TOPIC OF THE WEEK: #CRITIQUE
an alternative a “cyborgian” approach to game criticism that accounts for the whole socio-technical, embodied assemblage of digital gameplay rather than cherry-picking one or two essentialized aspects to stand in for the whole.
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What I have called “expansive gameplay,” the imposition of optional rules and limitations to enhance or re-frame one’s experience of a game, might also be an example of a critical “reading” strategy (ha ha) that enables the kind of “bottom-up, descriptive analysis” Keogh is after - some examples might include Ben Abraham’s experiments with “permadeath” in Far Cry 2 and Mattie Brice’s "Pokemon Unchained," which turns Pokemon into a disturbing slavery allegory. As philosopher Manuel de Landa argues, the introduction of new capacities into an assemblage at any scale (such as using a new tool or learning a new skill) can precipitate a break in the habitual, destabilizing and reconfiguring the entangled elements that constitute the assemblage. If the goal of game criticism is, as Keogh contends, to describe and critique “the player’s actual [embodied] engagement with formal and material properties,” I’m curious to see what other critical tools, skills, and strategies might be mobilized to this end.
http://reading-strategy.tumblr.com/post/74181657281/reading-strategies-for-game-criticism
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Despite being the focus of academic studies for close to two decades and a significant part of popular culture for much longer, the humanities generally and cultural studies in particular lacks a coherent vocabulary to perform strong, analytical criticism of individual videogame works. The solution is not another prescriptive, top-down model that attempts to understand all videogame play the same way, but a descriptive, bottom-up conceptual toolkit that understands particular videogames in the moment of play when videogame and player come together. This article highlights the values inherited by game studies that have resisted the creation of such a toolkit and suggests one path forward grounded in the phenomenological pleasures of videogame play across worlds and bodies. After exploring game studies’ historical hostility to critical and textual readings, it conceptualises the ‘videogame text’—the critic’s object of study—as the coming together of the player and the videogame in a cybernetic circuit of embodied pleasures. This circuit flows across both the actual and virtual worlds of play in a convergence of form and content. Ultimately, this article lays a groundwork for academic roads into videogame criticism that is primarily concerned with understanding videogames as videogames to complement those ad-hoc methods already being developed by a nascent scene of online critics and bloggers.
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The first of these sections observes how the concept of ‘immersion’ obscures critical analysis of videogames as cultural forms that actually exist, as it leads to the same separation of form and content that Susan Sontag (1964) so completely dismantled half a century ago.
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the dichotomy of action and representation is perhaps the most contested in the formalist wars to assert what a videogame is. Eskelinen (2001), along with many of the ludologists, privileges videogames’ “remediation of [nondigital] games” over what he sees as the insignificant window dressing of audiovisual representation.
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A videogame’s mechanics and audiovisuals are symbiotic, a singular and irreducible component of videogame play. Claims, such as Newman’s and Aarseth’s above, that Lara Croft’s depiction in Tomb Raider as a human female matters less than what her body allows the player to do ignores the very fact that the player only considers ‘walk’, or ‘run’, or ‘jump’ as viable options because Lara Croft is represented as a human being capable of such actions.
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Immersion, effectively, splits the game’s content from the game’s form, reintroducing the Cartesian split that “takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there” (1964, p.13) that critic Susan Sontag so convincingly dismantled half a century ago in her essays “Against Interpretation” (1964) and “On Style” (1965). Immersion, deployed uncritically, privileges a desire for immediate experience of the ‘content’ of the videogame while ignoring the fact that this content “is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation” (Sontag, 1965, p. 25). As a theatre critic accounts for the performances of actors or an art critic accounts for the brushstrokes that contribute to a portrait, the videogame critic cannot hope to understand the virtual world of the videogame text without accounting for the player’s active involvement with formal, material elements and construction of an imagined fourth-wall
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A postphenomenological approach to videogame play accounts for the overlapping worlds active during videogame play. It allows the critic to account for what Psycho Mantis makes explicit in Metal Gear Solid when he collapses Solid Snake and I into a single addressee of his speech, and what Mother 2 makes implicit inside the two-walled house: that the ‘content’ of videogames—their virtual worlds and the player’s presence inside of them—is a product of the player’s actual engagement with formal and material properties.
