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The Audacity of Alan Wake II

9 Min Read

Previously on Alan Wake… In 2010, bestselling author Alan Wake took his wife Alice on vacation to Washington State. There—after enduring years of writer’s block—he was finally motivated to embark on a manuscript for a new novel, Departure. But when the events described in that work-in-progress started coming true in real life, Alan realized he needed to hurry up and write an ending. Extenuating circumstances forced Alan to jump into a lake, which was actually a hellmouth to another dimension, which is where Alan’s fractured psyche is still trapped. So concludes the cult-classic videogame Alan Wake. Thirteen years have passed since the writer’s untimely disappearance, but this isn’t to say Alan hasn’t kept himself busy. After the events of two DLC episodes, Alan—ever resolved to escape the confines of the “Dark Place” and resume a life in New York City—begins work on yet another infernally-inspired manuscript, this one fittingly entitled Return. Alan is also confronted...

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Say You Don’t Know Me: One Night in Pokémon Go

By Jenn Frank

In Memoir

7 Min Read

It was already after 11pm. My husband found me in our bathroom, where I was working to pull my hair up into a lazy French twist. I clipped the knot into place with a barrette. “Are you getting dressed for Pokémon?” my husband asked me, bewildered. I didn’t answer. Instead, I put on a necklace. My husband smirked at me. Then he looked at himself in the mirror. “I already look like a Pokémon trainer,” he said. “Oh,” I laughed, “the hoodie?” I was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, too. With a necklace, though. “Yeah,” he said, “and this bag.” “Oh!” I said. “I need to get my bag.” We left our apartment building through the front entrance—something I can’t remember ever having done before—and I stopped at a park bench and sighed happily. I checked my phone. “Playground,” my smartphone’s screen read. The playground itself was, in actuality, dark, deserted, but someone had taken a photo of it earlier, during the day. I swiped on the daytime photo, and I was immediately gifted three...

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An Improbable Conceit: The Importance of Heavy Rain and Beyond: Two Souls

By Jenn Frank

In Criticism

11 Min Read

Editor’s note: There are a number of articles between 2015 and 2016 I have no recollection of writing but, as Paste Games’s then-assistant editor, I was supposed to be contributing regularly. (I preferred to hide out and edit others.) At this point, I’d been a GamerGate target for 32 months. This text is frantic—the kind of disorganized thinking that reads like hastily-scribbled notes—but I do feel that it has some sort of deeply-buried merit. *** Until last month, I had never played Heavy Rain. Old fart that I am, I believed the game launched only a couple years ago. (Turns out, Quantic Dream released the game in 2010—which, to me, still qualifies as “just yesterday”). I had also, until last month, never played Beyond: Two Souls, Quantic Dream’s 2013 follow-up to Heavy Rain. Last month, my husband Ted and I played Beyond: Two Souls together in “Duo Mode”—Ted playing Elliot Page, and I playing their ghost-friend Aiden—in one single sitting...

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The 10 Best Mobile Games of 2015

By Jenn Frank

In Lists

7 Min Read

Any end-of-year ranking is not going to be easy work—but ranking mobile games is perhaps toughest of all. It’s very much comparing apples to Mack trucks: One app might be something of a simple toy, while the next may be a full-fledged RPG, for instance. Still, it’s a task we here at Paste Games are willing to undertake. We’ve whittled this list down to just ten of 2015’s best. (Eleven, really. Two games came down to a tie and we just couldn’t choose between them.) The ten best mobile games of the year—or eleven best, if you’re a stickler about stuff like math—follow, below: 10. Neko Atsume: Kitty Collector When beloved localization studio 8-4 quietly rolled out its English-language translation of Neko Atsume, fans rejoiced—including English-speaking fans who had already been playing the Japanese game for months. A variation on ‘collector culture,’ the simple joy of hoarding cats apparently knows no language barriers. Neko Atsume never bogs...

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Games are a Faith-Based Pursuit: A Conversation with Jenn Frank

By Nora Khan

In Interviews

17 Min Read

Chop Suey by Theresa Duncan and Lynn Gesue

On Friday, Rhizome published a restoration of three CD-ROM games from the 1990s by Theresa Duncan, which you can play here. Duncan’s work has been largely and unjustly forgotten since the 1990s, and this restoration project was inspired, in no small part, by a 2012 article on Duncan’s work by Jenn Frank. To mark the restoration of the games, Jenn Frank spoke at a panel discussion at the New Museum in New York on Thursday (video here). Here, Nora N. Khan interviews her about her life in gaming. —Ed. Acclaimed writer and games critic Jenn Frank is widely known for her excruciatingly intimate memoir essays, in which she often probes her family history and girlhood nostalgia to illuminate why games have been vital for her personally and, by extension, for many others. Her work also explores how players engage with, and imagine themselves, in relation to systems, to the sets of rules established by a game world. Frank uniquely renders games as...

