About

What is HMP?

HMP is a blog examining and chronicling the maturity of video games and the video game industry. I’ve played video games since I had an N64 as a kid (I’m one of those ubiquitous twenty-somethings), and I think there’s a growing willingness in the industry to treat games more seriously. In that hope, I am going to treat games as a viable artistic medium and examine them critically.

Why?

I could babble on for a while on this topic, but I have two main reasons:

1. Most of the current criticism that I read is on news sites. Although I fully enjoy and encourage this, I don’t think this should be the primary place to find games criticism. It’s unfair to expect journalists that focus on the news to also be knowledgeable or interested in cultural criticism. I think it’s valuable to have more places that are exclusively dedicated to looking at video games critically and I aim to make this blog one of those places.
2. The motivation for this blog also stems from my own frustration when looking for discussions of things that I’ve noticed in games. There have been times when I’ve been frustrated with an aspect of a game and went online later and been unable to find even a mention. I have spent too long being annoyed by this — if I can’t find it myself, I’ll create it.

Having said all of this, it’s important to remember that I am one person, and so I can only have one person’s opinion. I have no illusion that I’m some sort of expert. My goal is to participate in a healthy dialogue. I am, always, very happy to engage with other people’s opinions and ideas. Different people’s interpretations of the same events is one of my favorite things about gaming.

What topics?

There are many articles and discussions out there about gender. I’m glad these articles exist, and I hope to continue that discussion on this blog. Along with gender, I want to discuss issues of race, classism, sexuality, ageism, body diversity… honestly, anything that is relevant. I have not personally come across much formal discussion of these topics, and I think they’re especially important now as the gaming industry has the technology possible to create complicated narratives and communicative gameplay.

I will be doing my best to focus on positives rather than negatives. This is partially for my own benefit. There’s a lot of negative in games, and it can be depressing to dwell on it too much. I also think there’s plenty of positive, especially recently, and it’s easier to imagine future directions for the games industry by pointing to examples of what to do alongside talking about what not to do.

What games? 

For now, most of what I have planned has to do with story-heavy games. These are the games that I tend to play and enjoy the most, so I have a lot to say about them.

However, I don’t want to limit myself to a certain type of game and would love any game recommendations, which should be sent to howmanyprincesses@gmail.com.

What’s up with the name?

It’s inspired by the iconic line “But our princess is in another castle!” from Super Mario Bros. The saving of a useless prize of a woman is some ooooold fashioned game design and the sort that I would like to see go out the window (not specifically targeting Mario here — I’m sort of a Nintendo fangirl). The basic idea behind the name is “How many princesses are left in this castle?” How long till the majority of games can move past cliched and damaging tropes and move on to something more fulfilling and artistically interesting?