Reading over my posts again, I found that I could separate them into two categories: posts that compare two works to each other and posts that discuss the use of medium in one work. In posts of the former category, I always ended up examining the relationship between the player and either the player character or the game mechanics. My first post is the most obvious example of this, as it focuses on whether the player of that day’s games play as the character or as themselves. Similarly, my second and fourth posts examine how the game guides the player (or maybe how the player guides the game) through its narrative possibilities. I think I focused so much on the role of the player in these posts because it serves as both a common ground and a narrative split between games. Every game has a player, after all, but every game will treat them differently.
The posts I wrote about a single game were not so player-centric. Instead, they were about how games used techniques built into their medium and to what extent they worked. For example, my third post discussed signal degradation, or technological errors with visual effects, and why it’s used intentionally in horror games when it would be a detriment to any other genre. I didn’t bring up any technique in particular in my fifth post, but I did mention how the creators of the relevant game did their best to simulate a realistic stream-of-consciousness, and how the attempt was ultimately doomed to fall short due to the limitations of the medium.
Overall, I was primarily interested in discussing player-game relationships and the way games present themselves to us. I was a little surprised to discover that I had a few topics I naturally gravitated towards, since before I thought I was just writing whatever came to my head.