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Gamergate and the year in video gaming 2014, entry 8

By Jenn Frank

In Criticism

7 Min Read

Entry 8: Gamergate is the most expansive real-world ARG in video game history. Editor’s note: Being asked to contribute to a end-of-year letters series at Slate was a dream come true—but trying to evaluate GamerGate and put it in its “historical context” when you’re still very much experiencing it, is assuming a pose of objectivity that must surely be deleterious to your mental health. (There’s a significant feeling of “please stop hitting me” that I notice here, too—an appeal.) This was also my first Christmas with my in-laws. This piece was shared far and wide by GamerGaters, who were delighted by my coining of the phrase “real memetic power.” *** Stephen, Laura, and Chris, Chris made a crucial point earlier: The most popular television shows are rarely what reviewers or critics bother writing about. Most reviewers would rather critique the latest episode of Mad Men because, really, what else can possibly be...

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Jenn Frank’s Top 10 Games of 2014

By Jenn Frank

In Lists

14 Min Read

Frankly, it’s about time we heard what Jenn’s favorite games of 2014 were. In 2005 Jenn started writing 90- and 120-word game reviews for Electronic Gaming Monthly; from 2006 to 2008 she was dreadful as 1UP.com’s CM. Fortunately, she is better remembered for her irregular appearances on Retronauts, a podcast about being an old person. Since 2008 she has written for Kill Screen Magazine (twice), The Guardian (twice), The New York Times (once), and other outlets. She is also the voice of Super Hexagon and, therefore, technically a BAFTA nominee. Giant Bomb actually asked me to do an end-of-year top-ten list once before, and I flaked on it, and I have been sad about that for literal years now. So it is an honor and a privilege to finally right that old wrong with this, a cameo listicle. My top-ten games “experiences” of 2014 in no way reflect the actual ten best games of the year; rather, they reflect the top ten times I pooped...

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I’ve Been Playing ‘Snood’ for 14 Years, and It Won’t Stop Insulting Me

By Jenn Frank

In Retrospectives

11 Min Read

a stock image of a VERY old computer. On the monitor are three people pointing at the viewer. Their heads have been replaced with Snood cartoon faces.

I tented my fingers, bending them into a writerly stretch. Then I poised my hands over my new laptop’s keyboard, a musician ready to compose on her instrument. I froze, waiting for inspiration to strike me down. It wasn’t right, I wasn’t ready. Something was missing. I’d already installed Scrivener, for writing; Notepad++, for blogging and code; LibreOffice, for editing other people. And WordMenu, for coming up with words like “aposiopetic.” Now that I had assembled my workspace, I was too bored to work. Instead, I began inching my cursor toward the Steam icon in the bottom-right corner of the laptop’s screen. I’m stressing myself out, I reasoned. I need to vegetate. But everything in my game library looked too heavy. Even the thought of Osmos exhausted me. Then it hit me. “Snood!” I shouted at my laptop. “I haven’t installed Snood!” At the outset of any Snood session, more than half the...

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The 10 Best Game Boy Games

By Jenn Frank

In Lists, Retrospectives

10 Min Read

The original Game Boy is always called the original Game Boy. In the videogames industry, where everything is in flux and obsolescence is planned, this naming convention—”original Game Boy”—is anomalous. For instance: We often refer to the first PlayStation, retroactively, as the “PS1.” Even original-formula Coca-Cola is called “Coke Classic,” while old-school Mountain Dew is branded as “Throwback.” Sometimes we will call an Xbox an “original”; here, we are only distinguishing from the 360, which is what we really mean by “Xbox.” We call it the “original Game Boy” because we must. That little device was so fruitful, so ambitious—and so studied, so imitated by its own creators—that we have to stop ourselves mid-sentence to clarify exactly which Game Boy we mean. We don’t mean the first one, or even the best one: We mean the original one, the innovative one, the font from which all handheld inspiration would eventually spring. Which is kind of funny. The...

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The Rolodex

By Jenn Frank

In Explainers

8 Min Read

“We should hire based on merit rather than gender.” It’s a great idea in theory, but can it work in practice? Editor’s note: One of my strengths, debatably, is patiently explaining certain concepts to my two core demographics—straight guys with good intentions, and my readers’ own Baby Boomer moms. A lot of these Explainers are mortifying for me to revisit, since they tend to be loaded with outdated or problematic verbiage, an only rudimentary grasp of basic social studies, and my significant ignorance of intersectional issues. Still, I was relatively late to deconstructing my own internalized beliefs and, as my own values became more cohesive, I’d feel a deep obligation to describe them to the men who are my peers. (I was never perceived as particularly “radical” until August 2014, and I probably really wasn’t.) *** Somebody once said: …[W]e should hire based on merit, and not gender. I would like to compose a reply...

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