tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-78570337403123418892024-03-13T09:40:11.201+01:00Minding GamesWhere musings (every so often) are more than word playAva Avane Dawnhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04564104575376090627noreply@blogger.comBlogger104125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-11804894292997756702016-10-27T09:45:00.000+02:002016-10-27T09:45:25.714+02:00Crit Links 27/10 VIDEO <br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuU6ojvBIic">The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker's dungeon design | Boss Keys </a> <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPQr4NoRsbQ">Are Bullshots Illegal?</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-XaLOYUZI8">A Love Letter to Grim Fandango</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsfZMPOFUnI">Errant Signal - Oxenfree </a> <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMYyO6Zd4b8">The PS4 Pro - Changing the Console Market - Extra Credit </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AffpO05p4V8">Why We Remember Bioshock's Fort Frolic | Game Maker's Toolkit</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3QhamG6PY">Review: Japanese Gaming Restaurant </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CA3S9L_JvU">Errant Signal - Firewatch (Spoilers!)</a> <br /><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSHjB_OXzLw">Errant Signal - Devil Daggers </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AffpO05p4V8"><br /></a><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_1924020307&feature=iv&src_vid=2-XaLOYUZI8&v=xOPiSYUSrQ0">Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? (The Death of the Adventure Game) </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT20RBySY98">Errant Signal - Anatomy (Spoilers) </a><br />
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WRITTEN <br />
<a href="http://nowrongwaytoplay.tumblr.com/post/151288884958/transistor-romeo-and-juliet">No Wrong Way To Play — Transistor - Romeo and Juliet</a><br />
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<a href="http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/rd_ff7_1.html">Reverse Design: Final Fantasy 7</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.zam.com/article/1114/can-love-fix-life-is-strange">Can love fix Life is Strange? </a><br />
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<a href="http://www.popmatters.com/post/indie-horror-month-2016-the-final-station/">Indie Horror Month 2016: The Quiet Apocalypse of 'The Final Station' </a>Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-68556508852541853002016-10-01T23:16:00.000+02:002016-10-01T23:16:05.260+02:00Crit Links 1/10<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWgc20zbRXk"><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Baldur's Gate: Durlag's Tower - #1 - Design Club">Baldur's Gate: Durlag's Tower - #1 - Design Club</span></a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wMxtm2b4p0">The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages and Seasons' dungeon design | Boss Keys </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wMxtm2b4p0">Farewell 12 Dominion Cards</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgr2ThIWnk">Review: Japanese Arcades </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oXzWzMqarU">Sinister Seductress - Tropes vs Women in Video Games </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2iJLy-1IGg">Review: Japanese Pachinko Parlors - YouTube</a>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_uxPnDB2qQ">Pokémon GO - Designing for the Real World - Extra Credits </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNh1XaLuLOw">Why Abzu Might Be the Most Important Game for Kids in Years - Writing on Games</a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxDz6RWncVM">Free-to-Play's MECHANICS are Great - Gwent, Blitzball, and the Mini-Game Revolution - Extra Credits </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHhX5GtWNr8">Shovel Knight and Nailing Nostalgia | Game Maker's Toolkit</a>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xeq1AETA0Q">Gwent IRL </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbqRtp5ZUGE">All the Slender Ladies: Body Diversity in Video Games </a><br />
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<a href="http://www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/hyrule-haeresis-2/">Video game sequels are a different beast than sequels in other mediums</a>. In video games, a sequel is typically expected to improve upon its predecessor because video games are intensely technical. <b>Since a game is thought of at least partly as a feat of software engineering, sequels are approached as a honing, refining and improvement of the original as much as they are a thematic and aesthetic continuation of them</b>. In other words, we should think of video game sequels as new and improved models as much as the next chapter of a story, if not more so. <b>On the other hand, the nature of a sequel demands in any medium of genre demands narrative escalation</b>.<br />
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<a href="http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog/logo-creative-process">The Chinese Room logo - the creative process — The Chinese Room</a>
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<i>The logo was designed by a local Brighton graphic design studio about
4 years ago. It works well as a logo, but as The Chinese Room has grown
and changed, it wasn't sitting right as the visual to represent the
studio. Red and black are very heavy colours and triangles are quite
harsh and sharp. The overall logo is very masculine and corporate -
exactly what The Chinese Room is not.</i><br />
<i>So I began my goals for rebrand -</i><br />
<i>• Make the logo less masculine</i><br />
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<a href="https://thiscageisworms.com/2016/09/17/no-one-criticized-bioshock-infinite-before/">“No One Criticized Bioshock Infinite Before!” | this cage is worms</a>
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<i>something has changed. If the world were the same way it was three
years ago, the people finding out about these long standing critiques
would still be walking around thinking everyone sees Infinite as
a holy grail of achievement. And that’s heartening, in some ways,
because it means the discourse has shifted that little, small amount.
The words got out, somehow.
</i><br />
<i>/.../</i><br />
<i>I’ve got the long view on “games criticism” at this point, like quite a
few others, and I’d say that 80% of the people doing that kind of work
on the internet who predate myself and my “cohort” have gone on to other
things. Maybe even higher. But there’s a weird print in the culture in
the shape of their words, and well, I guess that’s something.</i><br />
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<br />Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-87435740167940879972016-08-28T13:07:00.001+02:002016-08-28T13:07:39.424+02:00Crit Links 28/8<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmOVS-qLG6o">The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask's dungeon design | Boss Keys - </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jywza4So-eU"><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Inside Tokyo's Long Love Affair with 'Dance Dance Revolution'">Inside Tokyo's Long Love Affair with 'Dance Dance Revolution'</span></a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3It3S7TFTGo">Review: No Man's Sky </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbyTOAlhRHk">The Comeback of the Immersive Sim</a> | Game Maker's Toolkit <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94KwB205DDk">Improving on Pokemon GO - Making Better Augmented Reality Games - Extra Credits - YouTube</a>
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofJzavEH12A">Zoe Quinn Talks Project Tingler and Moving On: VICE Gaming Meets - </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnoiZ7s6EF8">Review: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - YouTube</a>
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<a href="http://www.digitiser2000.com/main-page/modern-game-logos-are-rubbish">Think of a game logo. Any logo. Chances are if you can picture one, it probably wasn't created in the last ten years.</a><br />
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Far
be it for me to be that old man grumbling about how everything was
better in the olden days... but one thing that was undeniably better in
the olden days was this thing: game logos.<br />
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And here's the proof.<br />
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<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/invisible-women-videogames/"><br /></a>
<span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/invisible-women-videogames/">We began with the idea that the female body, when made visible, is sexualized, and then moved on to how videogames have avoided this by creating invisible women</a>, rendered so by
their first-person perspective and fast movement. But to stop there
would be a hopeless end, as if women in games will only find power in
their physical absence and the traces they leave. </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bound</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">
presents an alternate, it being a game in which the body is the most
important aspect—after all, the main character is a ballerina. If you
watch the trailer, even if you look at it for a second, you’ll realize
that the player’s avatar in </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bound</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> isn’t sexualized at all, and it is wholly present. Maybe it’s because the creators want </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bound</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to be a game about femininity as seen from the inside</span>Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-80723047505592175132016-07-15T09:16:00.001+02:002016-07-15T09:16:34.890+02:00Crit Links 15/7<br />
<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Nintendoomed 2: Pokemon GO's Jaunty View"></span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOJC62t4JfA"><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="The Unbearable Now: An Interpretation of The Witness">The Unbearable Now: An Interpretation of The Witness</span></a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEm_wPGgScU"><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Nintendoomed 2: Pokemon GO's Jaunty View">Nintendoomed 2: Pokemon GO's Jaunty View</span></a><br />
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<b> </b><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="The Power of Incentives - How Games Help Us Examine Our World - Extra Credits"> </span><br />
<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="The Power of Incentives - How Games Help Us Examine Our World - Extra Credits"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HqcLghafPXY">The Power of Incentives - How Games Help Us Examine Our World</a> - Extra Credits
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<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening's dungeon design | Boss Keys"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AezAN2RcO8Y">The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening's dungeon design</a> | Boss Keys
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<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Wind Waker: The BEST Zelda Sequel? - Really Freakin' Clever"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-6MwRYha2E">Wind Waker: The BEST Zelda Sequel?</a> - Really Freakin' Clever</span><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46HxrpYzM3g"><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="What Old Games Got Right: Donkey Kong Country!">What Old Games Got Right: Donkey Kong Country!</span></a><br />
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<b>At times, <i>Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture</i> feels very grounded.</b>
Despite it being a story about a supernatural visitor that causes the
population of a small English town to inexplicably vanish, the world and
its inhabitants often feel authentic. However, <a href="http://www.popmatters.com/post/196990-a-fleeting-sense-of-presence-in-everybodys-gone-to-the-rapture/">due to the way that you interact with and learn about the world, this feeling of “being there” is inconsistent. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture is a story about humanity, but the tools that you use to understand the story are unfortunately alienating.</a><br />
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<b>It’s fine to make a deliberately paced game, but <i>Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture</i>
makes even the simple act of entering and exiting a house a tedious
chore. </b>It’s really hard to overstate how slow the movement is. One could
argue this is meant to enforce a reflective, observant approach to the
game. In some respects this is true, but it also inspires resentment.<br />
Missing a key story piece and facing the prospect of a long journey
backtracking (and potentially getting lost) is demoralizing. After a
certain point, seeing a mysterious item in the environment no longer
raises the question of “What is that?” but rather “Is that potential
clue worth the time it will take to walk over there?” <b>The fact that
sometimes a mystery is just a trick of the light (rather than the
quasi-defined light being itself) means that the slow speed actually
hastened my pace to finish the game.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Because of your speed, you have plenty of time to reflect on the many
contrivances needed for an interactive sci-fi story/religious parable.
Why can’t I hop over waist-high fences? It sure is convenient that some
of these doors are locked while others aren’t. How is this place
littered with identical radios that all play a pre-recorded message on
demand? Why can I only see the ghostly apparitions of some people and
why aren’t these people more angry about their impending deaths?<br />
Suddenly everything feels overly produced. You’re not person in a
village. <b>You’re a human-sized viewfinder navigating around a
meticulously constructed set on which you mustn’t run.</b><br />
/.../<br />
<b> What starts off feeling like an intimately human environment becomes a
stifling set piece. Instead of relishing your presence in environment,
you resent it and ultimately detach yourself from it. </b><br />
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<a href="http://www.popmatters.com/review/everybodys-gone-to-the-rapture/">Everything else about the game actively works to hinder your consumption of the story</a>; an insane design decision considering that the story is
literally the main selling point for this type of game. <br />
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The town of Shropshire is large, and it’s <b>easy to get lost among the houses</b> <br />
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The open world design also works against the story. <b>Memories are spread
far and wide, so it’s easy to miss things</b>. There’s no map of the town,
so it’s easy to lose your sense of direction; Shropshire is no
predictable grid town, it’s curved and wide and there’s no clear sense
of a “forward” direction. The floating orb is meant to mitigate this,
but there are dozens are memories off the proverbial beaten path that
you’ll miss if you just follow the orb.<br />
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<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/powerless-reality-everybodys-gone-rapture/">A sense of powerlessness runs throughout <i>Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture</i></a><a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/powerless-reality-everybodys-gone-rapture/">. </a>Taking place after all of humanity has died out, and after anything can
be done about it, the game places the player in an ambiguous role: she
is an observer and a wanderer, but she is not a character in any story
the game is telling, and <b>rather than creating her own, she has a story
told to her, one whose outcome she cannot affect or alter. </b><br />
/.../If, like most games, the default movement setting was a jogging pace, with the ability to either slow down or speed up, <i>Rapture</i>
would become a very different experience. Suddenly, the world would
feel more open, more navigable; somewhere the player could roam free
rather than stalk carefully. <br />
/.../<br />
The player can shake door handles, rattle gates, knock over and over
again but there is nothing to be done, nobody will respond, and there
are many places the game simply doesn’t allow the player to go. <b>The act
of knocking on doors or rattling their handles is one of the few ways Rapture </b><b>allows the player to interact with its world, yet remarkably this act is one that ends in failure every time.</b><br />
/.../<b>These physical boundaries that the game imposes all add to the
sense of powerlessness felt; despite the world having ended, it is not
yours, and you are not there to profit from disaster.</b> <br />
/.../<b>The inability to interact with these items doesn’t take away from any
sense of realism in the game, it simply adds to the ways in which the
player is rendered powerless.</b><br />
/.../<br />
The representation of the characters in the game is closely tied to the
narrative they are involved in. <b>So often, progress in videogames comes
down to what the body is capable of;</b> as the game goes on, more and more
extreme physical feats are necessary to progress. <b>Yet in <i>Rapture</i></b><b><i>,</i>
the only progression comes in the form of narrative progression,
something that happens by reaching the end of a character’s story,
which, every time, involves witnessing the final moments of their life.