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While the purity complex of game studies with its values of ‘action’ and ‘autonomy’ can be traced through hacker identities and notions of a liberal human subject, the hybridity of the videogame text demands a cyborg identity that understands the player as posthuman, as a subject distributed and emergent (Hayles, 1999, p. 290). To recognise the fluidity of bodies and identities is to understand that virtual worlds, like human capability, are not imperiled by the splice, but depends on it (Hayles, 1999, p.290). When Psycho Mantis uses the second-person address to say “you haven’t saved the game often” he is not talking to either me the player or Solid Snake the character, he is talking to the cyborgian, gestalt identity that is the two of us combined across bodies and worlds (5).
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With the videogame text located in the circuit, the challenge for the videogame critic is to focus on the flow back and forth across the actual and virtual worlds—form and content flattened into the videogame text as played as a flattening of form and content. By starting with the experience of play across worlds and bodies in particular videogames, an academic videogame criticism can begin to understand what a videogame is without being distracted by what it should be.
http://gamescriticism.org/articles/keogh-1-1
§
rather than trying to portray a realistic world, metafictional texts try to portray the process of creating that world by “plac[ing] fictionality, structure, or language at their content’s core” (29). This form of mimesis leads to “the unmasking of dead conventions by a mirroring of them” (10). The goal is to change the medium by showing the ways in which it is relying on the same old, tired methods, meaning that metafiction can be an agent for artistic innovation and renewal.
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As with any good piece of metafiction, however, The Stanley Parable isn’t just interested in commenting on the way games are made, but also interrogates the role of the player in the game world.
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As Campster says in his analysis of The Stanley Parable, “I tend to approach it [analyzing games] from two general directions – a narrative-focused reading that looks at the plot structure, characters, dramatic arcs, that sort of thing, and a play-focused reading that looks at mechanical systems and how they interact with one another. Then I try to reconcile the two into a cohesive whole.” This is a trend that permeates the way we analyse games as a community. Beyond the influence this paradigm has on game criticism, it also influences how games are received. If the elements of narrative and gameplay fail to intersect to a satisfactory extent, the game opens itself up to critiques of “ludonarrative dissonance,” while if the developers succeed in interweaving the two, we can praise the “ludonarrative harmony” of their game. It’s the Venn diagram of game criticism, looking for as much overlap between the two circles as possible, and serves in the minds of many as a litmus test for game quality.
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to consider choice as only a part of the narrative is to understate the importance of its function: it is one of the principle ways “the player is able to interact with the game-world.” In The Stanley Parable, it is one of the only ways we interact with the game. By foregrounding the functioning of choice so clearly, Galactic Cafe complicates a simple or dichotomous understanding of choice, forcing us to examine the game in a more holistic manner.
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Repetition isn’t something we generally conceive of as a distinct gameplay mechanic or as an aspect of the narrative.
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But in The Stanley Parable, repetition, including repetition due to the death of the protagonist, isn’t a narrative disruption, but is rather a key element of the way the game functions.
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Once again, a dichotomous reading of the way repetition functions in the game is impossible: it can’t be strictly confined to being part of gameplay or narrative exclusively.
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If we truly want to understand how games affect the player, we’ll have to move a bit past the concept of “ludonarrative harmony,” and take a more holistic approach to game analysis. And maybe if we do so, we can at last exorcise the ghost of the old narratology/ludology debate. I think that the field of game studies would be better for it.
http://theanimistblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/that-wasnt-supposed-to-be-a-choice-metafiction-and-the-stanley-parable/
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How I analyze a game
The first thing I do is set aside my experience. It is only mildly useful, a single data point, when everyone’s experience is subjective.
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Mechanics, inputs and processes, rules and tokens and actions. I strip away the surface until Gone Home is a game about flipping over cards on a desk to see what is underneath them. Papers, Please is a Spot-The-Difference game. The Stanley Parable is a choose-your-own-adventure where some of the options are written in invisible ink.
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All of these things are elements on my tuning checklist for my own work. I look for them so I can look at the craft at this mechanical level.
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And now comes the crux of it.
I know the intent of the systems.
I know what the systems actually teach.
I know the intent of the experience.
I know what the experience actually says.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/06/how-i-analyze-a-game/
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How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Mods
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIYx0zov8wM
§DESIGN
The violator/violated cycle of The Castle Doctrine self-perpetuates because, it seems, it’s enjoyable to violate. In reality, the relationship of a burglar and the mansion owner is a ton more complex than swapping a binary.
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Rohrer’s distillation creates a gulf between the issue in reality and the issue as TCD discusses it. For the most part, people don’t suddenly materialise into criminals one day. There are causes that drive them there, making their roles in society much more tragic than Rohrer’s moustachioed caricature. As game designer, he adopts the teleology of the world within TCD, and with it responsibility for the system’s narrative dynamics falls upon his head. So, whereas in reality these criminals are created by the horrors of the world, in TCD they are selfish, greedy opportunists with nothing better to do.
