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[editor's View] On How Memories beyond the Record Resonate with Games

From save data, numbers written to a small memory chip, to the feelings a player carries after a game is over, we survey the wide surface of a lake called memory. Some writers, drawn by a small ripple on that surface, will dive beneath it. We invite you to listen to the many things games can say about the memory that lies beyond the record.

Announcement: The 5th GameGeneration Game Criticism Contest

GameGeneration holds an annual Game Criticism Contest to invigorate the criticism of digital games in Korea and to discover new writers, and we are pleased to announce the 2026 contest as follows. We look forward to the participation of all who are interested.

The Editor-in-Chief Answers: Q&A for the 5th Game Criticism Contest

The editor-in-chief answers the questions prospective applicants most often ask—or have always wanted to.

A History of the Externalization of Game Experience and the Reappropriation of Memory

When digital games first appeared, they were not something to be played at length over several days. The arcade games of the 1970s ran on a business model that required coins to be inserted again and again within a short span, so play was best kept short and intuitive. Home computers and consoles stood on different ground: arcade boards used dedicated hardware for superb graphics and sound, while general-purpose home machines long lagged behind in expressive power.

What Do Datafied Memories Dream Of? Memory in Games as Seen through Cyberpunk

In Cybernetics (1948), Norbert Wiener hypothesized that the human brain and the machine differ only in material while remaining structurally identical — so that an understanding of the brain’s nervous system could be applied to machines as it stood. On that theoretical basis, the “cyberpunk” genre flourished in 1980s America, imagining worlds in which human brains and machines are actively connected.

The Many Ways of Composing Memory: Why Games Take Up Memory — When the Past Was Around

Parting is the place love has passed through. Some wish to erase the memory of that love forever; others endlessly retrace it. Strangely, those memories always remain accompanied by feeling — imprecise, and perhaps at odds with fact. Memory is not data; it is imprecise; and because it comes with feeling, it finally becomes remembrance.

Death as Memory, Death as Record: Return of the Obra Dinn

The pocket watch’s name is a kind of command issued to the player: remember the event of death (memento mortem). And in order to remember, imagine the concept of death. Upon the death that will be “recorded,” recall the “memory” of death. And so, in the end: remember death itself (memento mori), not the scene of dying (mortem).

The Journal in the Game: Memory That Substitutes, Supplements, and Governs

Without hesitation, but without much expectation either, I press J. The journal. The log. The quest log. Games built around quests and unfolding stories all include a journal. In it, the adventure I have forgotten is neatly arranged: whom I met in which village, what I was told, which requests I accepted. And what I am now supposed to do.

The Hand of the Crownbearer: The Memory a Raising Sim Keeps Hidden

Anyone who has played Princess Maker knows the experience: you spend real time raising a daughter with devoted care, only to arrive at an ending nothing like what you had hoped. The game does not tell you what went wrong — which stat fell short, which season’s schedule was the problem, whether one carelessly chosen option decided everything. On all this, the game keeps silent.

From Kim Kaphwan to DokeV: Who Has Been Writing the Codes of Korea in Games?

What must be borne in mind is that games have developed chiefly around the United States and Japan. Korea in games, then — unless Korea made it herself — is mostly Korea as seen through American and Japanese eyes. The other factor is change over time: in the West, before the 2010s, information about faraway Korea was scarce, and the need for accuracy slight.

I Don’t Want the Stress: The People Who Play Cozy Games

A confession: I do not like games about fighting. I live tense enough in reality; I have no wish to be chased and to fight in games as well. Perhaps that is why my hand keeps reaching for games like these — and there are more of them than you might think. Tidying scattered things, unpacking after a move, farming, brewing potions, climbing mountains, delivering parcels. Games of this grain have long formed a current of their own, and in Korea we have usually called them “healing games.”

The Interface That Fell into Cosmic Horror

Aliens is interesting in many respects, but what deserves particular note is how the earnestness of James Cameron, tech nerd, runs through the whole film. Case in point: the first characters of the opening sequence are neither human nor alien nor android, but industrial robot A, which laser-cuts the door of the ship where Ripley sleeps and promptly exits, and industrial robot B, which follows to scan the ship’s interior.

Unpacking Your Memories: How an Organizing Game Handles Memory

Memory comes to us not as a text with every detail preserved but as a collection of partial images. Objects, as elements of those images, summon whatever is associated with them — indiscriminately.

Those Who Will Remain as Memory, and Those Who Will Live by It

When I was small, my grandmother told me the story of a relative who died meeting a bear in a winter forest. The story is rather grisly, so I will not set it out in detail — but I do not think my grandmother lied. He ended his life young; I know neither his face nor his name, and he could not have known of my existence. Yet he is remembered by me, nearly a century on, as the man killed by a bear.

If We Dig Up the Grave, Will There Be a Body? — The Lore of FromSoftware’s Games

Viewed objectively, the object of his devotion lies far from the main narrative that runs through the Dark Souls series — the story woven around Gwyn and his kin — and seems unlikely to form points of contact with anything else. Undeterred, Hawkshaw keeps returning to the first Dark Souls, pressing the blank spaces for every last drop within a world whose end has been explicitly declared.

Stories Untold: An Interface for Approaching Memory

Ultimately, through just this restoration of material sensation, the work forces even the memory its protagonist refused to the end to summon into the present to be called up again within the player’s performance. As Episode 4 (“The Last Session”) reveals, the interface was for the protagonist a psychological shield for evading and suturing his own terrible fault — the story untold. And the player, paradoxically, becomes the potent performer who passes doggedly through that shield and composes the memory — the truth — anew.

[Journal Club] What Old War Video Games Tell Us about the Relation between Nature and Humans: “Retro Violence as a Paradoxical Fight for the Environment”

These days one easily meets discourses linking games to climate and the environment: the more material resources poured into gaming hardware and consoles, the greater the e-waste; the longer gamers play, the higher the carbon emissions. Game play has become nearly inseparable from the problem of environmental harm, and game companies now face a situation where developing a game necessarily means weighing sustainability.

[Journal Club] The Hierarchical Structure behind the Diversity of Age of Wonders 4

The discussion leaves a provocative question about the nature of games. To overstate it: however progressive the values a game’s content tries to hold, if the game’s mechanisms reproduce conservative values, does the game not in effect harbor an alt-right property?