In other words, progression in the game actually involves the body
failing, as opposed to triumphing; narrative progression comes at the
cost of human lives, of the body falling powerless.</b> Death in Rapture happens over and over again, and every time the body fails, and every time the player is powerless to intervene.<br />
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<a href="http://gamechurch.com/six-games-that-celebrate-grace/">Six Games that Celebrate Grace</a><br />
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At first glance, it looks like an ordinary adventure game: here are some puzzles, here are some pieces, get to work putting it all together. But <a href="https://gameexhibition.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/sam-max-the-devils-playhouse/">the more you play it, the more you realize just how much the game questions adventure game form</a>. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>Future Vision</b>. When Max first receives this power, it’s easy to think the writers are using his Future Vision to provide a narrative justification for the game’s hint system. But after making your way through a few of the game’s puzzles, you learn that<b> it’s actually both a vital tool for solving puzzles and the site where Sam & Max dismantles the very process of solving puzzles in the first place. </b>Usually when we talk about puzzles in video games (adventure games especially), we discuss them as a linear chain of cause and effect: you see a problem, you piece together bits of information you’ve gathered, and one revelatory moment later, you’ve solved the puzzled and you can move onto the next. In fact, researchers at UC Santa Cruz have identified this process as “the eurekon design pattern”, describing it as vital to understanding adventure games. With Future Vision at play, though, this cause/effect understanding no longer applies as neatly as we want it to. Predictions can be defied, and characters can act on information they received from future predictions. Sometimes, the act of gathering information is all you need to complete a puzzle. <br />
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<a href="https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/07/07/gothic-retrospective/">Most RPGs have NPC traffic. Gothic had a society.</a><br />
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<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/stop-calling-eastern-european-videogames-pessimistic/">Stop calling Eastern European videogames pessimistic</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.zam.com/article/720/the-ballistic-politics-of-hideo-kojima">How the history of Japan's post-war peace movements can help us understand Kojima's older games-- and maybe Death Stranding, too.</a><br />
/.../ <br />
<span class="s1">This Kojima aesthetic -- fusing Anime tropes,
real-world events, American action films, and Japanese anti-nuclear
rhetoric -- creates a world where<b> Kojima can tell an anti-war story
while still indulging Hollywood war fantasies.</b> Despite his obvious love
for military hardware and action scenes, <i>MGS</i> retains its
anti-war, anti-nuke message because it happens in an absurd fantasy
world unmoored from realism. No one in their right mind would join the
military because of a <i>Metal Gear Solid</i> game, because we know real militaries don’t have walking tanks and psychic soldiers. Kojima gets to play with the same toys as <i>Call of Duty</i>, yet avoids the worry that he’s glorifying military action by depicting it.</span><br />
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<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-06-24-fatherhood-isnt-the-shortcut-to-emotional-complexity-games-wish-it-was">Fatherhood isn't an accessory</a>, or an upgradeable character trait, or a snap-on mark of maturity or earnestness, <b>as so many of this year's </b>other<b> games would have it be</b>. It's an overwhelming source of agony and purpose that - yes, I am saying - is a bit like owning a vast and feathered cat. Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-91817862357108431102016-06-16T07:17:00.000+02:002016-06-16T07:17:44.407+02:00Crit Links 16/6<br />
<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Solaris (And How it Influenced Silent Hill 2) | Monsters of the Week"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRJTbGc_1uk">Solaris (And How it Influenced Silent Hill 2) </a>| Monsters of the Week
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<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Controllers Control Everything | Game Maker's Toolkit"></span>
<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="Controllers Control Everything | Game Maker's Toolkit"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJGKDyrR8qc">Controllers Control Everything</a> | Game Maker's Toolkit
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<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past's dungeon design | Boss Keys"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouO1R6vFDBo">The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past's dungeon design </a>| Boss Keys</span><br />
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<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="E3 2016 Thoughts and Analysis - Writing on Games (Bonus Episode)"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTHOm8L8_J8">E3 2016 Thoughts and Analysis</a> - Writing on Games (Bonus Episode)
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTNOJpkBLL4">Game Commercials are Still Stupid</a> - The Final Bosman <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBaOpfSL2YQ">Still Skeptical of V.R. - Five Challenges for Virtual Reality</a> - Extra Credits<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujTufg1GvR4">Strategic Butt Coverings</a> - Tropes vs Women in Video Games <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZzLM-1XN6_0">OXENFREE | Part 1: The Story </a><br />
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<span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="The Kojima-P.T. Conspiracy (Silent Hills|Konami) - Monsters of the Week Special (feat. Fungo)"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbr_vyayk2E">The Kojima-P.T. Conspiracy</a> (Silent Hills|Konami) - Monsters of the Week Special (feat. Fungo)</span><br />
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<a href="http://gdcvault.com/play/1021917/Designing-Morally-Difficult-Characters#">Designing Morally Difficult Characters, Responsibly</a><br />
Designing a morally questionable character doesn't have to railroad your players into moustache-twirling villainy: done right, it can present a truly meaningful study in compromise and complicity. Dan Nagler, designer and writer for Gigantic Mechanic, details a unified design strategy for creating this type of game protagonist: a character whose very moral ambiguity is leveraged for positive dramatic, emotional and educational effect. This theory is grounded in Gigantic Mechanic's design for the Edward M. Kennedy Institute's Senate Immersion Module, a digital and live-action hybrid game that puts students in the shoes of antebellum, slaveholding American politicians. <br />
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<b>Some people insist that reliance on psychotherapy or medication is a sign of moral weakness, while others deny that clinical depression exists at all. Playing Quinn’s game and allowing yourself to feel sad therefore becomes a form of social action</b>; to play is also to take a stand, placing yourself on one side of a debate. The sadness intertwines with a kind of proactive anger to challenge the status quo and advocate for the disenfranchised. <a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/the-impossibility-of-sadness-in-that-dragon-cancer/">The role of art in unpacking incontrovertible sadness is more ambiguous.</a><br />
/.../<br />
Ten years later I’m a little wiser and a lot less snarky, but I still don’t think Rabbit Hole is a good play. Its emotional punches land squarely on the nose, yet its point-of-view is absent. One ends up feeling manipulated by such a work: we are made to feel sad because, well, it’s sad to watch parents grieve for two hours. No one could argue with that. But <b>what’s the point? There is no stand to take, and any anger evoked cannot be put to productive use. What can be gained by such an exercise? </b>Then again, perhaps the idea that something should be gained is simply an indication of our discomfort with facing the undeniably tragic.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>The emotional core of That Dragon, Cancer is real—so real, in fact, and so personal, that I ended up feeling like an outsider looking in. </b>I pitied the Greens for having to endure this awful series of events, but I did not come away feeling connected to their experience, or enlightened by it. This was not because the game tried but failed to connect with me, but because it didn’t. <b>There is an insular quality to the vignettes; they are by and for the family Green</b> (and, perhaps more broadly, others who have lived through similar trials). The “point” of the game is that this is how Ryan and Amy are dealing with their loss. I can praise or criticize it, but really my opinion is irrelevant. This game was not made for me, and reviewing it feels like a borderline intrusion into a family’s private mourning.<br />
/.../<br />
for the Greens, the titular dragon turns out not to be an RPG’s final boss but rather one of the Arthurian variety: an evil to be battled by brave Christian crusaders, pure of heart and clean of soul, who know that even losing the fight means an unfettered ascension to god’s heavenly kingdom. As a secular existentialist Jew, it may go without saying that by ultimately settling on this metaphor, the game started to lose me.<br />
/.../<br />
This is sadness. <b>Our task, I think, when faced with this kind of sadness, is not to force it into an ill-fitting symbol, or turn it into a cause, or define its point. Our task is to sit there for a while and feel its invisible weight, its randomness and cruelty. </b>But I understand why the Greens could not stay in that space for long. Who could? I applaud that they tried, and I am sorry for their loss.<br />
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On its own, the tedium of The Ice-Bound Concordance would not be enough to carry the text to any sort of end beyond exploring the well-trod intersection between play and work. Instead, the game focuses on narrative layering in a way that attempts to discover the compulsive allure of difficult texts. The echoes of Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), or Borges’ Labyrinths (1962) are fairly apparent, but present also are the interests of electronic literary experiments like Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995) or Michael Joyce’s Afternoon: a story (1994). Like these artists and their respective works, <a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/death-of-the-author-a-review-of-the-ice-bound-concordance/">Reed and Garbe use The Ice-Bound Concordance to prompt its player to embrace the pleasures that come with deciphering, or maybe just interacting with, texts that actively resist comprehension.</a><br />
/.../<br />
While KRIS wanted to write about “human dignity” and “going it alone,” I fought to keep the focus on the aforementioned spiral imagery and ever-growing threat of existential horror that haunted dark places below the facility. KRIS cared more about character flaws as they related to the personal sins of the writer whose mind the AI was meant to emulate, but I found its quest for self-discovery a dull moral tale about the need for humanism in the process of artistic creation. KRIS and I fought constantly, each of us vying for authorial control until we landed on an ending that disappointed the both of us. <b>Ultimately, it was my struggle against KRIS that interested me most in The Ice-Bound Concordance. Even as that damn program insisted that “endings are the crux of this matter” and warned me not to “get distracted by the medium” because “it’s the material that’s important,” I found my time spent trying to use the book to redirect the program’s focus to fit my needs far more satisfying than coming to any sort of end. </b>All of this is by design, of course, though the heavy-handedness of KRIS’s direction over-explains the themes of the game that were already revealed organically. Indeed, if The Ice-Bound Concordance has any noticeable flaws, they appear in the occasional pontifications about the toil of creation that are a bit too obvious, or with a few supposed tricks that are far too telegraphed in their method. But such observations may reveal more about my own hubris than it does an actual flaw in a game about the tension between authorial intent and editorial obsession.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>There’s something troublesome at the heart of The Ice-Bound Concordance that rests in the space between the physical copy of the book and the way a machine can see patterns and forms beyond the player’s perception.</b> The complicated networks of mediation reveal that there are systems at play beyond the human faculties of language. From the actual mechanics of printing and editing to the complex codes that run software required to read the physical Ice-Bound Compendium, these unseen forces aiding in the processes of artistic creation trouble our concept of the single author. After all, we can never read Ice-Bound in its native form because it only truly exists in the raw data of the computer program and the obscure iconography of the compendium, each only readable when filtered through the computer. <b>For us, that text will always be just beyond our scope of understanding—formless, changing, and warped as if it is partially obscured behind a translucent sheet of ice.</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.showmethegames.com/2016/02/02/the-witness-five-years-on-a-retrospective/">Was it worth waiting an extra five years to play The Witness? No.</a> What I played in 2011 was satisfying and intriguing enough.<br />
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<a href="http://tinysubversions.com/essays/witness/#!">Undertale and The Witness have a lot in common</a>, too. Both heavily reference a mid-90s game (Earthbound and Myst, respectively) but avoid cloying reverence, instead managing to say something new. Both games are extremely avant-garde, constantly requiring the player to think about genre convention and challenge it head-on. And like The Witness, Undertale is essentially one long ritual labyrinth. At the outset of the game, an assortment of characters and posted signs walk you through a series of trials where you're meant to tread a path that has already been clearly marked for you.<br />
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<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/oxenfree-glows-with-teenage-charm/">In the end, Oxenfree is absolutely a game about teenage bullshit </a>(forgive me for being a little disingenuous earlier). <b>But it manages to revitalize that narrative by focusing on feeling more than substance; it glances at each character’s inner struggle rather than serving it up for a full meal.</b> The supernatural side of the story carries some of the weight here as well, mirroring Alex’s own story of grief and isolation even as it performs the work of all good ghost stories: reinterpreting your immediate surroundings and enchanting the mundane. If you’re looking for a story that valorizes adolescent struggle by iterating all of its existential complaints, you’d be better off looking elsewhere. But if you miss the naïve wonder, the warmth of lifelong friends, and the thrill of still having rules to break, Oxenfree can take you back.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-15118393570848939282016-06-04T20:00:00.004+02:002016-08-21T16:25:13.558+02:00Critical Compilation - Firewatch<a href="https://soundcloud.com/popmatters/moving-pixels-firewatch">Firewatch and Games for Grown-ups </a><br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiQiBW3buk">Firewatch and the Consequence of Player Choice</a> (Review/Analysis) - Writing on Games <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z74nUBkMdSg">Firewatch Is Mine</a> (No Spoilers) <br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CA3S9L_JvU">Errant Signal - Firewatch</a> (Spoilers!) <br />
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<a href="https://soundcloud.com/popmatters/moving-pixels-firewatch">The Moving Pixels Podcast</a> Looks at the Scenic Vistas and Human Drama of 'Firewatch'<br />
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<a href="http://www.experiencepoints.net/2016/02/exp-podcast-366-firewatch-debrief.html">EXP Podcast #366: Firewatch Debrief</a><br />
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FIREWATCH Theory - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-kJek00O0Y">ROMANCE, MURDER, AND JANE EYRE</a>?<br />
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FIREWATCH Theory: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpKFxN1tukg">DELILAH'S DARK SECRET</a>. The True Firewatch Ending <br />
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<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-02-16-my-spoilery-firewatch-theory">Firewatch is all about the dangerous assumptions the player makes as they play</a> - the writable way we approach readable games. We work through the text-adventure backstory sequence at the start and think: sick wife, childless - Oh man, what a burden this must be for Henry.What a terrible thing to happen to him! The girls down by the lake go missing. Poor Henry - are they trying to frame him? Or is it something worse? We go home and ponder Delilah's tower, bright in the distance. What is her deal? What is she hiding from Henry? Is she watching him? The answer that suggests itself - it's the answer that suggests itself at almost every stage - is: of course she is.<br />
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<b>Because Henry's special.<br /><br />Henry's special because he's the main character in a narrative video game. Everything that happens must, in some way, be happening to him.</b><br />
/.../<br />
In truth, <b>if the trick that allows Firewatch to work is the player's suspicion that a single-player game must revolve around them, the irony is that, to expose this cognitive fallacy, the designers have to devise a game that does revolve entirely around the player.</b> In order to make the player understand that they aren't the center of the universe, the designers must build a universe around them. Spoiler: games are weird because players are weird.<br />