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But it’s fixable. Some tweaks and the introduction of a rudimentary economy would suffice to ground the message in relevance.
http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/20011/article/fixing-the-castle-doctrine-s-self-defense-parable/
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In this sense, the “authentic” titles are not games that simulate WWI at all – in their mechanics, their play-style, even their attention to period detail, they render a war that is both recognisable and yet uncomfortably distant from the object that it seeks to reproduce. The team-based capture the flag and death match modes have a fluidity and activity that the “real” war rarely, if ever, had.
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Moreover still, because the team death match style is so closely associated with other, more cinematic titles and contexts, the effort that has gone into the landscapes seems a let down, less important. Almost as if you’re playing against a backdrop, rather than in a landscape
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To be representational, however inadequately, there is a need for games to reach beyond conventional and rule-bound mechanics and toward the jarringly unfamiliar, toward the red poppy “a little white with the dust”, toward Paul Nash’s rugged, imbalanced collage of shade and shape and fragment. Toward something just a little more like Super Trench Attack, and a lot less like Counter-Strike.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/scarce-heard-amid-the-guns-below/
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A script can give me the most dramatic, apocalyptic, life-and-death scenario in the world to try to make me care; but knowing that I can help someone in the smallest way, and then giving up the chance, is much, much more painful.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/16/5311820/the-power-of-weakness-you-cant-save-everyone-nor-should-you
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Determinism comforts, and nondeterminism unsettles. But there’s something frustrating and unsatisfying about living in a universe that’s entirely mapped. When a universe can’t be mapped at all, it frustrates in a different way. This tension lies at the center of much videogame story design.
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Esther’s nondeterminism creates more possibilities, without needing a designer to define them in detail. At the same time, the information gaps it leaves are, on average, going to be filled with things of average quality. Stanley’s deterministic branching lets the player feel in control, but also makes that control feel pointless. Taken together, these sum up a lot of the current tradeoffs in interactive storytelling.
http://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2013/03/17/esther-and-stanley-and-fate/
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This is the first section of a four-part essay on the history of videogame design.
http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/GDH_1.html
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Extra Credits: The Magic Circle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ-EY9gTsgU
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Difficulty is the point, not the problem. The play's the thing.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/17/difficulty-in-video-games
§COMMUNITY
What eSports could learn from an amazing four-person Super Metroid speedrun
http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/15/5311460/esports-super-metroid-speedrun
http://kotaku.com/four-person-super-metroid-speedrun-may-consume-next-hou-1502246487
§HISTORY
Does Legend of Zelda Exploit Nostalgia? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAP6Anq2j9Q
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Down, down-forward, forward + punch: the controller input was designed by Nishiyama to mimic the onscreen animation of the move, as if grounding oneself with the downward stick motion, then lifting the hands upwards and towards your opponent. It is, alongside Mario’s ground pound and Sonic’s revving spin, one of the earliest and most enduring input sequences, one never forgotten once learned. The Hadoken may be science fiction, but in this way it has become part of us, something that can be summoned from the hands with concentration – just so long as they are resting on an arcade stick.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/hadoken-why-this-mashup-of-sci-fi-and-martial-arts-is-far-more-than-a-signature-move/
§MAGAZINES
The Arcade Review
http://arcadereview.net/main/
§OTHER
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/uxo4qx/the-final-bosman-nintendo--what-are-you-doing--man-
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Saturday, February 1, 2014
1/2 Crit Links
In 2012 I realized videogames were holding me back, artistically speaking. Or rather: my tunnel vision focus on videogames as "my" medium was holding me back.
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Every medium is imbued with the exact same amount of possibility: it’s like the density of the Real Line. The density of the Real Line between 0 and 1 is infinite, as is the density between 0.2 and 0.4, which is the same as between 0 and 100, etc.
You can always drill down, and there will always be more to discover about a medium.
http://tinysubversions.com/fuckvideogames/#slide1
§DESIGN
Chess has problems.
Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level. Those people who really love chess, that devoted few who have given their lives to it and for whom chess really should be a great game? They're not getting a great game - and they haven't been getting one for a while.
Chess, it turns out, has been in a bit of a rut for some time.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-03-chess-2-the-sequel-how-a-street-fightin-man-fixed-the-worlds-most-famous-game
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Extra Credits: Affordances
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCSXEKHL6fc
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DOET [Design of Everyday Things] judges the user’s needs most important, and her perspective most valuable. It is about the apotheosis of the user; it makes her into God, and with holy might it strikes the fear of Her into objects and those who make them.
