Friction Burns Power Without Control In Pentiment By Ruth Cassidy • December 21st, 2022 Pentiment is a game about the changing balance of social power, and this uncomfortable dinner sets the stage for how even words are catalysts of change.
Friction Burns Against the Storm, Against Randomness, Against the Inevitable By Ruth Cassidy • November 29th, 2022 An exploration of the tensions you play with, vs the tensions the game’s text shows you. It isn’t enough to survive against all odds – for the purpose of your task list, that’s simply assumed.
Feature Story Whose Body Horror Is It, Anyway? By Ruth Cassidy • October 21st, 2022 A look at body horror, the just world fallacy, and lungs that turn into glass.
Friction Burns Finding The On-Ramp To Route Zero By Ruth Cassidy • September 26th, 2022 Kentucky Route Zero carries its own ghosts of its critical legacy. How do I get past that?
Friction Burns I Was A Teenage Exocolonist: Let’s Do The Time Warp Again(?) By Ruth Cassidy • September 14th, 2022 Consequences matter when you decide, but sometimes death is useful.
Friction Burns There’s Two Sides To The Story in Signs of the Sojourner By Ruth Cassidy • August 29th, 2022 There’s a truth at its heart of Signs of the Sojourner’s conversational card games: you cannot prepare the perfect conversation.
Friction Burns Wholesome Games, and the Context Collapse of Branding Culture By Ruth Cassidy • August 10th, 2022 Whether they meant to or not, Wholesome Games have staked unique ground, so their choices invite criticism about what is and is not included.
Friction Burns Shifting Tides and Dynamics in Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.Jpg By Ruth Cassidy • July 29th, 2022 Like the changing tides, and the pitching skies, the perspective in Queer Man Peering Into A Rock Pool.jpg shifts.
Friction Burns Life Is Strange: Artificial Colors By Ruth Cassidy • July 13th, 2022 Characters’ quirks and quips are endearing, but they never feel like more than the LARP versions of themselves: there to give information or resources, or be acted upon.
Friction Burns In Card Shark, The Devil Finds Work For Busy Hands By Ruth Cassidy • June 16th, 2022 The easiest mark is one distracted by believing they’re getting one over on someone else.
Friction Burns Conversation In The Ruins Of Interplanetary Capitalism By Ruth Cassidy • June 3rd, 2022 An interview with Gareth Damian Martin about Citizen Sleeper, and its bodies
Friction Burns NORCO Is A Connected Web Of Estrangement By Ruth Cassidy • May 12th, 2022 The desire for connection and rejection of it shapes the core family in a web, but it plays out across the story’s politics too.
Friction Burns In Disco Elysium, Cops Aren’t Community By Ruth Cassidy • April 14th, 2022 No matter how kindly or redemptively you play Harry, and for all Kim speaks to his belief that the RCM are doing good, Disco Elysium itself recognises that cops are not social care.
Friction Burns Weapon Degradation – Or Ephemeral Equipment? By Ruth Cassidy • March 4th, 2022 Does having the specific language to spot a mechanic – or a narrative trope – prime players and critics to see what they know, instead of what they’re experiencing?
Friction Burns Broccoli Dungeon By Ruth Cassidy • February 25th, 2022 I want to come to the defense of challenging art, but I’d found Boyfriend Dungeon to feel too safe.
Friction Burns For Commander Shepard, Ignorance Is Access By Ruth Cassidy • January 31st, 2022 Shepard’s xenophobia and its invisibility are both tools to give players what they want: as much access to the game’s world as possible, without the social cost.
Friction Burns Being Willfully Bad at Games By Ruth Cassidy • January 26th, 2022 Being ‘bad at games’ was partly a statement of intent: I will not get good and I don’t care to try.
Friction Burns Unpacking Vulnerability, Empathy and Player Agency By Ruth Cassidy • December 17th, 2021 It’s that moment when you walk down the street and realise that every single stranger, whose presence is fleeting in your life, has lived an entire history up until that moment.
Friction Burns Authoritarianism (In Frostpunk) Is Not Inevitable By Ruth Cassidy • December 10th, 2021 In that optimisation-first mindset, it’s easy to do – violence will make this problem go away’. But then, so would meeting your citizens’ material needs.
Friction Burns Dishonored’s Chaos System Was Never Punishing You By Ruth Cassidy • November 12th, 2021 Dishonored’s Chaos system introduces a world where you can take exactly what you want, and have fun with it, but the cost is laid bare.
Friction Burns Urgency and Mastery in Umurangi Generation By Ruth Cassidy • October 29th, 2021 While I followed advice to turn off the timer, I kept chewing on its presence. Was it at odds with the game’s purpose, or was I acting in conflict with it?
Feature Excerpt Pendragon and Anti-Fascist Medievalism By Ruth Cassidy • October 29th, 2021 “Camelot has, for the moment, fallen, but the dream of Camelot – of a sane Government by consensus, led by an Arthur and not a Mordred – must and will live on.”
Friction Burns How Disco Elysium’s Centrist Path Observes the Player By Ruth Cassidy • October 1st, 2021 “It isn’t about diplomacy, or pacifying all sides, but about absolute control.”
Feature Excerpt Imagining the Future in Games By Ruth Cassidy • June 24th, 2021 A vision of tomorrow, today!
Feature Excerpt Your Choices Matter: The Real Power Fantasy By Ruth Cassidy • August 28th, 2020 An interview with the co-narrative leads on Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire about subverting that power fantasy of the Chosen One.