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<a href="https://emshort.wordpress.com/2016/02/12/firewatch-campo-santo/">I quite liked the ending of Firewatch</a>, and I’d like to discuss my thoughts in some detail.<b> I think it is ultimately very coherent on the level of theme</b> (perhaps even over-obvious about it, by literary standards), and that if there are missteps, they’re in the midgame rather than the endgame.<br />
/.../<br />
thematically, the mystery is not pasted on, and the teenagers (the “third of the game” rendered “essentially irrelevant” according to Metro) play an important part as well. In fact Delilah explicitly spells out the themes for you in some endgame dialogue, to a degree that I would consider Too Much if I encountered the same dialogue in a novel. Ned Goodwin is a bad father (she says): he didn’t step up and deal with his responsibilities to his son. Delilah herself didn’t do what she should have done in terms of reporting that Brian was in the woods to start with. She says that when you care about someone, you are supposed to figure out how to take care of them, even if it’s tough to do so: a clear reference to your relationship to Julia, and perhaps to the way that she herself let down her ex-boyfriend.<br />
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Meanwhile, <b>the forest that you were supposed to care for is burning down around you, thanks to the carelessness or self-serving impulses of various characters. That too might have been avoided if Brian hadn’t died, if Ned hadn’t gone into hiding, if you and Delilah had been more open with the authorities instead of trying to cover your own tracks in various ways. You and Delilah are in your way not all that different from the drunk teenagers you had to deal with at the beginning.</b><br />
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<b>So. This is not primarily a story about your romance with Delilah. Delilah is a counterpoint for Henry, suffering from the same decision-making, responsibility-taking problems. The best you can do for each other at the end is direct one another to do the right thing, if it’s too hard for you to direct yourselves. To my mind, that’s a more interesting and poignant outcome than some implied hookup would have been, and one that suggests a genuine intimacy between the characters.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Wapiti Station is a distraction, and it seems to have made some players think that the point of Firewatch was going to be a reveal of the terrible truth about what is really going on. Many games do work that way, after all.<br />
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The ending we actually get is more unusual, more mature, and more interesting, in my opinion, assuming we’re able to see what we’re looking at. <b>It’s an ending that doesn’t really let Henry off the hook, or Delilah either. You screwed up. You’re responsible. And now you need to grow up and go do the scary and painful things that are your job.</b><br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/%C2%B4https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/02/19/firewatch-ethics/">For the majority of Firewatch, my foremost emotion was jealousy</a>. Many-splintered jealousy: primarily at the aforementioned freedom available to protagonist Henry, in his escape from the pressures of life and into somewhere truly beautiful. Partly at the easy repartee he and unseen deuteragonist Delilah were capable of – oh, to be capable of such effortless wit, such natural connection with another human being. Partly, and relatedly, at how much attention Henry was immediately given by an interesting person (later tempered by the realisation that, unfortunately, Delilah has just a touch of the manic pixie dream girl to her).<br />
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<b>The contradiction is glaring: I want to be on my own, unbothered by anyone else’s needs, but I want to mean something to someone nonetheless. I don’t really want to be a farmer on his own in a field, day after day: I want people to be there but I don’t want them to need anything from me. </b><br />
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S<b>omething happens in Henry’s life and he disconnects. He then sees what happened to another person who also tried to disconnect, and at least partly resolves to try and find a way back into his life. </b>That, for me, is <a href="https://shutupvideogames.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/speak-up-firewatch/">the emotional core of Firewatch</a>, and no, it’s not tearjerker. Instead, it’s a story about a person, or rather persons. Too many writers try to make games about something – loss, existentialism, the apocalypse, abuse, childhood – instead of about someone. Firewatch is a videogame about its character and for that it stands out. <br />
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<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/265957/How_Firewatch_hearkens_back_to_relationships_on_the_early_internet.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+GamasutraFeatureArticles+%28Gamasutra+Feature+Articles%29">Cibele takes on the online dimension of this phenomenon forthrightly, but Firewatch abstracts it away from even the mediating force of the Internet</a>, instead exploring all the other ways we can have ineffable but meaningful contact with human life.<br />
/.../<br />
Over the course of the game you realize that Delilah never expected to actually meet Henry and that shaped the context of their interactions greatly;<b> all of their intimacy was akin to the way we anonymously flirt online or overshare with strangers we think we’ll never meet or see again.</b> Contact without consequence, sating a need with none of the mess.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>Perhaps the quietest beauty of Firewatch is that Henry ran into the woods to get away from it all, but failed.</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.pippinbarr.com/2016/02/27/bad-hands-in-firewatch/">The absolute worst instance so far</a> has been picking up a photograph
of Henry with his wife (who is a key element of the narrative setup and,
I assume, the rest of the game) – which is to say it’s an emotionally
charged object. So you pick it up to look at this woman who you love but
are tortured about – good dramatic moment. Then you try to put it down
and… you throw it carelessly on the floor. We did this over and over
trying not to be so callous. Eventually by doing some pixel-perfect
aligning we managed to get a contextual message saying “put back
photograph” (instead of “drop photograph”)! Imagine our delight at this,
so we push the button and… the hero tosses it on the ground again.<br />
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It’s hard to express how upsetting this experience is. <b>It’s a kind of
“uncanny valley” except for normal human behaviour. </b>Most videogame
protagonists are psychopaths one way or another, and so when they do
thoughtless bullshit you don’t really notice. But <i>Firewatch</i> is
attempting to represent an actual human being with feelings, a voice,
preoccupations, a life outside the game mechanics, etc. So <b>when that
person, who you’re trying to believe in, is such a dick with the objects
around him, it’s a real killer to any sense of identification or
being-in-the</b>-world.<br />
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Henry ‘should have’ stayed with Julia. Delilah ‘should have’ called in that there was a minor at the fire watchtower. Henry ‘should have’ never taken the job. Delilah ‘should have’ never developed any feelings for a married man. Henry ‘should have’ never ran away.<br />
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<a href="https://medium.com/@videodante/after-the-june-fire-72aac7f4e743#.ayld93vil">Everything was an ‘I should have’. Or an ‘I could have’.</a><br />
/.../<br />
Every character in Firewatch carries regrets. The narrative tells about those regrets, and the spaces they occupy, like smoke set into an old jacket. They never really leave you. Everyone ran away here for a reason.<br />
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<b>By the end of the story, nothing feels wrapped up completely. Firewatch doesn’t pretend otherwise. Henry goes home. Delilah leaves before you ever see her in person. The boy’s body still lies at the bottom of the cave, rotting and posed grotesque by gravity. Life goes on.</b><br />
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Campo Santo, the game's developer, doesn't want to offer me this path with Henry. He is selfish. <a href="http://www.polygon.com/2016/2/12/10966494/firewatch-agency-campo-santo">Campo Santo has taken away the option to be flawless</a>. <b>They've removed an aspect of my agency and, in doing so, created a character who's arguably far more like us than any paragon of justice we'd like to create.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Interactions with Delilah on the first night are informed by Henry's exhaustion and crankiness. There is no option to be perky, friendly or engaging, because Henry has just hiked a bunch of miles and he's exhausted. The opportunity to maybe open up and help Henry to grow as a person is provided at exactly the moment it should be: after rest, recuperation and a good night's sleep. His new life has begun. It's time for you to help figure out what that means.<br />
/.../<br />
Delilah is never the antagonist. Delilah becomes your confidante and potential lover but also occasionally your accidental foil. This makes for a far more honest portrayal of confronting oneself than if her role had been that of a cackling villain. Your reactions to her may include frustration and disappointment, but ultimately they lead to a desire to understand and support her. It's a relationship based on growth, whether through Henry's obvious shift in personality or Delilah's steadfast stubbornness. It's a perfect metaphor for the average relationship with one's own self.<br />
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Delilah is a woman who has worked the job for nearly a decade and been seemingly unchanged by her experience. She's not growing, and the fact that Henry and the player are still not enough to change her mind in many situations is refreshing in a medium where you can often achieve impossible persuasion simply by having high enough stats.<br />
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You can encourage her to inform the police about the missing campers, but she won't. You can ask her to wait for you in the tower before evacuation, but she doesn't. By the final interaction, if you choose to ask her to come with you into the future, not even you or Henry believes that she will. In all these cases, she can be persuaded to agree with you, and to commit to doing these things. She just simply doesn't follow through on any of them. She's a rare thing in gaming: an NPC with agency.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>The game ends with Delilah remaining steadfast in her feelings, no matter what Henry says, and this is purely a narrative decision. It serves as a great footnote on how Henry has changed into a more empathetic person and starkly highlights how, despite Henry's influence, that empathy is still absent in Delilah. </b>Or maybe it's an indicator of the difference in approach between men and women, or simply between Henry and Delilah. It's open to interpretation, and even the reading that Delilah is failing to empathize isn't condemning of her.<br />
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There are plenty of justifiable reasons why she might not choose to do so. While Henry has additional insight as a retrospective observer, Delilah bore witness to the majority of events as they unfolded, and as the game ends there's still the possibility that due to his empathy and growth, Henry's got this one wrong. <b>None of the characters are infallible, and the player never has enough agency to make them so. And that's just perfect.</b><br />
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<b>If I want more than just those handful of photos, I can load up a new save file, find the camera again, and <a href="http://www.zam.com/article/155/how-firewatch-reminded-me-to-remember">keep the shutter clicking until I’m satisfied.</a></b><br />
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But real life doesn’t provide that luxury. Sure, I could rent out the watchtower again, but Jon is two time zones away, and it wouldn’t be the same. I need to be more mindful of my surroundings. I’m not going to live the rest of my life through a viewfinder, but I won’t be a passive observer who looks but doesn’t see.<br />
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<a href="http://indiehaven.com/ignoring-delilah-in-firewatch-is-heartbreaking/">what would happen if you went through Firewatch without talking to Delilah at all?</a> How would that colour an experience that’s already about cutting yourself off? So that’s what I decided to do when starting over, and it was one of the bleakest experiences I’ve had in a game.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>Firewatch isn’t just about fleeing from life’s problems. To me, it’s more about finding solace in the sometimes fleeting connections we make with others. They may be temporary, but sometimes they come along when we need them the most. So when they do, speak up.</b><br />
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<a href="http://www.kotaku.com.au/2016/02/the-most-intriguing-part-of-firewatch-is-the-wedding-ring/">In Firewatch your wedding ring is inescapable. </a>Each time you climb up a rock wall or scramble into a crevass your wedding is there, visible: emblematic of a relationship that sits silently at the centre of Firewatch’s narrative. Your absent wife, who you’ve left in Melbourne, Australia, is represented by that ring. It’s a constant reminder that your escape, your avoidance, is a temporary solution. It’s Edgar Allen Poe’s Tell-Tale Heart, beating beneath the floorboards. It’s the visible representation of your regret and shame. Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-49606983295867522852016-01-23T15:53:00.002+01:002016-01-23T15:53:38.767+01:00Moments - Opera OmniaThere are moments when we face ourselves and the horrors we have perpetuated. And there are moments when we do not. In<a href="http://www.increpare.com/2009/02/opera-omnia/"> Opera Omnia</a>, there is a moment when we should have.<br />
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How do we forgot what others are, and in turn what we are? How do we forget to treat other human beings as human beings? It's a question with many answers, one of which is that we utilize tools to distance ourselves, or indeed use people <i>as</i> tools, treat them as <i>its</i> instead of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou"><i>thous</i></a>. If the only tool we have at our disposal is a hammer, then everything starts looking like a nail. If the only tool we have at our disposal is a boot, then the only interaction we can imagine with another is the boot stamping on a face. But we do not have to do our stamping in close proximity - if we abstract our interactions enough and create a framework for evil so that it appears both banal and commonplace enough, we can run through a a large set interactions/boots-in-faces simply as we go about our business . We can go "the distance", commit to our framework of abstract interactions and in doing so committing atrocities as science.<br />
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In Opera Omnia, you play a state historian who is charged by your superior to prove certain theories the state has about the past migration routes of minority groups in your country. For this task you have tools for simulating migration patterns, population numbers, natural historical occurances such as famines, plagues, etc. You get these in the form of a very counterintuitive interface and data points situated in both the past and present which your superior doesn't even bother to assure you are correct but are indeed taken at face value. It all takes some time to wrap ones head around, and the complexities of the missions just grow with each completed assigment. But idle hands make for devil's playthings as they say, and thus you will just have to put all your mental effort and computational power at your disposal to become one with the interface and learn to think backwards like the system which you use for your calculations. See, if there were still people left in the city after the plague had decimated the numbers of the minority population, then plagues actually increase population if you see this simple fact through the interface which works its way from data points located in the present toward the past. Once you get the hang of it, it starts making sense. Kinda.<br />
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Well, the fact of the matter is that Opera Omnia was never meant to be simple, and that the obscurity of its interface furthers the theme of obfuscation at the hands of the imagined state which the protagonist works for. The object for that state was never to create a better future, but rather to craft a more convenient past under the veneer of objectivity. There are no theories which you can arrive at in Opera Omnia other than those already typed into the programs which you work in. Thus the conclusions are drawn before any real questioning can begin. The minority groups in Opera Omnia, Romani or what have you, are abstracted through so many layers that one doesn't know what comes out at the other end. Or wait, one knows exactly what comes out, because that was the point all along - to obscure and abstract through temporal aspects such as time/proximity, by unclear communication such as insinuations, by cherrypicking for misrepresentation, by making unfounded generalizations, by Othering, in general. Add to this a preoccupation on the protagonists part with figuring out the interface/"scientific" procedure and a promise of a future career at the institute by hir superior instead of evolving the capacity to ask tough questions and question superiors, and you have the parameters set for the possibility space of the data points in this little game of politics. <br />
