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From their polished artistic analyses of video games to their well-reflected pieces on the issues surrounding the industry, the writers at Kill Screen have constantly delivered what I feel gaming needs in terms of writing, from celebrating particular games in unique features or proper reviews to the advocating of the medium as art, social, and/or serious business. Here are some of my favorite articles from them:

1. Hidetaka Miyaza's transcendent quest for beauty in Bloodborne - Easily the greatest piece on a video game I ever had the pleasure of reading.

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/hidetaka-miyazakis-transcendent-quest-beauty-bloodborne/

It is, in fact, a place of fear and superstition. From the rolling graveyards that climb up to the high cathedral and then back down to a shrouded forest; from the depths of a corpse-strewn aqueduct to the arcane academy set on the shores of a moonlit lake; its strength lies in its commitment to a tragic sense of decaying beauty. Comparisons are easy to make, and should be made with Dark Souls’ seminal world of Lordran, but in reality these are two very different beasts. While Dark Souls revelled in twisting fantasy stalwarts like lava, sewer and castle into a distinctive sprawling whole, Bloodborne builds a world that follows its own rules towards a perverse and chilling logic. This is a city that feels like a nightmare vision of old Europe, with its bridges and spires, squares and alleys. There is a distinctive atmosphere that is carried through each area with a sense of restraint and an unflinching eye for detail. Statues and carvings each tell their own story and Yharnam feels like the most storied of cities—its strata made up of alternating layers of bricks and bodies.

Miyazaki is known for bringing literature to design meetings, circling passages and handing them over to artists, asking them for their own interpretation. In Bloodborne these literary connections are evident, with the works of H.P Lovecraft hanging over its dark world like a veil. Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein also have echoes in this world—not in their pulp, Hammer Horror forms, but in the texture of their original and ornate prose. For Miyazaki, it’s clear that these are not just style references, but the seeds of his world. After all, the focus of these iconic gothic texts is not a sense of horror but a sense of humanity lost, and of the darkness that lies in the subjective spaces of human experience. Meanwhile, it is difficult not to look at the towers and spires of Yharnam, and not to think of Gormenghast, the grand gothic castle created by writer Mervyn Peake. In it, old dying institutions locked to endless rituals echo around once-glorious halls. Bloodborne’s interest in ritual and religious institution, as well as its empty but charged edifices, seem to speak directly of Peake’s worldview, one which depicts the powerful draw of fantastic dreams coloured by a pessimistic view of the waking world. Peake’s works were irrevocably affected by his experience of living in a time of European war, and Bloodborne is perhaps the first game of Miyazaki’s to suggest that he too is influenced by an ever-darkening modern world.

This is not a unique position that only Miyazaki occupies; instead, it connects him to a legacy of directors and artists that have returned again and again to the same fertile ground. We might see Miyazaki’s pursuit of an austere and powerful visual language as analogous to William Blake’s obsessive paintings of biblical suffering; or his honing of gameplay mechanics as similar to Andrei Tarkovsky's pursuit of the metaphysical powers of the long shot. Both of these creators saw beauty in what they were hunting—not a general, normalised beauty, but a specific, intense beauty, intrinsic to their very nature. This process goes beyond the task of making “good games,” and becomes something else—a creative act driven by both love and obsession. Bloodborne is built on this transcendent love. A love of the crumbling ruin, of the screeching banshee, of the shape in the shadows whose eyes catch the candlelight. A love of heaven-scratching spires, ever-descending staircases and fog-cloaked alleys. A love of all the magnificent horrors that have filled the minds of humans since they learned to light fires to stave off the dark. Lamps are, in truth, just another kind of bonfire, but the dark is always shifting, and it is on this shifting form that Miyazaki has set his precise and studied gaze.

2. Silent Hill 2's endings aren't what you want, but what you deserve

Of course, the idea that total immersion in a virtual world is akin to having total control over it is very different from our experience of real life—there are always things we cannot predict, or things we do for reasons we cannot consciously explain. Silent Hill 2 boldly attempts to capture this complexity in its story, imagery, and above all its ending-determination mechanic, which seems as strange and ahead of its time today as it did when the game was first released in 2001.

Unlike in most games with multiple endings, including the first Silent Hill, we are not presented with clear forks in the road that delineate one path from another. The game instead presents a world in which our actions have tremendous weight, while simultaneously leaving us blind to how those actions will radiate out and impact the course of events. Silent Hill 2 determines not the ending we are trying to achieve but the one that corresponds to how we played the game, whether we want it or not. We are active agents within the game world, but at the same time must accept that sometimes things just happen, and sometimes we just are who we are.