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DOET, alongside all the important research around it, culminated in something called User Centered Design, a philosophy in which “user error” does not exist and programmers are sad.
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This school teaches that if it’s not fun (or at the very least quick and painless) to be taught about some feature, we shouldn’t include it; that clarity is better than complexity; that elegance is better than messiness; that one button is better than two. It teaches that the purpose of a game is to explain itself to you, and that somewhere in the act of explaining lies that game’s intrinsic value. We have thereby converted the scariest, most contentious question of all (what should this thing be?) from an artistic decision into a design decision.
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Our belief in clarity and elegance, though it has yielded spectacular results, is not the very best way to make videogames; it may not even be a particularly good way. We suffer from the bar we’ve set for ourselves and the burdens we place upon designers. We are wrongly convinced, even in the critical community, that works like Problem Attic are unworthy of attention solely because they prioritize different features and challenge players in a way we deem to be unfashionable.
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I plan on thinking much harder about how I evaluate potential game features. “Because then the user doesn’t have to think” or “but how do we teach that?” should not be trump cards in every single argument about whether to include stuff. It’s easy to turn everything into a neat little design decision, but making a few more artistic ones would be better in the long term for users and for my sanity
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrendanVance/20140106/208092/The_Cult_of_the_Peacock.php?print=1
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At its worst a backstory driven piece can seem soulless and lonely, as the player wanders desolate locations from which all the other humans have already fled.
But there’s also an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature.
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The problem I have with it in Gone Home is that this interaction style enforces the distance and lack of agency that is backstory’s chief defect, and it does so without offering much of value in exchange. The player’s task is purely ergodic, methodically working through every explorable space, even though this is a story about understanding and insight, not about effort and dedication.
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Hypothetical reading is most interesting if the reader is likely at first to form incorrect hypotheses.
Gone Home misguides the player initially, but it does so in a way that is completely orthogonal to the actual substance of its story.
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Nor does Gone Home let the reader take an active role in guessing and testing the guesses. One may form hypotheses about the relationships between the people in the house, why they are absent now, and where they have gone. But there is nothing the player can do that can either ask additional questions about these issues or hazard a guess at the answer. The exploration can’t be directed by the player in such a way that it elicits more information of the kind the player is most interested in; it can only be performed systematically and with a greater or lesser degree of thoroughness. Where in the house would you go to express, or investigate, the suspicion that the mother is having an affair?
The house, I felt, was a distraction, the 3D exploration a red herring.
http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/reading-and-hypothesis/
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Gone Home tells a great romance story, but it tells a particularly brilliant video game romance story because it finds a way around all these problems; you’re not part of the romance. By placing the player outside that relationship, Gone Home can develop a romance that feels realistically nuanced.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/177701-gone-home-is-the-best-romance-video-games-can-offer/
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Half the men who got the number of the girl on the scary bridge tried to call her up. Only about 12 percent of the ones on the blase bridge in the control group made use of those same digits. Also, remember those stories the subjects were asked to make up about the ambiguous picture? Those who did so while swaying slightly back and forth over the Capilano River were much more likely to come up with narratives involving sex.
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I think this explains why certain games get overrated.
Or at least certain aspects of games. Take the first season of The Walking Dead for example.
http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2013/12/fake-feels-and-free-passes/
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The Importance of Quiet Time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCxR__N0_is
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Fast-paced choices and moral quandaries are the most prominent feature of The Walking Dead, but they seem to have no real consequences. Why did this game receive approximately all of the awards in 2012 if its main selling point is used so inconsequentially? I suggest that the most important aspect about this game is not the many difficult choices it offers the player – it’s the illusion of choice the game constructs
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The decisions you make in The Walking Dead don’t change what happens, they change how it happens.
Your actions determine what kind of person Lee is, how he reacts to certain situations, and how the other characters see him. You could almost say The Walking Dead is an RPG: Is Lee a failed family-man who sees Clementine as his second chance? Is he short-tempered and violent? Or does he keep a clear head and talks his way out of hairy situations? Does he regret what he did? Is he a cynic or a wide-eyed idealist? Will the other characters be his friends, or just his companions? Is there even any coherence between what he does and what he says? Maybe he doesn’t talk at all, which is really stupid but really funny. It doesn’t change the overarching story, but all of this and much more is up to you.
