27/3

§VR
"How would you feel to swap your body with another?" Philipe Bertrand asked me. "Would you better understand the other if you see through their eyes?"
http://www.polygon.com/2014/3/4/5423330/oculus-rift-vr-gender-swap-girl-mirror-look

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It’s not about swapping gender, it’s about tricking your brain into thinking you’re a different sex – for a few minutes, in a safe environment where you can quickly step out if things aren’t going how you please. Sure you can put your eyeballs in the head of another for a few minutes (and yes, this is really interesting stuff!) but you’re not in that head yourself. You don’t know what it’s like to have had to live with that body.
http://www.sophiehoulden.com/a-machine-to-be-another/

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Why You're Going to Suck At Oculus Rift and Virtual Reality | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGmy1V1u_ko

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Using Virtual Reality to Treat PTSD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIj26r4VPaA

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If the avatar is simply an extension of the player, violence by the avatar reflects a violent attitude held, even if hidden, by the player. This, I think most gamers would agree, is nonsense. But the lack of understanding of the role of the avatar leads many people, even as intelligent a person as Slavoj Žižek, to equate violence by the avatar with the player’s supposed internal desire for violence.
http://theanimistblog.wordpress.com/2014/03/09/my-second-self-understanding-the-relationship-between-players-and-avatars/




§DESIGN
Is Dark Souls the Future of Videogame Storytelling? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-YvxPvqOmE

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For this month’s Queer Mechanic, we’re going to take a look at ways of toying with, subverting, destabilising and queering the concept of the straight male gaze.
http://gaygamer.net/2014/03/queer-mechanic-5-queering-the-male-gaze/

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Extra Credits: Quest Design (Part 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur6GQp5mCYs

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Designing for Youth - Making Games for Players Under 14 - Extra Credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdFw8kvHAY8

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In narratology, vraisemblance, or “versimilitude,” – the semblance of something to truth, or reality, or to agreed-upon rules – was first used in this meaning by Gérard Genette, and Tzvetan Todorov, in the same special no. of Communications in 1968 (and later adapted for her own purposes as doxa by Tel Aviv School member Ruth Amossy). For Genette, vraisemblance meant the aspects of a story that answered to “[...] a body of maxims accepted as true by the public to which the narrative is addressed; but these maxims, due to the very fact that they are accepted, most often remain implicit”12 – in other words, the parts of the story that need no explanation, in good and bad.
/.../
Barthes’ core thought, applied to Gone Home, is as follows: The insignificant signifiers, such as the bags of chips in the game, seem to refer directly to their referent. A bag of chips is, well, a bag of chips. In other words, these inconsequential details seem, at first, simply denote reality directly. But since the significance of the signifier is insignificant, it actually doesn’t!Instead, according to Barthes, the signified escapes, with a generic sense of “reality” replacing it. The bag of chips doesn’t actually mean what it means, it simply speaks to us of a kind of “reality”.
http://www.slowdown.vg/2014/03/13/gone-home-and-the-reality-effect/





§MISC
Science fiction in games (and, let’s be fair, science fiction outside of them as well) tends to treat Dick’s devices as just cool things to riff off of—they make a great excuse to set up an action scene—while ignoring the metaphysics that he’s really interested in. As a result cyberpunk, as a subgenre, is more easily recognized by its mask than by its face, so to speak.
http://big-tall-words.com/2014/03/14/ascentury-philip-k-dick-and-videogames/

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A Defense of Cheating in Videogames | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=er-E1vxEnic

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...the very fact that the drive toward canonization ends up revealing certain latent ideologies or power structures makes the act itself, rather than whatever product results from it, appear eminently useful.
http://gamingvulture.com/2014/03/11/shots-fired/

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Ugly Truth in Advertising
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/itrits/the-final-bosman-ugly-truth-in-advertising

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Basically here's what happened: after the launch of Stanley Parable, I became a bit depressed.
http://www.galactic-cafe.com/2014/02/game-of-the-year/