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Withhin that framework, persecution can become a migration pattern. From there, the step to genocide becoming a famine isn't that big. The data points are there. The facts add up. It's all so godamn <i>clean</i>. It's so godamn clean that one of the problems toward the end of our assigments make no sense at all outside the scope of the simulations we toy around with - the theoretical assignment can only be proven if we treat the number 0 as a purely mathematical concept within the computational landscape of the programming itself. After all, 0 can be zero, nothing at all, or an infinity of numbers. Suddenly there's no end to the possibilities. And during all this, a disconerning question starts formulating in the back of my mind - <i>what kind of government would want to cover up atrocities if not one which commits atrocities as we speak</i>? <br /><br />At that point, I wonder if the protagonist would even recognize a human being if zie looked one in the eye. And I wonder what zie would see if zie looked in the mirror.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-84485152645602402222016-01-19T17:55:00.000+01:002016-01-19T17:55:02.142+01:00In the absence of long rpgs<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For a second I thought that Telltale might become my new Bioware now that I don't have patience for 50+ hour videogames. Bioware has been that company which makes me buy a new console and always has me anticipating and following the progress of their upcoming releases. And then has me playing their games, and replaying them, and always loving them. I don't think there are any other companies out there which I've had this relationship with for the past 5-10 years. I used to love the Metal Gear Solids, and I used to play every new Castlevania and Silent Hill game, but there has not been anything quite like Bioware, meaning a company which makes a very specific type of game that isn't part of the same video game franchise/series and makes that type of game consistently awesome. For a while there was Cave and their shmups, but mostly it was their back catalogue that I explored, and by the time their games started reaching the Western hemipshere once again my interest in arcade shmups was already waning. And there was Nintendo and their trinity of Zelda, Mario and Metroid games. Of these, I'm mostly into Mario today, which I wouldn't have guessed ten years ago, but that's a franchise. There's all these indie developers whose upcoming projects I've been looking forward to (Aaron R. Reed, Jake Elliot,<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"> Terry
Cavanagh, Jason Rohrer, etc). But no<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">ne of these is <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;">Bioware. </span></span>And then there is Telltale. But Telltale is not Bioware either.</span></span></div>
<br />
Bioware for me has been about immersing myself in something for an extended period of time. It's been both about the hype before a game release, about playing the game with millions of other people, and then being part of the gaming communities collective memory. It's been about comparing their new game to their old ones, tracking the progress of their conversation systems and contextualizing their games in the video game industry as a whole. It's been about finding <a href="http://www.funnyjunk.com/Bioware+rpg+cliche+chart/funny-pictures/4994440">these types of charts</a> endearing. It's been about always getting to know interesting characters in interesting settings, and about doing cool missions with these characters. It's really not the same thing in Telltales games. In my playthrough of Tales Of Borderlands, I got the opportunity to talk to the supporting characters by approaching them on my own maybe once or twice per episode. There were a lot of other conversations (seeing as the game consists primarily of these), but mostly in-action, as part of the plot development. One might see this as a strength and proof of good writing. But it's not the same thing as kicking back with your squadron in your spaceship, extensively getting filled in on their backstory and what problems they might have had with each-other while you were out doing something else. It's not the same as taking in what a character is asking of you in your own pace, then deciding how to answer, approaching the problem at hand. It's not the same as exploring a world and its characters in that RPG and Bioware specific fashion.<br />
<br />
So I mourn the fact that I don't have the same relationship to Bioware as I used to have, and that there doesn't seem to me anything close resembling a replacement. jRPGs just never worked for me in the same manner, and I even tried replaying both Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII just last weekend. I got five hours into FF7 and three hours into FF8, and this when playing without random encounters! No, I'll just have to remember those games through their soundtracks, because by God is the writing in them so bad that I honestly think many teenagers could come up with something better. And newer jRPGs, well, you know, they haven't gotten much better, and they sure as hell haven't become much shorter. And I guess that's part of the problem, that the open-world trend has taken over both the new Dragon Age/Metal Gear Solid games and the upcoming Zelda (although in the context of the Zelda franchise I'm actually intrigued).<br />
<br />
But, you know, I did play Pillars of Eternity last year. It was awesome, even though it wasn't Bioware. And this year the new Planescape is coming out. Perhaps it's not so bad after all, it's just me being nostalgic as always. And then there is always Mass Effect: Andromeda. If they make just enough changes and don't make it too much of an open world game, I might give it a spin, and I might even get hyped before release. Well, if I get a PS4 that is, but I still don't know any other game which might convince me of doing so more than Bioware's upcoming one.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-48104147751567548562016-01-18T09:27:00.001+01:002016-06-03T09:03:48.807+02:00Critical Compilation - Her Story<a href="https://soundcloud.com/popmatters/moving-pixels-180-her-story?in=popmatters/sets/moving-pixels-podcasts">Moving Pixels Her Story Podcast</a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/her-story-spoilercast">Idle Thumbs Her Story Podcast</a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFvbN3K6EA8">Game Maker's Toolkit - How Her Story Works</a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/1299336">Her Story Gamers With Jobs Spoiler Section</a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKPWfY6RqkQ"><span class="watch-title" dir="ltr" id="eow-title" title="'Her Story' and the Birth of the Reader - Writing on Games">'Her Story' and the Birth of the Reader - Writing on Games</span></a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.appunwrapper.com/2015/06/24/her-story-walkthrough-guide/">Her Story: Walkthrough Guide and Discussion</a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
Barlow decided to make a game by himself and never looked back. <a href="http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2015/07/03/inside-her-story-the-indie-mystery-game-that-people-can-t-stop-analyzing.aspx">His
very first idea was to place the entire game around a police interview,
and the reasons behind that are more intriguing than you'd think.</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<i>[interview with Sam Barlow]</i><br />
At it’s core it’s a game about a single case, a murder, and <b>what’s different about it is that rather than taking the direction that other crime and detective games take of having you embody the detective and wander around, doing lots of gamey stuff, with the trappings of a police procedural – I’ve gone off on an extreme and created something where you have a lot less of the gamey stuff. </b>Almost to the point of having none of it. I’ve abstracted things but this, in theory, gives you a much greater sense of the feeling of being a detective and, for me, fires a lot of stuff off in the brain that you get from that kind of police procedural material.<br />
/.../<br />
<a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/23/text-lies-and-videotape-her-story-interview/">If you do a thought experiment and you imagine the holodeck exists and you’re standing in a fictional world, and to all extents and purposes you’re there – for me, at that point, all the things that make art just disappear. If I’m in this virtual space and it’s all happening to me, and I’m reacting exactly as if it IS happening to me, I completely lose that layer that enables me to parse something.</a><br />
<br />
If I’m watching a movie, there’s this wonderful thing where you have the floating viewpoint of the camera and a lot of your responses to the movie are as if you were in the position of that camera, spying on things, looking at things, reacting to the action with movement.<b> At the same time you’re doing this magic act of putting yourself in the shoes of the characters but also being outside of them, so you’re aware of their situation, you have dramatic irony, you have that whole concept where you’re able to think of things on a more thematic level – that’s what makes movies really interesting and makes them more than just soap operas*.</b><br />
<br />
Part of me, <b>when I’m trying to make games that are that immersive and virtual, is aware that there needs to be another thing that is pushing against it and deliberately defying it. </b>With Shattered Memories, we deliberately did things that are specifically designed to take you away from that character, Harry. When we’re cutting back and forth to the therapy sessions, we’d occasionally spawn Harry in a slightly different place to where you’d left him and some of the things that he said were there to deliberately push that.<br />
/.../<br />
RPS: We mentioned performance as an aspect of a psychiatrist’s job. The same must be true of a detective?<br />
<br />
Barlow: Yes, that <b>whole aspect of performance is key to the police interview. With the stuff about torture coming into the public domain now, I had that in the back of my mind while I was working.</b><br />
/.../<br />
It isn’t about uncovering contradictions – some of those contradictions and lies are interesting because they lead to a different truth.<br />
/.../<br />
You were talking earlier about how people take skeletal things and put flesh on them and particularly with women accused of murder, all of the tropes come out. When somebody is trying to get the death penalty, to show that the accused is beyond human, you get these concepts of the femme fatale and all of that. On some of these YouTube videos, people are analysing the way that this woman cries – is she crying in the right places or in the right ways? No, they’ll say, she’s deliberately crying, or she’s flirting with the police here. She’s evil! All this kind of stuff comes out.<br />
/.../<br />
Overall, <b>Her Story ends up being about the bigger picture rather than the crime. </b><br />
/.../<br />
I think there’s a bigger point that comes from all of this. It’s not just about armchair detectives, it’s true of everything. <b>People take very small pieces of information and extrapolate from there, ending up with conspiracy theories. You just have to look at some of the stuff in the games industry recently. The level of invasiveness and the way that people concoct crazed theories around stuff, which is essentially peoples’ lives!</b><br />
/.../<br />
<b>We’ve almost now become immune to reality. There’s a realness to VHS and scrappy footage that just doesn’t work on us anymore, partly because of found footage films mimicking reality. If I watch an advert for tissues or bread, I will be in tears. A little boy pedalling up a hill and his bike breaks, and I’m in tears, crying because of the artistry of this completely synthetic thing. But yet I can sit and watch video footage of these people who have lost loved ones, or been forced to do horrendous things that they’ll never recover from, and we’re able to sit and watch it and eat it up and post popcorn gifs on the internet.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>That’s partly what I’m trying to figure out in my head with Her Story.</b><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/20/8906465/her-story-ending-sam-barlow">Her Story creator wants the truth about the game's ending to stay a mystery.</a><br />
/.../<br />
"<b>My notes and my current understanding is that there's a definitive
version of the story that I have in my head</b>," Barlow said. "Certainly of
what happened prior to the various interviews; this was important as
well because all of the detectives' dialogue was fully scripted as well.<br />
"Obviously when you remove all the questions of the detectives —
obviously there are a lot more questions — but for the detectives to be
asking those questions and have their line of inquiry that would have to
be quite well thought out." Barlow has no plans to release those detective questions, though he did consider it for a short time. <br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
lately I’ve run into a strand of criticism of the game to the effect
that t<b>he central mystery is very trope-driven and highly implausible.</b>
(Here are several: <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2015/07/07/a-tale-of-two-women/#.VZ2ske1Viko">Claire Hosking</a>, <a href="http://www.slantmagazine.com/games/review/her-story">Jed Pressgrove</a>, <a href="https://soledadhonrado.wordpress.com/2015/07/07/her-story-his-cliches/">Soledad Honrado</a>.)<a href="https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/07/09/her-story-further-reflections/"> I read these critiques, I see what they’re getting at, and I think: yeah<b>, but I liked it anyway.</b></a><b> </b>Why? Fundamentally I believe stories need
to contain some measure of human truth to be worthwhile. Was I just
distracted here by how much fun the mechanic was, or did I see a truth
in it?
So I want to talk a bit about the actual story that is uncovered here, and about why I personally responded positively to it.<br />
/.../<br />
let’s get this bit out of the way: yes, the thing is crammed with
tropes.<b> It’s a Gothic story, fundamentally, the bones of Radcliffe and
Bronte still visible under the wrappings of more modern genres.</b> The
duality of persons, the midwife, the poison, the significant pictures
that are usually kept covered up; the obsession with mirrors and
fairy-tales, doppelgangers and disguises, the forbidden places within
the home, the family secrets preserved by servants, the false parentage.
No, of course it’s not plausible. This kind of story has never been
plausible. It never made sense that Mrs. Rochester could hang out in the
attic that whole time without Jane finding out, either. The Gothic is a way of talking about irrationality, darkness in the
soul, and the fact that people aren’t consistently just one thing or
another. Though the Gothic is full of women who might, in the words of
some of the reviewers I linked above, fall into the “crazy bitches”
category, it was also often written by and for women, concerned with
domesticity, and touching on family loyalty and family perversion.
“These tropes are really old tropes!!” is obviously not an excuse of
any kind: I don’t think the mere presence of recognizable tropes is an
automatic artistic demerit, but what is harmful or derivative remains so
regardless of length of pedigree.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>So what truth did I see in all this? I think: the social mutability
of self, which is something that everyone inevitably experiences.</b> It has
been especially present in my life the past few years. I travel more
and have increasingly non-overlapping social circles, so that I’m
playing the role of native and foreigner, novice and expert, relatively
rich and relatively poor, depending on environmental factors that change
sometimes many times a day. And for reasons of career, I’ve also needed
to give more thought to actually managing all this, rather than just
observing it in a bemused way<b>. Here’s a thing that happens to me pretty frequently. I’m at a
game-related conference. I may be wearing a speaker badge. A young man
comes up to me; often he’s a student, sometimes a bit older. He asks me
what I’m into, game-wise, and I say that I work in interactive
narrative. This is the starting gun. He begins to tell me all about
interactive narrative. </b>He has deep theories about interactive narrative,
in fact, which are usually grounded in having played a couple episodes
of The Walking Dead, or maybe the end of Portal or Bioshock. Typically the insight he wants to share with me is something like
“it’s really hard to have both story and gameplay” or “it ruins the
story if you let the player make important decisions” or “twist endings,
man, whoa”. <b>There isn’t really a stopping point for me to say anything.
Sometimes he may transition from telling me his insights to giving me
some advice about how I might “break into” the field, e.g. by working in
QA, or maybe teaching myself to program a bit. Gently, he may tell me
that I shouldn’t be scared of code and it might really help me out to
learn some. </b>If I somehow manage to get a word in and mention that I do
code, the fact that my language of choice isn’t C++ inevitably entitles
him to blow this information off again. Sometimes at this point I excuse myself from the conversation and go
find someone else to talk to, or the bathroom, or a drink, or just the
nearest exit. Just occasionally, the incident gets an alternate ending:
someone Student <i>has</i> heard of and respects — his professor, an
older dev, a journalist — comes over and says, “HI EMILY! It is great to
meet you! I love your work!” Student becomes confused, then silent.
Professor and I have a conversation instead.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>It’s not lost on me that I’ve needed to learn a lot of traditionally
feminine-coded and traditionally less-valued skills (I pretty much never
wore makeup before a couple of years ago) precisely in order to
navigate an environment where I was shown less respect as a result of
being female<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc0mxOXbWIU&feature=youtu.be&t=3m35s">.</a></b>
I don’t think all this is about discovering how to be fake or how to
deceive people, but how to be myself in a way that other people will
best connect with, and that will draw the least negative feedback. Even
if it’s not fair to have to think about these issues, what happens when I
don’t think about them <i>gets in the way of doing my job</i>. <b>When
Student is talking down to me like I’ve never read a CYOA or opened a
terminal window, he’s not having a conversation with me as I am, but
with a projected imaginary version of me that I’ve failed to dispel.
Maybe it’s not really my fault as such, but we’d both be having a better
time if I could change that. The more authentic self, in other words, is sometimes also the more
deliberately enacted and performed self. And this is the point
(finally!) where we get back to what I liked about <i>Her Story</i>.