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The Walking Dead is not about choices, it’s about decisions. It’s about making the right decision in a world where everything goes wrong. It’s about doing what you think is right, even when faced with absolute despair, even though all hope seems lost, and even though this bleak world doesn’t give a single fuck about your decision. But you have to do it. For Clementine.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/clementine-will-remember-all-of-that/
§QUEER
Diary of a Western Videogame Protagonist:
Day 1 – I got a haircut today. It’s a lot shorter now but not working class short, not army short. Back at home, Sarah said that she liked it, that she could see herself playfully gripping tufts of my hair during sex. I said, “Why don’t we test that hypothesis?” and she obliged. God, I love her so much. If anything were to happen to her, I swear…
Day 2 - Sarah’s dead. And just one day after our scene of mildly erotic domestic bliss, too. To mark my loss, I refused to shave today. Shaving would somehow cheapen her passing. And besides, revenge is a dish best served scruffy.
http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=11663
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One could read in Shadow a sexual politics in which the innate goodness of human-born-humans is counterpointed with the monstering of a man-made, non-human person. Without the involvement of sexual reproduction in their creation, gender becomes irrelevant precisely because the creature is unnatural. That this character became a villain is unfortunate, because it supports a conservative idea that morality relies on a heteronormative reproductive context. I prefer to see Homunculus as a queer anti-hero: a person who has very limited survival strategies, and opts to fight for their own existence at the expense of other people. Queer anti-heroes are unable to solve their problems using brute force or economic privilege, and must manipulate what advantages they do have with skill in order to get what they want. The hero must, in response, do the same.
Histories of gender & sexual diversity in games, Issue three June 2013, Gender in the shadows, Zoya Street
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So, why do all but one of the females need to be warriors? The problem for me is, in the context of this whimsical game, I can’t really identify with a warrior-type character. The female characters in Rayman Legends simply aren’t as fun for me because they aren’t as whimsical and fun as their male counterparts are allowed to be. Not that there is anything wrong with playing a warrior in certain games or contexts (or, I guess, with playing a lovesick fool), but it just doesn’t work for me in this particular game. I would rather play a character like Rayman who is described as “always raring for a fresh adventure to save the world;” or Sir Gilbrax, “a very famous knight.” Out of the thirteen playable male characters only one, Raynesis, is described in a threatening manner similar to the warrior princesses: “A desperate case in need of serious anger management.” But, one threatening male character still leaves me twelve whimsical male characters to choose from.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4447
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In the first part of this study of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, I questioned whether the Bechdel Test was the best benchmark for judging whether or not a piece of media had something to offer in terms of good female characterization. Is the Bechdel Test enough, or does even this bare minimum set the bar too low?
In this second part, I’ll be looking at some of the games’ other character, particularly Clementine, in an effort to delve deeper into the presentation of women in a game praised for its characterization and narrative strength.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4492
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Long story short, I can see genre and contextual reasons that lead designers in some areas (like fighting games) to make broad-brush design choices that engage ethnic, gender, and sexual stereotypes. http://www.chaoticblue.com/blog/2014/01/shes-got-the-look/
§VIDEOS
Final Bosman
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/ur6ce9/the-final-bosman-nobody-finishes-video-games
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Do You Think eSports Should Allow A.I. Teammates? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hkMhng4q74
§
Nintendoomed? A look at Nintendo's financials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_ho5Y-Yw8g
§
Final Bosman
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/7j4yfw/the-final-bosman-xbox-friends-with-benefits
§
Composing The Banner Saga
http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ntly7e/backtrack-composing-the-banner-saga
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Why Comcast's 300GB Data Cap is Bad for Gaming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD8eqTIzjZM
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Are Virtual Worlds Real or Fake? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiEu5wMoEDs
§REVIEWS
Errant Signal - The Novelist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VThsdoxwgc
§
Tim Schafer didn’t really give us what we said we wanted, which was an old school point-and-click adventure game. He gave us something better, a modern LucasArts game. He looked past our words to our intent and gave us a game that represents what we really wanted, not just what we thought we wanted.
www.popmatters.com/post/178507-the-beautiful-simplicity-of-broken-age/
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Ice Pick Lodge seems to be reaching back into childhood to seek a resolution to very adult problems, the problems of memories that we don’t want to confront or that we think that we can simply hide out long enough from.
