Thoughts on Video Games Curation
	2026 May 28
	Current Mood:	stressed out about tomorrow and my current physical state
	Now Playing:	KIND 013 by Khotin

Honestly, I don't remember what made me want to start writing this blog post. I've been seeing the echoes of recent video games discourses lately on bsky, and then I started seeing video game blogs also engaging in some of those discourses, which led me to start ruminating on the current role of the websites that write about video games as the supporting and engaging part of the video games circles ( in this case I'm using "circles" as an umbrella term for including the creations, the creators, the consumers, and the relations between all of them).

Here I started writing something long, including some quotes from bigger websites, but I deleted all that and just want to get to the point: there's not enough curation for video games (honestly, at this point, any kinds of video games, not only smaller indie ones), especially in video game blogs, especially in those blogs that have bigger audiences and are calling themselves something distinctively more important and more "valuable" than just a "blog".

Recently, partly in response to corporate and walled off video game showcase events, there's been more and more self-organized video game showcases on youtube. Some of the examples:

• Unearthed Treasure Room
• Computer Worlds
• shovel

These showcases may use different forms of curation: from submitting a game for the showcase via an online form and then being chosen by the organizers to be featured in a video, to having event guests present a video game they think deserves a spotlight. And these showcases, in my opinion, are doing an amazing job at introducing new games to people who are willing to watch them. But all these events take a lot of time and effort to organize and produce, so they can't be the foundation of video games curation on the Internet. There needs to be something more rapid and frequent to produce and to check out — like text and images (and links).

And here, I think, there's still more to do currently to cover as many video games of all kinds as possible for curious players. Just like DJs are having fun with digging for new and lesser known music to then present it to their listeners on the radio or at the club, there could be more of this done with video games, too. I, personally, love reading blog posts with someone's thoughts on various games they are currently playing — this often makes me look for more information about those games — simple as that.

I got deep into indie games in the late 2000s mostly thanks to the curation on the websites like Gamin.ru, the TIGSource blog, Indie Games The Weblog, etc.

And later, our lowpolis games were getting new players mostly because of the hobbyist game curators and blogs like Indie Games Plus, Alpha Beta Gamer, Warp Door, Weird Fucking Games, game-curator, L’Oujevipo, Priceless Play at Rock Paper Shotgun. The work of those bloggers was essential for the creators of small free video games on itch.io back in the second half of 2010s, and now it should be even more essential with the amounts of slop and algorithms overtaking the web. Some of those blogs, unfortunately, are not around anymore, but you should definitely at least follow Warp Door and Weird Fucking Games, as they are still doing an amazing job of finding interesting games on itch. Indie Games Plus have switched mostly to covering games on Steam, but the sheer volume of indie games Jupiter Hadley and Joel Couture got to write about over these past years should make every new big "finally independent" video games website team question their methods and goals.

Nowadays I know even more websites that do interesting video game curation work:

• Virtual Moose — while using it as a personal blog, Michael writes a lot about the games they played recently, and earlier they did the Indie Game Roundup column where they tried to include as many recent interesting game releases as they could.
• Indie Tsushin — a website dedicated to highlighting indie games and developers from Japan, including a lot of interviews!
• Kimimi The Game-Eating She-Monster — a legendary blog mostly reviewing older Japanese console releases.
• Bad Game Hall of Fame — a blog specializing at deep dives into critically slammed video games and their history.
• Indiepocalypse — a powerhouse monthly zine of experimental video games from itch.io.
• KRITIQAL Care Podcast — a podcast series of interviews with indie game developers. Aside from Indiepocalypse Radio, I'm not sure if any other project like this even exists on the Internet nowadays?
• Exhibit:Play — fun collections of indie games (with a good amount of them being from itch.io!) united together by hyper-specific themes.
• Thinky Games — a really big web project dedicated to curating puzzle video games with a news section, its own "direct", and even daily puzzles.

Although I've mentioned quite a few websites above, I still feel like there are big blank spots that folks who like to write about video games (or do it for living) could highlight. For example, almost nobody covers the big and exciting "scene" events like the recent Cookie Cutter RM2k3 Jam or smilejam. Hell, even DOMINO CLUB, LITHOBREAKERS, and vextro game drops are not receiving enough attention. And TOXIC YURI VN JAM was lucky to get featured in Mothership, a big "finally independent" blog — only for the article to get blocked behind a subscription-wall? What was the reasoning behind it? Do we want to help the cool and talented folks to get noticed by new players or not?

As a contrast example to Mothership or Aftermath, one could at least be doing what jank does: a once-a-week column simply called "What you could play this weekend", and also another equally important column "The Lie-In" that is just reblogging recent interesting writing about video games (reblogging is important for the health of the Internet, and the indieweb specifically). Game developers are going to send you press releases of their games anyway, so why not at least mention what has come out recently? Even the smallest part of it that is interesting only to you is a big win for the curious readers and the game developers you are going to feature.

While the initial idea of this post was to address "professional" video game blogs with bigger general audiences, I think simply the increase in circulation of hyperlinks to video games one finds interesting (outside of the mainstream) and wants to share with others in blogs, forums, or, at least, on social media, or even in DMs, would help greatly both players and creators. I understand that it sounds simple, obtuse even, but that's my whole point: I feel like people online nowadays are not bombarded enough with obscure shit other people like to really get into something like that!

Please don't post the link to my silly ramblings anywhere on social media websites. Feel free to reblog or mention the post in your blog if, for any reason, you'd like to!