This generates a unique and at times delirious anxiety during play, well suited to the game’s genre. But it is not the grotesqueries of Pyramid Head that unsettles in this case—it is that this arrangement feels disturbingly familiar. Silent Hill 2 refuses to indulge our desire for omnipotence, for carefully planning out each step to willfully steer what happens to us and the broader story. Instead, we make decisions that we think we understand, which may or may not matter, and that yield outcomes at once logical and wholly opaque. Along with James, we experience the tug-of-war between a desire for control and a fear of responsibility, a craving for submission and a disgust for dependence. Silent Hill 2 is terrifying because it recalls the nausea of daily life.

“Leave” may be the closest James can come to finding the balance between these two points. And it makes sense that this is the easiest ending for us to achieve as players. For all its perversity, Silent Hill wants us to thread the needle and find a certain equilibrium, fragile as it may be. Suicide is shocking but final; repeating the past is gloomy but predictable. Moving forward into the unknown, however—taking ownership of our lives while maintaining reverence for that which we do not know and cannot change—that is truly scary.

3. The toxicity and empathy of social media, in videogame form

Many perceive the web of applications we call “social media” as a collective tool for our betterment, one that I’ve always likened to a digital, semi-literal version of the Burkean Parlor. Kenneth Burke created the parlor metaphor as a way of showing how discourse, whether it be about literary theory or the failings of public institutions, doesn’t ever truly end. It simply continue son and social media allows us a gateway to tap into those conversations. However, we cannot deny the amount of control that developers of such programs exert over our lives in exchange for this privilege. Beyond the personal information we give up to corporations, there’s also the chaotic nature of social media, how it can wreak havoc on the lives of people whose only crime is expressing an opinion in a digitalized public space. Just as these platforms have the potential to serve as an outlet for marginalized communities to express themselves and to help fund noble projects, they can also be used to carry out horrific harassment campaigns that endanger lives.

“In the lead up to writing KTALS, there were a few events that were dominating the headlines of my Twitter feed, even if they weren't on the local news: Gamergate and Ferguson. Both horrible, vile tragedies that still haven't gone away. But here I am, on the other side of the planet, completely unable to do anything for my friends except to say ‘This is terrible, I'm sorry, I don't understand it, I don't know what to do, is there ANYTHING I can do?’"

Killing Time at Lightspeed presents a take on social media that we don’t see often: as both a stage for educational self-expression and a window into the lives of others. Those who use social media are both (inadvertently or otherwise) watchers and performers; the nature of these applications forces users to fulfill these roles. This doesn’t mean that performers actively create fiction but instead that watchers can only perceive those performers from one perspective: through the narrow window that allows us to see their expression. As watchers, we are unlikely to fully comprehend everything that surrounds a performer’s expression of anger, sorrow, or joy. After all, often what the performer is doing is condensing a significant part of their lives—whether it’s detailing their experience with racism or sexism, or simply talking about their career expertise—to a series of 140-character statements. However, that doesn’t stop such expressions from being beneficial to everyone involved. Social media platforms, in spite of whatever advertising they stack on the sidelines of their webpages, can serve as a means for us to connect to one another, an opportunity to grow as human beings by sharing our pain and experiences.

4. In praise of silence in videogames

Games which harness silence as a means of crafting narrative and emotional meaning in their respective games tend to stand out to me. The growth of artistically driven games designed by small teams in the late ‘00’s has proven far more fruitful than Michel Hazanavicius’ attempt at reviving the traditional silent film with 2011’s The Artist. One of the games at the forefront of this flowering was 2010’s Limbo, which featured a final puzzle evoking the trauma of a car crash, wherein one throws a gravity-altering switch and sends a boy who is mid-fall careening to the right through a wall of glass (a windshield). For a moment, the sound gives out and time slows to crawl (perhaps the boy is seeing his life flash before his eyes). Here, the simulated experience of such an accident seems reticent and muted so as to heighten the emotional and physical toll it would take upon a person.

Silence forces us to internally fill in the gaps, creating a sense of space from very little. Shadow of the Colossus features no traditional enemies (save for its colossi) or other characters to converse with, aside from our trusty horse Agro and the indifferent god of the land Dormin; we’ve only our sword emanating a beam of light to guide us. The game’s protagonist, Wander, is an outsider and a mute, serving as a vessel through which the audience can enter and live in the game world on their own terms, much like Ryan Gosling’s stoic characters in Nicolas Winding Refn’s films Drive and Only God Forgives. For all the plainness of its empty grasslands and deserts, its mountainsides, forests, rivers, lived-in ruins of once-great temples and monuments, and wayward fauna quietly beckon us toward them, so as to satiate our curiosity. A place which appears desolate on first impression slowly and quietly reveals itself to be more by allowing us to connect to the space’s more realistic, minimalist nature.

So yeah. Are there other gaming sites that are like them?