At some point, the game seems to argue, we need to be brave like children and make a run for it—even if that run might allow us to to be seen, to be found out for what we truly are.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/178042-knock-knock-the-terrors-of-self-exposure/
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Knock Knock is primarily an intellectual experience not an emotional one, which already makes it a poor horror game, but then it also fails to express anything intellectual because its central means of communication, the hide and seek puzzle mechanics, are awful.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/178712-puzzles-arent-scary-in-knock-knock/
§COMMUNITY
Thoughts on Games Writing and Community Involvement
http://big-tall-words.com/2014/01/08/thoughts-on-games-writing/
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Among the many elephants in the games criticism room, our relationship to academia is one that threatens to stomp on others the most often. It’s presence comes out in numerous ways, but most usually on methods of analyzing games and the craft of writing criticism. This month there seems to be a resurgence of it, so I want to spill some thoughts on how it effects me and some things I’d like to see develop.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-diy-of-games-criticism/
§
In the coming year, I want to see discussion and experiments on constructive, passionate uses of anger for social justice and change. I want people to express themselves honestly and without the degradation of others. We have our journals, our personal friends who understand us to be petty with. This doesn’t need to be an artificially happy place, but I’d like it to be somewhere no one is afraid to speak their mind and learn. I hope people who disagree with me contact me and let me know what they think, because I am ready for a change for the better, whatever it is we decide, as a community.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/on-anger/
§
What I want to dig into, and outline to respect, is the experience that Kim Delicious describes here in response to anti-toxicity articles. It’s a conflict between legit anger, anger that is cathartic and deserved, and understanding that it will wall off communication and education to another person. It shows where being an activist and simply existing as a minority identity blur.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/on-civility/
§MAGAZINES
The Arcade Review: Issue 1
http://arcadereview.net/main/?p=281
§PROFILE
I first encountered the unmistakable style of Stephen Murphy, aka thecatamites, back in 2009 with the hand-drawn adventure game Paul Moose in Space. Since then you may well have stumbled across any one of the otherworldly experience that he has provided on tap, like Space Funeral, Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog, and The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan.
http://indiegames.com/2014/01/just_who_is_thecatamites_anywa.html
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Every medium is imbued with the exact same amount of possibility: it’s like the density of the Real Line. The density of the Real Line between 0 and 1 is infinite, as is the density between 0.2 and 0.4, which is the same as between 0 and 100, etc.
You can always drill down, and there will always be more to discover about a medium.
http://tinysubversions.com/fuckvideogames/#slide1
§DESIGN
Chess has problems.
Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level. Those people who really love chess, that devoted few who have given their lives to it and for whom chess really should be a great game? They're not getting a great game - and they haven't been getting one for a while.
Chess, it turns out, has been in a bit of a rut for some time.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-03-chess-2-the-sequel-how-a-street-fightin-man-fixed-the-worlds-most-famous-game
§
Extra Credits: Affordances
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCSXEKHL6fc
§
DOET [Design of Everyday Things] judges the user’s needs most important, and her perspective most valuable. It is about the apotheosis of the user; it makes her into God, and with holy might it strikes the fear of Her into objects and those who make them.
/.../
DOET, alongside all the important research around it, culminated in something called User Centered Design, a philosophy in which “user error” does not exist and programmers are sad.
/.../
This school teaches that if it’s not fun (or at the very least quick and painless) to be taught about some feature, we shouldn’t include it; that clarity is better than complexity; that elegance is better than messiness; that one button is better than two. It teaches that the purpose of a game is to explain itself to you, and that somewhere in the act of explaining lies that game’s intrinsic value. We have thereby converted the scariest, most contentious question of all (what should this thing be?) from an artistic decision into a design decision.
/.../
Our belief in clarity and elegance, though it has yielded spectacular results, is not the very best way to make videogames; it may not even be a particularly good way. We suffer from the bar we’ve set for ourselves and the burdens we place upon designers. We are wrongly convinced, even in the critical community, that works like Problem Attic are unworthy of attention solely because they prioritize different features and challenge players in a way we deem to be unfashionable.
/.../
I plan on thinking much harder about how I evaluate potential game features. “Because then the user doesn’t have to think” or “but how do we teach that?” should not be trump cards in every single argument about whether to include stuff. It’s easy to turn everything into a neat little design decision, but making a few more artistic ones would be better in the long term for users and for my sanity
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrendanVance/20140106/208092/The_Cult_of_the_Peacock.php?print=1
§
At its worst a backstory driven piece can seem soulless and lonely, as the player wanders desolate locations from which all the other humans have already fled.
But there’s also an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature.
/.../
The problem I have with it in Gone Home is that this interaction style enforces the distance and lack of agency that is backstory’s chief defect, and it does so without offering much of value in exchange. The player’s task is purely ergodic, methodically working through every explorable space, even though this is a story about understanding and insight, not about effort and dedication.