Eve is both the more false and the more true member of that pair. She
knows what she is doing and why she is doing it.</b> She is more confident,
braver, a superior liar. Hannah is less competent at being bad, without
being a better person. Eve, one feels, would not have lashed out and
killed Simon by accident. She might have killed him <i>on purpose</i> at some point, if she felt she had to, but not by accident. As exaggerated as the story incidents were, as much as the virginity
story squicked me out, as little as we have in common in circumstance or
(I hope!) personality, there was still <b>something about the deliberate
self-making of Eve that spoke to me.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.electrondance.com/her-story-is-awesome-but/">On that
last interview, it's important to note that the clips you bring back
with every search are ordered chronologically rather than given a
permanent random ordering.</a> This seemingly minor detail is
significant because<b> the final interview clips often get edged out of a
search's five clip cap</b>. This is an astute way to bake hard answers into
the game without having to gate them artificially, thus retaining Her
Story's sense of openness.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.popmatters.com/post/196149-the-nature-of-art-computers-and-limits-in-her-story/">If the player were able to act like an actual researcher, the game wouldn’t be very exciting.</a> Dumping an ordered list of all the videos
and sorting through them in order would have satisfied by academic
inclinations, but it would have drained the story of any mystery or
sense of discovery.<br />
/.../<b><br /><i>Her Story</i> does an uncanny job of modeling some aspects of real
technology, while at the same time ignoring the fundamental purpose of
that technology.</b> At times, it borders on being disingenuous. <i>Her Story</i> presents something that looks like the 1990s, but it only contains a small portion of the rules that governed that world. Why not embrace the artificial limits and change the entire setting into
a fantasy realm where memories can be magicked away or a cyber-punk
future where computing rules are more science fiction than fact?<br />
/.../<br />
<b><i>Her Story</i> is about investigating people’s true nature with a set of tools that have had their true nature diluted.</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
with the exception of Narcissus, all of the stories named above are about women. In her essay <i><a href="http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Book+as+mirror,+mirror+as+book%3A+the+significance+of+the+looking-glass...-a0218950936">Book as Mirror, Mirror as Book</a></i>,
Veronica Schanoes points out<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/making-sense-endless-reflections-her-story/"> “the historical association between femininity and the trope of the mirror,” particularly in fairy tales</a>. Schanoes also discusses the long tradition
of Eve—the biblical first woman and humanity’s first sinner—being
portrayed looking into a mirror. “<b>Eve’s connection with mirrors suggests
the medieval emblem of vanitas, always depicted as a woman gazing at
herself in a mirror</b>,” she writes. In <i>Her Story</i>, Eve—the first twin
to appear on-screen and arguably the first to sin, by sleeping with
Hannah’s husband—presented with a set of psych-test pictures, Eve can’t
help but see herself in them. In the first, she sees Rapunzel, and
describes a girl trapped, “looking out the window because her mother
won’t let her out.” In the others, she tells tales of mistaken
identities, affairs and women wielding sharp objects. It’s practically a
full confession.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/06/24/her-story-sam-barlow/">It’s massively daring to tell your story in whatever order the player happens to stumble upon</a> — and yet my experience and the experience of
every reviewer I’ve read so far was that the narrative order they
experienced was compelling and memorable.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>I think, had <i>Her Story</i> been significantly more rigorous as a
puzzle, it would also have lost some of its emotional impact, and some
of its mechanical focus. I like that you really can find out a
satisfying amount without ever diverging from the main mechanic the game
offers you at the outset.</b><br />
§<br />
<br />
<b><i>Aisle</i> was, among other things, about how a character remembers his ex-lover. It’s explicitly a man’s feelings about a woman. <a href="http://www.unwinnable.com/2015/07/07/a-tale-of-two-women/#.VZ2ske1Viko"><i>Her Story</i> attempts this much trickier, less explored territory of fiction: a woman in her own words.</a></b><br />
/.../<br />
I feel like this was a plot that could have been built out believably,
deeply. Yet I find it so frustrating because <b>despite being called Her
Story, it keeps dodging the opportunity to say anything about women’s
real experiences.</b><br />
/.../<br />
<i>Her Story</i> is incredibly good at jolting the part of our brain
that seeks out motivations. I’ve read once that humans can have trouble
calculating some logic problems, but when those problems are framed as
checking other humans for cheating, we find the same logic much easier.
Our ability to reassemble complex stories is heightened when we suspect
other humans of deceit.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/247391/Surrendering_control_and_trusting_in_players_with_Her_Story.php">What’s
interesting is how Barlow doesn’t seem to sweat the idea that the
mystery might be solved quickly, or whether that mystery itself is all
that important to Her Story. </a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/06/25/her-story-verdict-analysis/">So
I’m assuming we all took slightly different routes through the story
and I’d be interested to know your favourite or most memorable AHA
moments because I’m thinking they’ll vary due to those different
pathways.</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-27-her-story-makes-game-narratives-personal-and-that-feels-like-the-future">There is a freedom in Her Story, and it is the freedom that comes from the game getting out of the way:</a>
you don't have to arrange your thoughts for the computer to then check
at the end. You don't have to show your workings. It's not Cluedo. You
don't actually have to arrange your thoughts at all. Ultimately, the
<b>game's about prejudice as much as detective work</b>; it's not Her Story but
Your Story as you weigh the evidence and apportion motives as you see fit. There is a neat thematic reason for all of this, I suspect, just as
there is a neat thematic reason that the logo on the opening screen
fades in and then slowly fades out again, one letter at a time. A
narrative can never belong to a single person for very long.<b> Once we
become historical artefacts, we belong to everyone, our agency is
steadily erased, and our actions are open to everyone's interpretation -
or lost for good</b>.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
*<span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;"> <i>"There
is a spectre haunting videogames: <b>the spectre of the holodeck</b>.
Developers, fans and the media are united in doing its work. Janet
Murray first summoned the word to game studies, but it has long since
escaped her control. In its purest form it is <b>the teleological
fantasy that games will one day achieve the status of perfect
simulation</b>: computerised experiences of such fidelity that they
consume all five senses and immerse the player in a fake reality. But
we pay tribute to it whenever we measure our games against it, or
imagine that it is the end-goal of the medium; whenever we repeat
simple platitudes that immersion is better than distance or the
intuitive better than the obtuse.</i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><i><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i> </i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i></div>
<div align="LEFT" style="font-weight: normal; line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
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<i><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;"><i>At
bottom, <b>holodeck thinking implies that mimesis is the highest
ambition of videogames</b>. <b>But games exist as more than reflections of
reality</b>: game places are not only representations of imaginary
locations, but are themselves actual places, with all the
characteristics of space as we know it; game systems are not only
representations of life systems, but independent formal arrangements
with their own terrors and joys. This truth acts against the
teleological tendency of the holodeck because it implies that a game
released two decades ago can be as interesting, complex or beautiful
for its own merits as a game released last month."<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></i></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></i>
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<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a><span style="color: navy;"><span lang="zxx"><a href="http://brindlebrothers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/fuck-holodeck_28.html"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><span style="background: transparent;">http://brindlebrothers.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/fuck-holodeck_28.html</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></a></span></span></div>
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Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-67081317188636690722016-01-17T13:16:00.001+01:002016-01-17T13:16:16.015+01:00Dreaming in gamespacesOne can be a gamer in many different ways, a notion I explored <a href="http://mindinggames.blogspot.se/2015/12/gamer-i-am.html">earlier</a>. I just realized another aspect of being a gamer - where one's mind wanders when it is time to choose one's creative weapon of choice.<br />
<br />
I recently saw The Martian, a sci-fi flick about a guy being left behind on Mars. And as often is the case when I interact with works of fiction (but also academic literature), I got inspired and started imagining scenarios; by projecting the possibility-space of what could occur in the movie later on; by trying to figure out how scientific the movie was; by trying to put myself in the position of the main character; by exploring the life of the main character after the end of the movie, and so on. My mind was exploding with creativity, a reaction I often have when watching an interesting movie, where really half of the experience is just me thinking about alternatives to the experience at hand, me extrapolating interesting things about the movie and toying with them. <br />
<br />
It also so happened that when watching The Martian, I remembered an idea for a video game which I wanted to make some years ago wherein you are a person in a spaceship with just a couple of minutes to live/play. A similar idea has since then been explored in<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"> <b>Orchids
To Dusk</b> (Pol
Clarissou), which in turn has conceptual similarities to earlier web-based works </span></span><b>4
Minutes and 33 Seconds of Uniqueness</b> (Petri/Kloonigames) and </span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><b>We
the Giants (</b>Peter
Groeneweg), but notes for my idea are still scribbles all over the pages of my copy of Alain de Bottons Religion For Atheists, which inspired me to imagine this spaceship game about connectivity and spirituality. I mean what better way to realize the connectdeness of everything than on your own deadbed, seeing the planet as a "pale blue dot"? I imagine going to ones own funeral might also work - someone should make a video game about that! <br /><br />Anway, watching the Martian something hit me - why do I start realizing video game ideas both when watching a movie and when reading a work of non-fiction? Because I am a gamer, of course! ;) Seriously though, my thinking patterns say something about me. I've never made a video game in my life, but I do give videogames a lot of thought. And even though words pop up in my head, often I want to insert them into a videogame of some type. I love a lot of things about video games, but one of the things I love the most is <i>inhabiting game spaces</i>. Many of the games I play these days (Her Story, Beginners Guide) don't have spaces you can traverse through and inhabit in the sense that you might traverse a space in games such as The Legend of Zelda or Baldur's Gate, but nontheless I love inhabiting game spaces and associate just walking around strongly with video gaming. And even though I love exploring game spaces conceptually and many of my favorite video games have these sorts of spaces, I'm happy that modern adventure games such as Telltales are linear and have game scenes rather than game spaces, as compared to oldschool point-and-clicks which were all about game spaces but then also all about backtracking through those spaces and being stuck in them far too long. <br /><br />I have less patience these days and I'm more interested in story than ever before, and thus just exploring game spaces for the sake of it doesn't cut it, which is why I didn't play Witcher 3, Dragon Age: Inquisition, or Fallout 4. But I'm not completely satisifed with the interactive movie solution presented in Telltales games either. Perhaps this is why I enjoy games such as Consortium so much, where you both have a very clear sense of space where it's all about mise-en-space rather than mise-en-scene, but you also have a lot of character interaction and story (all of the game takes place aboard a ship and thus there isn't much transportation necessary between the good bits). <a href="http://pathologic-game.com/">Pathologic</a> is similar, yet different: there, the characters and world-building is awesome, and there is also a clear sense of space, but most of the time is spent walking between interesting encouters, which takes far too much time and is something I hope Ice-Pick Lodge address in their upcoming remake, and not solely by making the walking bits/combat/scrounging system more intrusive/encompassing - then it just becomes a gamey survival simulator which has too little of the character/world building elements which I love about game spaces.<br /></span><br />
So what do I love about game spaces then? It's the sense of being somewhere specific, really connecting to that place, something which is easier to do when it has quality characters, and harder to do when it's empty or not fully-realized as a space and instead is more like a movie. It's also easier to get this sense of place when it's filled with characters that live and breathe (Life Is Strange, Undertale) as opposed to filled with audiologs of characters talking about the spaces at hand in the past (Bioshock, Dear Esther, etc). "Audiologs" exist in Life Is Strange and Undertale as well (I imagine it's really hard making a game as deep as Life Is Strange with as much a sense of space and character exploration without lazy environmental narrative "crutches" such as diary entries, newspapers, etc) but they do so as complements to exploring the space at hand rather than abstracting it completely. I guess that when I wish to be immersed in other worlds, I primarily want to be so through tightly-knit video game spaces with the traits mentioned above, and I actually don't wish to be immersed through text simply because I don't find text immersive enough. Text inspires me, non-fiction or fiction with for example sci-fi concepts such as the ones explored in Mievilles or Egans books especially, and I can imagine movie concepts, sure, but a good RPG such as Planescape Torment or an adventure game such as Pathologic makes me really want to live and breathe somewhere else for a while. Now then, I'm off to immerse myself in some <a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/388880/">Oxenfree</a>.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-9749974190627411832016-01-17T11:00:00.004+01:002016-01-17T11:00:50.593+01:00Longform Crit Comp 17/1there is a history of American temperance literature that Carousel slots
into nicely. <b>Temperance literature, very briefly, aimed to convert the
drunkard from his destructive ways and onto a path of righteousness and
bourgeois productivity. In many cases this was through tales of the
(female) children of these intemperate men taking the brunt of their
violence and, through the power of their innocent acceptance in the face
of this onslaught, their weathering of the storm, allowing these men
the chance of redemption</b>. It would seem that a broken and powerless man
is in need of an unflinching and unarguing object for his patriarchal
control in order to be rebuilt as a man of action. The drunk is drunk
because he has been denied, or has forsaken, the mantle of authority
that a man must wear: alcohol is a way to avoid responsibility and for
the family patriarch the first responsibility is ownership of the women
(and the as-yet ungendered boys) of his household./.../<br />
<b>When, in <a href="https://medium.com/optional-asides/eug%C3%A9nie-de-comstock-temperence-incest-and-the-shock-of-the-biological-35b55aafd81d#.8rgzvhlsw">Bioshock: Infinite</a>, then broken drunk Booker DeWitt batters down the
doors of a castle that he himself built in another life to rescue his
own daughter, trapped there in an asexual stasis it is not the chaos of
imagery and symbolism that it at first seems, but instead a direct
descendent of the form of rehabilitation pioneered by temperance
literature.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Perhaps unsurprisingly then the piece of
Infinite fan media that most makes sense to me is Zone’s Biocock:
Intimate, which collapses the erotic tension inherent in the game and as
Maddy Myers says ‘comes … a lot closer to offering me the version of
Elizabeth that I wanted to see than BioShock did,’ one who ‘speaks,
moans and calls the sexual shots.’ <br />
/.../ <br />
In Zone’s game, the
protagonist, this time a disembodied cock rather than a disembodied gun,
as if there is a real difference, is still Booker, making explicit the
incestuous undertones of the source game while neither remarking on them
or judging them.<br />
/.../<br />
Ken Levine, Bioshock’s lead creator, keeps telling
people to stop sexualising Elizabeth because he views her as a daughter.
