Difficult Games: Beauty And Pain (Skate Story & Ultrakill Essay)
Really, really excellent video from Renata Price and K Tessa Newton. Deals with a lot of stuff I've been thinking about re: living an embodied existence, and ties it together with difficulty in video games, depictions of hell, when pain is useful, meaningful, beautiful, or instructive, when it isn't, and what we might do as a response to pain. The video is, in some ways, very unpleasant (or at least uncomfortable), because it does not shy away from describing both physical and psychic pain in accurate and unwavering detail - which is exactly the approach a video like this needs. True representation of a particular person's body in pain. Throughout the entirety of the video, you can see Ren's exposed back and shoulder muscles clench and relax, you can see her stretch in unintuitive ways to alleviate the discomfort she experiences as she talks directly to the camera, and you can see her hands, wrists, and arms spasm while she plays as flashes of shoulder pain forces her to move in unbidden ways. Accurately reflecting the pastime of gaming (or, for Renata, the Job of gaming and writing about games) as an embodied activity where acting in accordance with the game's goals has specific, physical demands, and admitting that a pain response might be a deliberate artistic motive that Has Meaning i think is really important work and a side of gaming criticism that is woefully under-represented. Renata and Tessa just launched the YouTube channel Crit Build, where they'll be doing more of this kind of work, and if you're interested, I highly recommend checking this video out.
Content warnings for: Descriptions of hell and suffering, frank discussion of muscular pain and psychic distress