/.../
Hypothetical reading is most interesting if the reader is likely at first to form incorrect hypotheses.
Gone Home misguides the player initially, but it does so in a way that is completely orthogonal to the actual substance of its story.
/.../
Nor does Gone Home let the reader take an active role in guessing and testing the guesses. One may form hypotheses about the relationships between the people in the house, why they are absent now, and where they have gone. But there is nothing the player can do that can either ask additional questions about these issues or hazard a guess at the answer. The exploration can’t be directed by the player in such a way that it elicits more information of the kind the player is most interested in; it can only be performed systematically and with a greater or lesser degree of thoroughness. Where in the house would you go to express, or investigate, the suspicion that the mother is having an affair?
The house, I felt, was a distraction, the 3D exploration a red herring.
http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/reading-and-hypothesis/
§
Gone Home tells a great romance story, but it tells a particularly brilliant video game romance story because it finds a way around all these problems; you’re not part of the romance. By placing the player outside that relationship, Gone Home can develop a romance that feels realistically nuanced.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/177701-gone-home-is-the-best-romance-video-games-can-offer/
§
Half the men who got the number of the girl on the scary bridge tried to call her up. Only about 12 percent of the ones on the blase bridge in the control group made use of those same digits. Also, remember those stories the subjects were asked to make up about the ambiguous picture? Those who did so while swaying slightly back and forth over the Capilano River were much more likely to come up with narratives involving sex.
/.../
I think this explains why certain games get overrated.
Or at least certain aspects of games. Take the first season of The Walking Dead for example.
http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2013/12/fake-feels-and-free-passes/
§
The Importance of Quiet Time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCxR__N0_is
§
Fast-paced choices and moral quandaries are the most prominent feature of The Walking Dead, but they seem to have no real consequences. Why did this game receive approximately all of the awards in 2012 if its main selling point is used so inconsequentially? I suggest that the most important aspect about this game is not the many difficult choices it offers the player – it’s the illusion of choice the game constructs
/.../
The decisions you make in The Walking Dead don’t change what happens, they change how it happens.
Your actions determine what kind of person Lee is, how he reacts to certain situations, and how the other characters see him. You could almost say The Walking Dead is an RPG: Is Lee a failed family-man who sees Clementine as his second chance? Is he short-tempered and violent? Or does he keep a clear head and talks his way out of hairy situations? Does he regret what he did? Is he a cynic or a wide-eyed idealist? Will the other characters be his friends, or just his companions? Is there even any coherence between what he does and what he says? Maybe he doesn’t talk at all, which is really stupid but really funny. It doesn’t change the overarching story, but all of this and much more is up to you.
/.../
The Walking Dead is not about choices, it’s about decisions. It’s about making the right decision in a world where everything goes wrong. It’s about doing what you think is right, even when faced with absolute despair, even though all hope seems lost, and even though this bleak world doesn’t give a single fuck about your decision. But you have to do it. For Clementine.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/clementine-will-remember-all-of-that/
§QUEER
Diary of a Western Videogame Protagonist:
Day 1 – I got a haircut today. It’s a lot shorter now but not working class short, not army short. Back at home, Sarah said that she liked it, that she could see herself playfully gripping tufts of my hair during sex. I said, “Why don’t we test that hypothesis?” and she obliged. God, I love her so much. If anything were to happen to her, I swear…
Day 2 - Sarah’s dead. And just one day after our scene of mildly erotic domestic bliss, too. To mark my loss, I refused to shave today. Shaving would somehow cheapen her passing. And besides, revenge is a dish best served scruffy.
http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=11663
§
One could read in Shadow a sexual politics in which the innate goodness of human-born-humans is counterpointed with the monstering of a man-made, non-human person. Without the involvement of sexual reproduction in their creation, gender becomes irrelevant precisely because the creature is unnatural. That this character became a villain is unfortunate, because it supports a conservative idea that morality relies on a heteronormative reproductive context. I prefer to see Homunculus as a queer anti-hero: a person who has very limited survival strategies, and opts to fight for their own existence at the expense of other people. Queer anti-heroes are unable to solve their problems using brute force or economic privilege, and must manipulate what advantages they do have with skill in order to get what they want. The hero must, in response, do the same.