But I cannot for the life of me imagine why he thought a young woman
would neither develop or be the subject of a sexual gaze, especially
when, as I keep saying, the story that is told in Infinite is the story
of her sexual awakening and her emergence from the cloying constraints
of a father who wants to own her and use her as a replacement for his
wife, with all of the sexual labour that that implies.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>It is
a fairly common mechanism of patriarchy that violence against women is
framed as being bad, by and for the understanding of men, on the premise
that ‘you wouldn’t want this to happen to your daughter,’ that a victim
is ‘somebody’s daughter.’ Fundamentally what this says is that men can
apparently only view women as an object in relation to a man, not as a
person in their own right. </b>The non-daughter is an acceptable site for
your sexual fantasies because she is not owned and spoken for. Female
sexual awakening is therefore posited as a process by which a man
separates the bond between father and daughter, destroying the tower and
building a new one to encase her and protect her from the sexual
fantasies of other men.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>as an industry and a society we will
continue to seek our redemption in the arms of those we have wronged,
whose job it is, like the little sisters of the original Bioshock, to be
used to fuel our monstrous rages and to accept our caresses and desires
when we break down and wish for forgiveness. We will continue to expect
these women to save us with their love.</b><br />
<i>[I
love how pieces like these can put something in a larger context and
enrich my understanding of something which didn't make as much sense
before. It's interesting how I even come to appreciate Bioshock Infinite
more in some twisted way, even if it's flawed in its execution and in
using this idea of temperance without my having seen them putting it in
brackets or providing self-reflexivity.]</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§<br /><br /><br />
<br />
we see<a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/fragile-beauty-in-fragile-dreams-part-1/"> Fragile Dreams trying to reconcile modern Japanese life with traditional Japanese thought</a>. However, looking at the game on a
character level complicates the aesthetic. These ways of seeing the
world are not natural, as Seto (the game’s protagonist) must spend the
entire game learning to appreciate the beauty that arises from a
fleeting reality.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>For Japanese aesthetes, the most beautiful
arts would blend into the greater world around them. </b>Anything that
announced its presence was considered simple, boisterous, and to be
avoided.<br />
/.../<br />
in terms of mono no aware, the best way to bring out something’s beauty is to remind us of its inevitable change or passing.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>as
long as technology does not supplant the feeling of change and being in
nature, it’s capable of functioning within Japanese aesthetic theory.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Over
the course of the game, Seto finds various broken items amid the
wreckage. When he takes those items to a bonfire, he finds out what they
are, and hears a short story regarding the item’s last owner. <b>There’s a
consistent message running through these stories: one of unfulfilled
desire</b>. The protagonists of these stories regret making choices they can
never fix, or they feel scared after having something valuable taken
from them. They realize that their lives are short, and Seto sees that
their worries outlasted them.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>The game relays most of these
narratives through some object the owner confided in. They intended to
relieve their pain at least a little bit, but all we see is their
emotional pain; we rarely see any kind of resolution. Therefore, the
objects fail to serve their intended purpose of consoling their owners.</b>
The cell phone’s story displays this quite poignantly: while her intent
is for the world to remember her, the tragic irony of her situation is
that she leaves us nothing by which we can identify her. We don’t know
her name or any details about her life, and it’s unclear if Seto can
even access those details. All her story illustrates is how insufficient
her possessions are for satisfying her wants, even if she can never
know that.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/fragile-beauty-in-fragile-dreams-part-2/"><br />If <i>Fragile Dreams</i> uses its environments to celebrate Japanese aesthetics, then it uses Seto, the protagonist, to complicate them.</a><br />
/.../<br />
<b>he’s so pre-occupied on his loss that he’s unable to draw a connection
between the impermanence of life and its being valued in the first
place.</b> Any mentions of impermanence at this point in the story reveal Seto’s
negative thoughts on the matter. For example, he opens the game with the
words “At the end of a summer that was all too short” <span style="color: #999999;">(tri-Crescendo)</span>.
On one level, these words indicate his wishes that the summer had
lasted longer. Yet on another, they connote loss. This is a consistent
theme throughout Seto’s opening narration, implying that he can only
perceive change and passing on painful terms. We might also draw
connections between the youthful connotations of summer, Seto’s
adolescence, and the death of his caretaker.<br />
/.../<br />
if we interpret the old man’s death as an opportunity for Seto to
appreciate life’s transience, then we must also interpret the
possibility of survivors as an opportunity for Seto to deny that very
same transience.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>Seto’s denial is best illustrated through his interactions with Ren</b>, a
silver-haired girl who appears to Seto very early in the narrative. She
runs from him the second the two meet, and he only gets brief glimpses
of her throughout the story. He follows her by the drawings she leaves
in her wake, and when the two finally cross paths, it’s only for a short
period of time. While the story uses these facts to code her character
with impermanence and uncertainty, this isn’t the meaning that Seto
reads from her. Upon first meeting her, he remarks, “On my journey
through the world, all the people I thought I saw slipped away like they
were just a mirage. But that girl… her cheek was warm to the touch” <span style="color: #999999;">(tri-Crescendo)</span>.
So for him, Ren represents life and stability. <b>She is the anchor
against which he can verify his own experiences as real. Yet the irony
is that is in worrying about whether his experiences are real, he fails
to appreciate them for what they are.</b><br />
/.../<br />
<b>the time he spends with other people shows him how it’s possible to
appreciate things for their temporary nature. </b>The first person to show
him this is PF, a robotic assistant that Seto attaches to his back. The
two grow close to each other as they explore the underground mall in
search of Ren. However, their journey together is very brief: at the end
of the day, PF’s battery drains, effectively ending her life.<br />
/.../ <br />
<b>Where the old man struggled to share his most intimate with regrets
with Seto after knowing him for fifteen years, PF has no problems
telling him about how much she loved talking with him, despite only
knowing him for a day.</b><br />
/.../<br />
The two themes that emerge from <b>Seto’s time with PF </b>— death and its relation to<b> <i>mono no aware</i> </b>—
carry throughout his encounters with other people. Chiyo demonstrates
this the best by bringing the two into focus for him. When the two
characters meet, <b>Seto initially sees her as the ghost of a bratty little
girl who demands that he does the impossible. But as he continues to
fulfill her requests, he eventually learns the reality of the situation:
she is an old woman on her death bed. </b>Chiyo leaves Seto with these final remarks:
<i>
"The day will come when your journey will
end as well. Your greatest adventure will be over and you will make
your way home. However, your journey will not be complete. The days will
still go on for you. One after another they will pass, until you’ve had
enough of the monotony. No new discoveries will await you. You’ll watch
the sun rise and set. That’s all your days will have to offer. That’s
the moment when you’ll realize the truth. The sunbeams, the wind rolling
over the tall grass, the idle chit-chat with friends…These were the
gems of your life. Then your heart will be carried off by the gentle,
caressing breeze and it will sparkle like a jewel, fade, and grow cold." </i><br />
/.../<br />
her own life suggests that <i>mono no aware</i> could be a psychological
state of being rather than something inherent in life’s experiences.
<b>She was able to view the same natural phenomenon (sunrise/sunset) at
least twice in her life but have greatly divergent reactions to them at
different times. In her youth, she viewed the sun’s movement as a dull
monotony. It is only on her deathbed that she can finally appreciate it
as a liberating event. That realization didn’t come to her in a moment;
she had to cultivate it over an entire lifetime of thought on the
matter. </b>In relaying her message to Seto, Chiyo helps him through the
process of appreciating life’s transitory nature, and hopes to shorten
the time necessary to learn it.<br /><br /><br /><br />§<br />
<br /><br />
<i><br /></i>
<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/basements-basement/">Silent Hill 2’s architecture, along with its iconic blend of fog and darkness, is its main antagonist. </a><br />
/.../<br />
<b>Oddly
enough, this unnerving dysfunction stems from the game’s sense of
order. It has an obsession with the well-ordered spaces of institutions,
taking the player from an apartment block, to a hospital, to a prison,
and finally a hotel. The symmetrical ground plans for these locations,
found on the game’s various maps, seems to have been pulled wholesale
from life, rather than created for use in a videogame. In order to
become functional spaces in a game where exploration is key, these maps
have then been hacked into, with entrances blocked off and walls smashed
through. The divisions, functions and even internal logic of the game’s
architecture is subverted, room by room.</b> The game constantly forces the
player to turn back on herself at a dead end, to check again and again
the map, and try to connect its straight and true lines with the
decaying masonry around them.<br />
/.../<br />
The descents of Silent
Hill 2 are many. It is no coincidence that the game’s protagonist, James
Sunderland, begins his journey at a rest stop high above the town, and
must descend into it. This marks a preoccupation with downward gestures
that recurs throughout the game, from elevator rides, to climbing into
your own grave. <br />
/.../<br />
In the final third of Silent Hill 2
the player arrives at the top of a staircase. Its not the first
staircase in the game, or even the last, but it is the beginning of
something. Projecting down into darkness, it marks the start of the
game’s most exhausting descent.<br />
/.../<br />
This is where Silent
Hill 2’s architecture reveals itself as a psychological construct. <b>Up
above, in the town, ordered spaces stand in a struggle with the onset of
decay, but here, as you tread ever deeper, the subconscious takes over.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/pt-turns-corner-horror/">the beauty of P.T</a>. <b>is not in its basic looping structure, but they way in which it plays and experiments within that structure.</b><br />
/.../<br />
In semantic terms,<b> the game’s corner is analogous to the classic ghost-story phrase “and then.”</b>
It is the architectural equivalent of the shock reveal, articulated
through a 90-degree turn. It’s an ancient story-telling trick, holding
information back until the last possible second, but P.T.’s twist on it
is to do so without speaking a word, performing its repeated reveals
through the clever manipulation of space. Sometimes these reveals are
red-herrings, showing you the corridor you expect to see, but in the
world of P.T. even this is a cause for concern—if the corridor hasn’t
changed, then something else has. It’s worth nothing that almost
everything that happens, from bloody fridges to generic horror graffiti,
happens on the other side of that corner. After every repetition the
first task is clear—walk. This is the way the storyteller has you in her
grip. “She entered the corridor,” P.T.’s storyteller says, “walking
cautiously, unsure of what might be waiting for her. As she reached the
familiar corner she paused … and then …”<br />
/.../<br />
The clock,
the phone and the radio, all three sources of information, are carefully
spread, each given its own alcove. The front door is the only door that
never opens, an escape to an outside world hinted at but never allowed.
At the end of the corridor lies a short set of steps, meaning that for
each loop you must descend a little further down. This descent is
carefully offset by the balcony that hides in the darkness above the
entryway, imbuing in the player the distinct feeling of being watched.
These precise architectural features, twisted through an elegant play of
light and shadow, are laid out with precise intelligence.<br />
/.../<br />
Agency
is non-existent—instead, choreography reigns supreme. P.T.’s scares may
follow well-worn horror iconography, but they don’t require it to
function. Instead they rely on the corner and the corridor, the room and
doorway, the bright and the dark. This—the idea that horror exists as
little more than a series of spatial arrangements, presences and
absences—is truly P.T.’s greatest trick.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
Eventually, every genre, every media, has its Ulysses.<b> I don’t know <a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/an-evasion-of-critique-or-writing-about-difficult-games-is-difficult/">if Kentucky Route Zero is Ulysses</a>. It’s certainly allusive: a structurally
complex, confusing, the brilliant and beautiful episodic point and click
game by Cardboard Computer in which a host of characters embark on a
seemingly meaningless and mythical journey through the finance and
poverty ravaged landscapes of rural Kentucky</b>. Regardless, writing about
KRZ is not “easy”. Partly because of its episodic nature, and partly — I
think — because of its dense and almost Beckettian allusiveness, its
semantic density, KRZ seems to escape ready comprehension and
understanding. Its mechanics (the word we often descend on to describe a
technical process) are both simple (literally, “point and click”) and
alarmingly diffuse (navigating, by symbols, the Zero itself). Meanwhile,
its ‘story’ – the fabula itself – is slippery, and the formal framework
around which it is arranged is complex. It’s perhaps the hardest ‘text’
– not simply ‘game’, but text, product, artefact (see? Even finding the
right category word is tough) – that I’ve ever tried to write about.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>Maybe
we’re not properly equipped to write long-form about video games</b> —
especially those games which excel in their own obscurity and
strangeness — and are not used to it, or are standing in the primordial
sludge of it.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>For KRZ, and games like it, it might be best to think with the rhizome in mind. You build your theory as you go.</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
[<a href="http://www.haywiremag.com/columns/storyplay-human-machines/">SOMA</a>]<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">These days, when we talk about being
human, we’re more <b>preoccupied with defining humanity in opposition to
machines and advanced AIs</b>. We want to reassure ourselves that we have
something more than an uncanny android who looks like us, acts like us,
speaks like us, and is better than us at almost everything. It’s as if
we know our feeling of superiority is dwindling. Taking the Aristotelian
definition to its extremes, perhaps we could say that modern-day
machines, as purely rational creations, are even more human than us.<br />/.../</span><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>In trying to preserve the core of what
it means to be human, it’s easy to forget that this core immediately
changed when coming into contact precisely with what we’re defining
humanity against. The very existence of machines has already changed our
concept of what it means to be human. </b><br />/.../</span></span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">attachment to the body as an
imprescindible part of one’s identity, both in a positive and in a
negative way, is one manifestation of that excess that is unique to the
human. </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">We also have have
Catherine, the exception who accompanies the player for the best part of
the game but who lives in a chip attached to Simon’s Omnitool. I don’t
think the game explicitly says why she doesn’t go mad like everyone else
who suffered a similar fate, but I believe the answer may be found in
her strong sense of purpose. </span></span></span>/.../<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>Catherine is the most liminal figure
in this world in which every barrier is being broken. A human mind in
purely mechanical hardware, she is driven by a very specific purpose,
and, like a machine, she evaluates the world purely in terms of utility
towards that purpose. But what she wants to achieve is precisely the
recovery of a space in which to be human. As such, she is driven by a
concept of what human life means as opposed to the mere survival of
biological functions, a concept that the WAU never understood.</b><br />/.../</span><br />
The machine ends when there is no clear objective left to achieve.
