. Hypnospace might look like the past, but it speaks like the present."

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On Polly Pocket

"Polly Pocket has always been about evoking a dimensionality other dollhouses couldn’t have. They were the size and form of a makeup kit, and when you opened them, one half would be perpendicular to the other, thus conveying horizontality and verticality simultaneously."

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[Review] Bury Me, My Love

"As advocacy journalism turned into fiction, it lacks earnest execution, while as a personal/universal narrative, it lacks a heart. Bury Me, My Love isn’t exploitative, but is for sure a palatable gamification of a conflict that doesn’t want to confront me."

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