Histories of gender & sexual diversity in games, Issue three June 2013, Gender in the shadows, Zoya Street
§
So, why do all but one of the females need to be warriors? The problem for me is, in the context of this whimsical game, I can’t really identify with a warrior-type character. The female characters in Rayman Legends simply aren’t as fun for me because they aren’t as whimsical and fun as their male counterparts are allowed to be. Not that there is anything wrong with playing a warrior in certain games or contexts (or, I guess, with playing a lovesick fool), but it just doesn’t work for me in this particular game. I would rather play a character like Rayman who is described as “always raring for a fresh adventure to save the world;” or Sir Gilbrax, “a very famous knight.” Out of the thirteen playable male characters only one, Raynesis, is described in a threatening manner similar to the warrior princesses: “A desperate case in need of serious anger management.” But, one threatening male character still leaves me twelve whimsical male characters to choose from.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4447
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In the first part of this study of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, I questioned whether the Bechdel Test was the best benchmark for judging whether or not a piece of media had something to offer in terms of good female characterization. Is the Bechdel Test enough, or does even this bare minimum set the bar too low?
In this second part, I’ll be looking at some of the games’ other character, particularly Clementine, in an effort to delve deeper into the presentation of women in a game praised for its characterization and narrative strength.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4492
§
Long story short, I can see genre and contextual reasons that lead designers in some areas (like fighting games) to make broad-brush design choices that engage ethnic, gender, and sexual stereotypes. http://www.chaoticblue.com/blog/2014/01/shes-got-the-look/
§VIDEOS
Final Bosman
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/ur6ce9/the-final-bosman-nobody-finishes-video-games
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Do You Think eSports Should Allow A.I. Teammates? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hkMhng4q74
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Nintendoomed? A look at Nintendo's financials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_ho5Y-Yw8g
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Final Bosman
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/7j4yfw/the-final-bosman-xbox-friends-with-benefits
§
Composing The Banner Saga
http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ntly7e/backtrack-composing-the-banner-saga
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Why Comcast's 300GB Data Cap is Bad for Gaming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD8eqTIzjZM
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Are Virtual Worlds Real or Fake? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiEu5wMoEDs
§REVIEWS
Errant Signal - The Novelist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VThsdoxwgc
§
Tim Schafer didn’t really give us what we said we wanted, which was an old school point-and-click adventure game. He gave us something better, a modern LucasArts game. He looked past our words to our intent and gave us a game that represents what we really wanted, not just what we thought we wanted.
www.popmatters.com/post/178507-the-beautiful-simplicity-of-broken-age/
§
Ice Pick Lodge seems to be reaching back into childhood to seek a resolution to very adult problems, the problems of memories that we don’t want to confront or that we think that we can simply hide out long enough from.
At some point, the game seems to argue, we need to be brave like children and make a run for it—even if that run might allow us to to be seen, to be found out for what we truly are.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/178042-knock-knock-the-terrors-of-self-exposure/
§
Knock Knock is primarily an intellectual experience not an emotional one, which already makes it a poor horror game, but then it also fails to express anything intellectual because its central means of communication, the hide and seek puzzle mechanics, are awful.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/178712-puzzles-arent-scary-in-knock-knock/
§COMMUNITY
Thoughts on Games Writing and Community Involvement
http://big-tall-words.com/2014/01/08/thoughts-on-games-writing/
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Among the many elephants in the games criticism room, our relationship to academia is one that threatens to stomp on others the most often. It’s presence comes out in numerous ways, but most usually on methods of analyzing games and the craft of writing criticism. This month there seems to be a resurgence of it, so I want to spill some thoughts on how it effects me and some things I’d like to see develop.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-diy-of-games-criticism/
§
In the coming year, I want to see discussion and experiments on constructive, passionate uses of anger for social justice and change. I want people to express themselves honestly and without the degradation of others. We have our journals, our personal friends who understand us to be petty with. This doesn’t need to be an artificially happy place, but I’d like it to be somewhere no one is afraid to speak their mind and learn. I hope people who disagree with me contact me and let me know what they think, because I am ready for a change for the better, whatever it is we decide, as a community.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/on-anger/
§
What I want to dig into, and outline to respect, is the experience that Kim Delicious describes here in response to anti-toxicity articles. It’s a conflict between legit anger, anger that is cathartic and deserved, and understanding that it will wall off communication and education to another person. It shows where being an activist and simply existing as a minority identity blur.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/on-civility/
§MAGAZINES
The Arcade Review: Issue 1
http://arcadereview.net/main/?p=281
§PROFILE
I first encountered the unmistakable style of Stephen Murphy, aka thecatamites, back in 2009 with the hand-drawn adventure game Paul Moose in Space. Since then you may well have stumbled across any one of the otherworldly experience that he has provided on tap, like Space Funeral, Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog, and The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan.
http://indiegames.com/2014/01/just_who_is_thecatamites_anywa.html
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