The human, as we have seen, begins with the excess: the reality of being
left behind when the objective has been achieved and disappears. It’s
the reality of being alive when there is nothing left to do, a reality
in which the body remains in its irreducible, useless materiality.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§<br />
Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-38736487700656103952016-01-16T11:58:00.002+01:002016-01-16T11:59:24.642+01:00Crit Links 16/1<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qxVDOc-oV8">Things of Beauty: Super Smash Bros. as Spectator Sport </a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGxQzbCuh2M">Into the Black: On Videogame Exploration </a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://kotaku.com/near-impossible-super-mario-world-glitch-executed-for-t-1681109239">Near-Impossible Super Mario World Glitch Done For First Time on SNES</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RzIDj0FGH0">Game Writing Pitfalls - Lost Opportunities in Games - Extra Credits</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Xa7qM1o18c">Ingenious Solutions in Video Game Design: A Long-form Analysis </a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=78rPt0RsosQ">WIRED by Design: A Game Designer Explains the Counterintuitive Secret to Fun </a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://gdcvault.com/play/1021862/Classic-Game-Postmortem">Classic Game Postmortem: Loom</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KnfiSv9bm4">Get Anticipated - The Final Bosman</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
What if you could talk to the monsters? <a href="https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/01/06/soma-mod-horror/#more-338697">The Wuss Mode: Monsters Won’t Attack mod for SOMA </a>[official
site] doesn’t quite allow you to hold conversations with the denizens
of Frictional’s latest creation but it does prevent them from chasing
you around the place until you die. <b>I’m excited to try this because
it might just improve the game significantly, simply by focusing on the
fact that fear does not need to be followed by violence and death. </b><br />
§<br />
<br />
<b>“One of the weirdest / saddest design exp I had: [Bioshock 2]
playtesters carefully loot every container for hours, then report hating
every moment.”</b><br />
- Zak McClendon, Lead Designer on Bioshock 2<br />
/.../<br />
I
was a moth to the dull flame of the hidden packages of GTA III
(Rockstar, 2001), pieces of virtual tat that simply add one to a
meaningless counter. I continued to burn rubber for hour after hour
until I had found every last package. They’re just one example of
the now ubiquitous collectible. <a href="http://www.electrondance.com/chekhovs-collectible/">Today I’d like to introduce the collective noun for the collectible: a fucking plague.</a><br />
/.../<br />
<b>thank
God for those first-person secret box games dubbed “walking
simulators”. At least there aren’t any items to hunt, right? We don’t
need rewards for our activities! Oh reallllly?</b><br />
/.../<br />
<b>Will
O’Neill, who wrote Actual Sunlight (2014) and provided words for Planet
of the Eyes (Cococucumber, 2015), tweeted that he walked an entire
football pitch in Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture (The Chinese Room,
2015) hoping to trigger a scripted response but there was nothing. He
felt the game was forcing him to do tedious things for fear of missing
out.</b> O’Neill is not the only one to feel like his time is being
squandered by these games. But when players who are into walking
simulators complain they have no reward other than walking – you know
something has gone wrong.<b> It’s our old friend the overjustification
effect: once you wrap an incentive around something people enjoy doing,
it performs a weird kind of alchemy that transmutes the fun into
drudgery, into work.</b><br />
/.../<br />
When I played Fuel, it was easy to
concentrate on the driving and forget about those paltry liveries and
vista points because they were too sparse, but the scrum of missions and
sidequests and collectibles had come to define GTA more than its
cityscapes. <b>I had hated GTA: San Andreas, with prior GTA experience
convincing me to conquer everything – but San Andreas was overwhelming
and I was left dejected.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>Yet all I needed to do was forget about the objectives and collectibles.</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>All I needed to do was get in a car and drive.</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
“Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” says the pick-up artist. “I’ve just got more game than you,” says your roommate who wears too much cologne. <a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/tinder-matchmaking-is-more-like-warcraft-than-you-might-think/">Comparisons between dating and gaming are commonplace in our web-obsessed culture, and thanks to a recent profile on Tinder from Fast Company, it turns out this connection is less superficial than you might think.</a><br />
/.../<br />
According to Tinder CEO Jonathan Badeen, <b>Tinder uses a variation of ELO scoring to determine how you rank among the site’s userbase</b>, and therefore, which profiles to suggest to you and whose queues your profile shows up in. Invented by physics professor Arpad Elo to determine rankings among chess players, ELO assigns ranks by judging players’ presumed skill levels against each other.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>The result is a system where your ranking is more determined by how you compare to other people rather than personal stats. </b>The system has since been adapted for use in football, baseball, and even videogames such as League of Legends and Warcraft. So when translated to Tinder, the algorithm can be understood on a basic level as one where who you match with determines who the app shows to you. Get matched with those with a high ELO, and the site will start populating your queue with the people Tinder as a whole finds more desirable. Get matched with those sporting a lower ELO, and the site will only show you people who don’t get as many matches from high-ranking users. Your ELO is determined by the supposed desirability of the people who think you’re worth dating.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>So if you want Tinder to think you’re cool, you need to match up with a greater number of popular users and fewer unpopular users. </b><br />
/.../<br />
Essentially, the key isn’t how many people find you attractive, but which people think you’re worth dating.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>What if higher-ELO people match with you, but you’re actually interested in the type of people who normally have lower-ELO ranks? Just because other high-cheekboned and full-lipped ELO titans aren’t interested in them doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be. You might even be driven away by traits that Tinder as a whole finds more attractive. But because the high-ELO community has deemed you worthy, your queue will be filled with them while the type of people you’re actually interested in remain out of reach.</b><br />
/.../<br />
<b>Dating is often framed as a competition, where one has to strive to attract as many people as possible. In this context, it might make sense to use a system born out of competition to rank which “leagues” people fall into. But the end goal of dating is one of the biggest cooperative endeavors people can take on together. Which raises the question: Is a system born out of a war game like Chess really the most appropriate way to judge compatibility?</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://sufficientlyhuman.com/archives/1148">What gives Homesickened its gut punch is that, ultimately, it is a story about trying to go home, but how, for many of us, we can never really do that again</a>.<b> It’s a story about loneliness, isolation and the consequences of putting more value in things than in the people around us</b>. The ironically wistful reproduction of CGA DOS conventions is, after all, the earnestly resigned sigh too heavy for the software designed to render it.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.polygon.com/features/2015/9/17/9343943/the-witness-hands-on-preview-feature-braid-jonathan-blow-interview-ps4-playstation-4-pc">Blow says he designs puzzles to be "first and foremost a representation of an idea, non-verbally." </a>Rather than just being a tricky thing for a player to solve, he wants each puzzle to say something to the player. He does this by actually writing out a sentence for each puzzle.<br />
/.../<br />
Here's where Blow reveals The Witness' greatest trick:<b> It's not only that he's not scared of players getting stuck, but that getting stuck is actually a key part of the process. It's a requirement to the feeling he wants the game to create.</b> "I try to make puzzles in The Witness as simple as they can be," Blow says. "You just don't get it. It's not only that you don't get it, but you don't feel like there's anything to tell you how to get it. It's as much of a brick wall as possible, with no red herrings or anything. So eventually, when you manage to stick your head through that brick wall and see what's past it, it's the most magical.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KnfiSv9bm4"> </a><br />
<a href="https://criticalswitch.bandcamp.com/album/critical-switch-winter-spring-2015">Critical Switch: Winter 2015</a><br />
Zolani Stewart - Bernband 14:50 <br />
Austin Howe - Party Size in JRPGs 07:36 <br />
<br />
Austin Howe - Dead Sun 10:24 <br />
<br />
Zolani Stewart - F-Zero and The Language of Space 10:50 <br />
<br />
Austin Howe - Rest In Pain 15:19 <br />
<br />
Zolani Stewart - Petrichor 07:57 <br />
<br />
Austin Howe - BBSD, Ludocentrism, Abstract Themes 06:09 <br />
<br />
Zolani Stewart - An Intro to Minimalism 15:10 <br />
<br />
Austin Howe - Republican Dad Mechanics 07:37 <br />
<br />
Zolani Stewart - Mirror's Edge: The Landscape of Sound 09:15 <br />
Devon Carter (Guest) - JRPGs and Simplicity 11:20 <br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://criticalswitch.bandcamp.com/album/critical-switch-summer-2015">Critical Switch: Summer 2015</a><br />
Austin C. Howe - Shovel Knight and Interrogation 07:27 <br />
Zolani Stewart - Expanding Interactivity 13:30 <br />
<br />
Austin C. Howe - FFVII and Jazz Standards 09:40 <br />
<br />
Austin Howe - Intro to Game Design and Drama 09:15 <br />
<br />
Crit Switch Podcast! 26:55 <br />
<br />
Heather Alexandra - Procedural Generation in Game Design 08:25 <br />
<br />
Zolani Stewart - Menus and UI 04:05 <br />
<br />
Game Design and Drama: The Resistance Curve 09:06 <br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
At
the end of disc one, Squall and Friends face Edea on a parade float in
Deling City. After the fight, when Edea seems defeated, she conjures an
enormous ice shard and propels it through Squall’s chest. Squall
stumbles back and falls off the platform. He sees Rinoa above, reaching
to him as he falls. Squall closes his eyes and dies. <a href="http://squallsdead.com/">The entire remaining game time, from the beginning of disc two to the second half of the ending movie, is a dream.</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
Leigh suggested that it might be fun for us to do a letter series as I played, <a href="http://www.pastemagazine.com/tag/ffvii_letters">combining her nuanced understanding with my fresh eyes to explore just what it is that makes FFVII the game it is.</a> I agreed, and we started to write.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/03/20/we-are-not-colonists-2.html">What we see in gaming right now is not colonialism, but evolution</a>: the
changes that need to take place for the art form to survive and thrive.
<b>Rather than imagining games as a community of chosen people whose
integrity must be protected, everyone must take a broader view of the
form and the multitudes it already contains.</b><br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://blog.brendanvance.com/2015/12/29/kafka-in-the-friend-zone/">Those who dwell in the Friend Zone are not imprisoned by the object of their desire; they are imprisoned by desire itself, always entreating them to chase their own tail.</a> The walls they build and occupy play host
to a thousand doppelgangers, each wearing the mask of one person. <b>They
think they hate the person, but they hate only themselves. They think
this person imprisoned them, but they must have imprisoned themselves.</b><br />
/.../<br />
<b>Reading as I am in the year 2015, I must describe K’s behaviour as
rapey; I must say he’d fit right in amongst the denizens of The Friend
Zone, nestled snugly between the Nice Guys™ and the Creepers. </b>It’s
possible that his actions appeared dashing in the eyes of the book’s
1915 audience (as well as the eyes of the Internet Man). Regardless, the
plot confirms for us that they were unwelcome and inappropriate, since
Miss Burstner vanishes into the woodwork following the evening’s events.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>My work on <i>Friend Zone</i> prompted me to read it as an elegy for
the Internet Man, delivered 100 years before the fact. Like the Internet
Man, K has exploited his station: lorded it above anyone he
could, believing this to be his birthright and purpose. </b>Like the
Internet Man, K is too busy chasing tail to comprehend the shape of
his crimes. His verdict is as much about big inscrutable forces as it
is about a peculiar personal failing; it plays out neither with K’s
complete consent nor fully against his will.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.electrondance.com/ethan-carter-vs-verde-station/">Ethan Carter's final cutscene is a story unlock, whereas Verde Station’s last scene is a total shocker that does not, in itself, answer the big questions. HOWEVER. Both games refute the lazy pejorative “walking simulator” albeit in different ways.</a><br />
/.../<br />
an interesting distinction between Ethan Carter and Verde Station. <b>The latter is much more authoritarian about gating progress, yet the former more inviting to the explorer-player, save for the endgame. Which is the better game? The question is how you like your mysteries spun.</b> If a player figures out the story in the first few minutes, then the player is consigned to watching pieces move into assigned positions - and this is one of the reasons why Gone Home gates progress through the story.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>I’ve yet to see environmental storytelling as coy and understated as Kairo, although that game confused many of its players, because Verde Station still needs to rely on lore in the form of handwritten notes scattered around and messages stored on terminals.</b> But it might be better to see Kairo as a special case because I’ve previously discussed how limiting it is to tell a story in a dead world. Certain messages are corrupted a little too conveniently, so the world feels like a puzzle authored just for you as opposed to a real situation you’re trying to make sense of.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<b>[The Talos Principle]</b><br />
human race perishes but, in its dying moments, initiates a long-term computer simulation in which it is hoped a sentient intelligence will evolve to carry on the torch of humanity... but the simulation itself is frightened to die. But it’s much more than that. It’s <a href="http://www.electrondance.com/talos-1-the-words-made-the-world/">a story of individuals pulling together to “save the world” and what exactly that means.</a> <b>It’s a story of a species facing the end with dignity. It’s a meditation on what it means to be sentient. It’s a story of programs desperate to understand the strange prison they are born into and the “god” that presides over them. And virtually all of this is told through text, some with a conversational component.</b><br />
/.../<br />
“I was actually trying really hard to avoid retelling the same story,” he explains, “since I really hate repeating myself, but everything kept evolving into that direction, perhaps partially because Croteam enjoyed The Infinite Ocean. <b>I think some of the mistakes I made in my first few drafts came from trying to avoid similarities. What I ended up deciding was that if The Infinite Ocean is a game about an AI becoming a god, Talos is about an AI becoming human.”</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<b>The saddest aspect of the QR texts is that as you move further towards the end of the game, they thin out, making it clear how many programs never made it through and the world grows more cold and lonely. </b><a href="http://www.electrondance.com/talos-2-i-am-the-words/">Rather than the Garden of Eden, the simulation is both purgatory and graveyard – many of the child programs fall into depression or go mad.</a><br />
<br />
This ethical aspect of the simulation is never made explicit, although Gehenna does sail much closer to these particular rocks. Elohim continues to iterate from one child program to another, attempting to find the program that will finally defeat the simulation and thus be the candidate for upload to physical hardware. But many of the AI already seem to be self-aware and these programs are being put through mental torture. I’m not sure the creators of the Process, Alexandra Drennan and her team, thought this far ahead, as if they assumed only the successful AI would feel anything at all. But they were trying to save humanity and these abused children were the inevitable price.<br />
/.../<br />
“I always intended for a certain amount of ambiguity there. It's the messiness of the story – how the simulation was made out of disparate parts, how it malfunctioned in odd ways, how maybe the very malfunctions ultimately helped it succeed – that makes it human to me. Elohim is part of that. He's supposed to be challenged, yes, but he takes that too far, out of desperation, out of fear. To the player's character Elohim is just a test, but to himself the whole God thing is more than an act, it's his whole reality. Maybe he endangers the entire Process by his actions. Maybe he actually does a better job than intended by accident. Maybe underneath it all he always knows how it's going to end, no matter how much he denies it. To me, that messiness and ambiguity is a more realistic reflection of how we deal with these things in the real world.<br />
<br />
“I should probably also point out that there are deliberate references to Jesus and his moments of doubt in Elohim's lines, another syncretic element of the story, another retelling. There's a reversal of roles at the end, God in his doubt submitting to man: let your will be done. <b>The end of the game, in many ways, is about Elohim's moment of humanity, a kind of precursor to the humanity about to be realized."</b>Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-56006716035604467982016-01-15T17:19:00.003+01:002016-01-27T05:50:22.753+01:00Truth through systems<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; font-weight: normal; margin-bottom: 0cm; text-decoration: none;">
