11/2

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

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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-