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Hello!
I’m writing to see if you would be interested in a piece for Unwinnable.com with a working title of “Gaming to Remember.”
The essay focuses on my recent play through of Breath of Fire II, a game I first played as a child while my parents provided care for my great aunt in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. In the piece, I argue that the game elevates these human concerns by attributing memory loss to demon attacks while, at the same time, providing a vehicle to manage these traumatic experiences (those same demons can be defeated). In this way, retro gaming becomes as much about recovering narratives from aging media as it is about preserving the memory for the aging gamer that they ever took place at all.
By way of bio: I work in the University of Virginia Library, where I teach and write on technology and media culture. I regularly blog on topics related to technology and education. My video game writing has largely been for Backlog, where representative pieces include one on The Banished Vault and loss and a more recent one on The Long Dark and depression.
Thank you for the consideration.
Brandon Walsh
Hello! I’m writing to see you if you would be interested in an impressions piece for Gamers with Glasses with a working title of “Frustrating Mechanics Tell a Story in Death Howl.”
In many deck builders, the player is tempted to focus on one strategy that has worked for them in the past. In Death Howl, you are forced to build different kinds of decks depending on the region you are playing. The result can be frustrating—why can I not use strategy X when I enjoy it?—but that frustration serves a narrative purpose. Death Howl’s story concerns a mother who cannot accept her son’s death, and each deck type reflects a different way she might respond to this trauma: rage, numbing defense, self-destruction, and flight. The piece argues that Death Howl destabilizes the idea of growth and progress at the core of deck builders, instead centering how loss must be accepted as a universal part of life.
By way of bio: I work in the University of Virginia Library, where I teach and write on technology and media culture. I regularly blog on topics related to technology and education. My video game writing has largely been for Backlog, where representative pieces include one on The Banished Vault and loss and a more recent one on The Long Dark and depression.