All of these games are interventions situated inside cultures of death. They very much depend on the master’s tools. For some, that might not be radical enough. To me, it feels honest. These games take as their starting point the places where we find ourselves, both in terms of video game culture and our wider biopolitical environment, and they look for ways to challenge it, to develop or change. They believe in our capacity to grow and evolve. They recognise that there is no gap between today and tomorrow. We must build to where we want to be from where we are.

Death is the ultimate stamp of value. It was invented to sell arcade-like 1 Up repetition to the home market. To read politics in videogames is to learn to read necropolitically, which is why gamers don’t like politics.

It’s been said that Red Dead Redemption 2 ‘represents perhaps the most important intervention into the Western genre of the twenty-first century.’ Far from being dead, this genre has evolved through the years, constantly subverting its own tropes and reinventing itself. Positioning RDR2 within the context of the Western genre and comparing it to the canon it draws from highlights the genre’s ability to welcome narratives that have in the past been excluded, as well as the possibilities present within the medium of video games.

As a writer, I spend too much time awake at night worrying about building an audience for my work. And yet, I spend even more time awake at night, planning my next RollerCoaster Tycoon park in my head, for an audience of the hundred-or-so RCT parkmakers I care about the most.

Citizen Sleeper follows Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, whereby to resist one must move toward the plane of immanence and the multiplicity of capacities it offers. If we are all sleepers, then we must learn how to make new collectives, multiplicities and fleshly and virtual becomings. As my favourite ‘ending’ of the game tells us, we must turn away from identity, representation and ideology and ‘grow strange’ against the boundaries of capitalism.

If most videogames are collaborative stories that the player travels through and participates in, like an actor following their part of the script, Elden Ring is more like a complex puzzle box that players collectively poke at, trying to find a way into to figure out its secrets. It pretends to be about masochistic individual performance but is in fact about collaboration, helping each other out, and working against a deliberately obtuse and unfair opponent.

Perhaps, the last best hope in this sorry and sordid saga is that this may be a wake-up call to workers in the videogame industry. It’s a strong argument for unionisation, an example of how passion alone cannot create a safe work environment, and motivation to hold abusive bosses to the fire.

It’s clear that the definition of what constitutes a gamer and the debate on difficulty settings are intertwined. The gaming industry has already started shifting its focus to include more diverse audiences. However resistant ‘traditional gamers’ may be, difficulty settings have well and truly arrived and are here to stay. For plenty of people who don’t fit the stereotypical gamer mould, that’s a good thing.

Before its release, Cyberpunk 2077 was hyped as ‘the video game of 2020’, a prediction that rings eerily true in the sense that 2020 was a disappointing dumpster fire, and so too was the game. Cyberpunk 2077 is a case study of what happens when you exploit workers, deceive consumers, and put a projected, ideal future ahead of messy reality.

In grappling with the original, Final Fantasy VII Remake engages not only with the same environmental conflicts at the heart of the original game, but with the failures, mistakes and inactions of those who have come before. It becomes about one of the key aspects of the current climate crisis: reckoning with decades of inaction and understanding the effect that inaction could have on our future.

If we properly situate The Last of Us: Part II in the broader medium of videogames, and not just the subfield of Triple-A action videogames, both its accomplishments and failings are better tempered and it is easier to evaluate it for what it actually is.

While both of our largest political parties are so concerned about the possibility of a ‘too generous’ welfare system serving as a disincentive against finding work that they are both refusing to maintain it at its current, merely adequate level, Animal Crossing presents us with a fictional economy where people are allowed to choose to work to better their society.

Twitch is an exemplary case of how audience activities continue to be commodified in the context of online digital media. Unlike with traditional televisual media, a key way that this value is generated is through the interactivity performed by viewers, enabled by the platform. The work of watching is the work that these audiences do in creating and sustaining captivating structures of feeling.

For journalists and critics, for cultural institutions, and for players generally, Untitled Goose Game’s visibility and mainstream success is an opportunity to develop a new language and understanding of this broader field of videogame creation that does not fit neatly within traditional understandings of ‘the videogame industry’.

What makes DotaPlus interesting isn’t that it represents a new stage in the ongoing platformisation of videogames, but rather – I would suggest – that it reflects an economic and infrastructural model reliant on the quasi-autonomous capture, sorting, and presenting of user data. This model has transformative implications for the players’ experience of gaming.

Death Road to Canada starts in Florida, in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse. The player controls a small party of survivors, and the goal is to make it to the safety of the Canadian border. I spent eight weeks playing Death Road. I would wake, read the news, go to work, come home and play the game.