Game systems often seem to be telling me something or try to convince me of something. But almost always the argument made is an emotional one or one that appeals to my own ideas about the systems simulated away from keyboard. <span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="text-decoration: none;"><a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9186628/Anestesia/index.html">Anestesia</a>, a 1 minute game by <a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"></a>Pedro Paiva about </span></span></span>addiction, self-hate, alienation and consumption in a modern capitalist setting can serve as an example. I'll also provide <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88paMD8ecmQ">a video of a playthrough</a> since I cannot seem to get the game working properly right now. <br />
<br />
I think it's an awesome game, succinctly and swiftly juggling complicated concepts and their relationship to one-another. I mean it's also very on the nose, but in a span of a minute or two it manages to explore quite a lot of ideas, and being quite terrifying in the process - even if it does so with the help of text and equations. It really does feel like a slap in the face, in more ways than one, and not only because it's very much in-your-face, but because it is just that and also speaks to my own experience which informs my understanding of the mechanics (understood as arguments/explorations) presented. But what kind of arguments does the game propose that might convince someone of something concerning its subject matter by virtue of its system, really? <br />
<br />
It's not easy to separate "the system" from "the rest" of the game, but at all points during the game one could easily interject and claim that the systems prestented are misconstrued - because there is too little agency, because it misrepresents communication between the involved parties, demonises capitalists, working conditions, media, etc. And although I can both agree and argue with those criticisms (I understand that the game simplifies things in order to make a point), I cannot truthfully say that the mechanics of the game make good arguments in the sense that for example <a href="http://ncase.me/polygons/">Parable of the Polygons</a> by Vi Hart & Nicky Case does. Then again, that game is more of an interactive spreadsheet than something that feels like a work of art. It employs more of a didactic method in its truthsaying than the Socratic questioning more common to art with its many ambiguities. <br />
<br />
Perhaps I'm being unfair to Anestesia here. Perhaps the fact that it manages to raise <i>so</i> many questions and topics for discussion is its strength, is in fact its method of teaching. We are dealing with two different beasts here, even if both approach the seemingly scientific by incorporating using the language of mathematics. I guess I would just like to see more games trying their hand at explorable explanations, newsgames, serious games. Remember those<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc">1</a>? It was a while ago we saw <a href="http://newsgaming.com/games/index12.htm">September 12th</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFK:_Reloaded">JFK Reloaded.</a> Those two examples might actually be good to put side to side when I think about it. September 12th claims that for every terrorist that is killed by bombs, some civilians die, and they in turn become future terrorists. I find this idea fascinating, but once again the argument seems more in the vein of Anestesia - it takes a lot of context for that argument to make sense in my world, context which I take for granted, but context nonetheless. The game claims that it isn't a game but a simulation, a simple model one can use to explore some aspects of the war on terror, but I mean as a simulation it's just piss poor, honestly. It doesn't give me any reason to believe that the model it uses for simulation has any credibility. It's mostly a think piece.<br />
<br />
JFK Reloaded on the other hand tries to recreate the actual day that JFK was murdered with the "facts" US citizens were told about the murder to either make the player recreate that scenario, or realize that in fact it couldn't have happened. It is journalism at play, basically. Or scientitic inquiry at play, rather. A similar game but placed in the here-and-now with another topic is <a href="http://playspent.org/html/">Spent - The Interactive Poverty Experience </a>(McKinney), an online<span class="st"> game about surviving poverty and homelessness created by ad agency McKinney for pro bono client Urban Ministries of Durham (</span>basically Cart Life but with actual statistics and actual examples).<span class="st"></span><br />
<br />
Could one combine these type of games with more traditional storytelling? It wouldn't be an easy task, going from all those macro perspectives, bird eye views and<a href="http://integral-naked-holons.s3.amazonaws.com/Overview/AQALfig3.jpg"> exteriors</a> to micro perspectives, phenomenological truths and interiors. I would like to see people try, though. Another missed opportunity seems to be the way in which the controls of games and the actual playing of games can inform the systems we toy with, the narratives which emerge from those systems. I watch playthroughs of video games on youtube sometimes, and very seldom do I think I miss out on something relevant by my not actually holding the controller in my hand. There is the obvious <a href="http://www.dealspwn.com/brothers-tale-sons-review-149448">example in Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons</a>, but other than that, it's often quite optional to actually play the game in order to understand the systems of a game as it relates to the themes it might explore.<br /><br /><br /><br />
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.5cm;">
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.5cm;">
§§§</div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.5cm;">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a><i><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">One
could speak of influence transparency, construction transparency,
and reference transparency.</span></span></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">
In video games, assumptions about the source and consequences of for
example technological advancements are sometimes presented, as in
Civilization 4, and are indeed needed to take into account to be
successful at the game. In Crude Oil, the authors assumptions about
the nature of oil prices, supply, and demand are all there, and
being transparent about the simplicity of hir formulas, zie is in
fact elucidating that it is possible for oil companies to operate on
similarly simplistic models for their own business operations. Games
such as these (Democracy 2 being a prime example) exemplifies a
different kind of citation than those in books, one that resembles a
journalist opening hir notebooks of interviews and research instead
of cherry picking a convenient quote. </span></span></span></i>
</div>
<div style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0cm;">
– <span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US">Newsgames,
Journalism at Play, Ian Bogost/Simon Ferrari/Bobby Schweizer</span></span></span></div>
</div>
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0.5cm;">
<span style="font-family: Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="en-US"></span></span></span></div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym"></a></div>
</div>
Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-2352871354177114092016-01-05T16:15:00.002+01:002016-01-05T16:24:38.751+01:00Living up to ideals - to queer or not to queerAs some sort of queer person, and at the very least a potential queer ally, I seem to believe that it's my duty to further queer art and queer communities. To shine light on smaller projects, games, which don't get much attention outside those communities. And so I make myself search out and play queer games. But sometimes I get tired of both the search and the playing. Often the payoff just isn't very good when compared to when I use other criteria to find good games than them being queer. I get tired of asking myself why I bother with playing those games if I don't have a dialogue with the queer communities which spawn them. But I don't very much wish to have that dialogue, and I don't necessarily enjoy myself enough to justify my playing through all those queer games. <br /><br />And I guess that's what it comes down to. I just don't feel like I need to play another game with trans protagonists about trans issues, and often that's what those games have to offer me, and not much more. So the question I should be asking myself is perhaps "who am I trying to please here?" What lack am I making up for? It could be argued that I don't have to like or even play the games I wish to mention, but at the same times that begs the question why queer games are more worth caring for than other games which I enjoy more. Complicating this inquiry is my always having a hard time with relating to groups which I might belong to in ways I don't wish to address right now, but it doesn't make things any better when I feel I'm doing something which I wouldn't otherwise out of some sense of duty that isn't very well defined and has questionable effect. <br />
<br />
These are not easy questions to answer, but for now let's just put it bluntly - <a href="https://shutupvideogames.wordpress.com/2015/07/10/shut-up-videogames-part-one/">it isn’t my job to like anybody’s game.</a> Now, I'm off to do something I want to do as a human being instead of some idealistic identity political bullcrap.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-20662464659619896052016-01-02T12:35:00.001+01:002016-01-04T13:03:54.448+01:00Playing with spoilers/informed playingIt's not as important for me anymore to go in blind into things. Sure, if I'm going into something which lasts an hour, I'd rather go in blind - I can replay it anyway. But if it's something longer and my hype isn't through the roof, I just might search out some more information concerning the alleged experience. I do this because one sees different things when one has knowledge of what's about to happen, or have some sort of context through which to analyze what's going on. If I've read that the game concerns itself with some sort of theme, or has a tragic ending, I can from a narrative and game-design perspective scan the game for thematic clues. It just might be a more interesting experience, especially if the game is convoluted in its handling of themes or I just don't have the mental powers to glean them myself. Another plus is that if I already know "what's about to happen", then there is a smaller chance of my playing just to find out what happens, which means that I can quit the game even if it's so-so but I want to know how it ends.<br />
<br />
If would be cool if there was some sort of game wiki thing which worked as a sort of primer for specific video games and what one could be expecting from them upon play. It could be just a breakdown of conventions explored, or just questions one might try to answer when playing the game. For a game such as Life Is Strange, it could be things like "who writes what type of grafitti, what patterns can you discern and what functions do they serve?", "there are some animals in Life Is Strange - why these specific animals, why does Max happen upon them when zie does, and in what ways do they inform our understanding of different characters?", or "can the color coding of npc clothing reveal something or be read in interesting ways?". <br />
<br />
I guess I just which there was more study/teaching material for video games in the same way that there are for books in American highschool movies. Resources where one could find study assignments for each chapter of a video game that makes one appreciate video game design more, to make one think more critically or just get a greater sense of meaning and context of the work as a historical piece, as part of a design school, as part of a genre, etc. I guess one thing that books have going for them is that spoilers aren't considered as important because the books that are being read are classics - we know already that Madame Bovary becomes insane, that Raskolnikov goes to prison, and K is executed and so we can discuss those things in the context of the whole book right from the first page. In that sense we need more Citizen Kane type videogames for sure.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-62203364131910859702015-12-30T09:50:00.001+01:002015-12-30T09:50:37.775+01:00Critical Compilation - Mental Health/Illness<br />
It took a long time and a lot of work to name it as trauma, and even
more work, still ongoing, to understand how I could keep it from
destroying my life. <br />
/.../<br />
<a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/breaking-the-circle-exploring-trauma-in-bioshock-infinite/">I
want to say people who loved me asked me to get help, or that I had
some kind of breakthrough that I couldn’t spend the rest of my life that
way, but that’s not what happened. What actually happened is that I
played Bioshock Infinite.</a><br />
/.../<br />
for all the things it gets wrong — and it’s so, so many things — it gets so many things right about trauma.<br />
/.../<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Until the core physical experience of trauma — feeling scared stiff,
frozen in fear or collapsing and going numb — unwinds and transforms,
one remains stuck, a captive of one’s own entwined fear and
helplessness. The… perception of seemingly unbearable experiences leads
us to avoid and deny them, to tighten up against them and then split off
from them. Resorting to these “defenses” is, however, like drinking
salt water to quench extreme thirst. Booker’s split comes at a pivotal
baptism scene, implied to take place directly after Wounded Knee
although with no sign of the battle in sight. I<b>t’s here, the game tells
us, that one version of Booker decides to become Comstock, washing
himself clean of his sins, putting the past behind him, and eventually
going on to create the floating white theocracy of Columbia. Yet
Booker-as-Comstock is repression, stagnation, Peter Levine’s avoidance
and denial; he deals with his trauma by powerfully and absolutely
pretending it never happened.</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
That’s the salvific promise of the
game’s understanding of baptismal doctrine; but the past, it goes on to
show, cannot be wiped away. Columbia is Comstock’s monument to
everything he won’t deal with, a testament to the all-saving power of
staying stuck and the bandage on the unbindable wound of his actions.
With Columbia he can write a new story about Wounded Knee, about the
Boxer Rebellion, about the False Shepherd and the Lamb and the future
and himself. With Columbia he can pretend that everything is fine.</div>
/.../<br />
Having a wife and a family could have
been the coming back to life Booker needed, but instead, when it ends in
tragedy, he turned to the violent, ugly life of the Pinkertons. Peter
Levine writes, “Humans… reterrorize themselves out of their (misplaced)
fear of their own intense sensations and emotions… [making] the process
of exiting immobility fearful and potentially violent.”<sup><a class="footnote-link footnote-identifier-link" href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/breaking-the-circle-exploring-trauma-in-bioshock-infinite/#footnote_1_3242" id="identifier_1_3242" title="Levine. In an Unspoken Voice. 60–62.">2</a></sup> Or, as Comstock tells Booker, “It always ends in blood.” Unlike Comstock, Booker’s efforts are at
least kinetic. He dives headfirst into the person he was, trying to
solve his problems through the actions that caused them in the first
place. Columbia was made for him by him, or another version of him. It
is a playground for every one of his maladaptive coping strategies and a
place where he can spin his wheels under the guise of getting better
while simply rehashing the same old things. It ends in blood because he
brings it, because he can’t bring anything else.<br />
/.../<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>When it does go wrong, Columbia is
Booker’s ideal therapy room. In this floating city, everything that
wrecks his life on the ground leads to success.</b> <b>Non-Columbia Booker
clearly has a drinking problem, but in Columbia drinking makes him
healthier. Non-Columbia Booker is pretty broke, if the losing gambling
receipts in his room are any indication, but in Columbia people toss
their riches in the trash; money is easy to come by and easy to spend.</b>
At the Good Time Club in Finkton, a powerful stranger offers Booker the
job of head of security and forces him to “audition” for the role,
according to the club’s marquee, through a series of increasingly
difficult wave battles. To me, this is Booker auditioning for
the role of himself, a chance to indulge in all the violent impulses
that lived in his heart through Wounded Knee and the Pinkertons and to
be lauded and praised for them. His annoyance and his determination to
just do the job that brought him to Columbia are all lies. There’s no
way he isn’t enjoying it, because it all makes sense; it feeds back in
on itself, re-traumatizing him, trapping him in that endless loop. He
drags Elizabeth into it too, helping her deal with her dead mother
through the same audition format: a series of wave battles with her
ghost to prove herself worthy of the dead woman’s love.<br />/.../</div>
<b>As I played through the end of <i>Infinite</i>
and the game made its strange sense of Booker’s story, I understood
what I had been doing to myself more clearly than any website or
pastel-covered self-help book had been able to point out.</b> I saw how I’d
let my past define me, how I constantly ran it over in my mind, refusing
to try a new door, a new way, refusing to let anything else in. I<b>f people had done bad things to me I
couldn’t make them stop by doing bad things to myself. Just as Booker
couldn’t end the cycle of bloodshed with more bloodshed. Just as
Comstock couldn’t end denial with more denial. Booker’s looping timeline
showed me my own and pointed to the thing I seemed to most fear and yet
most want: that I’d be dead inside forever, because even though it was
terrible, at least I knew it was safe. When Booker decides to step away
from that, to let his past drown him at the baptism, to submit fully to
the weight of everything that happened… well. We don’t quite know if it
breaks the cycle, but at least it’s something new.<br /></b><br />
§<br /><b><br />Mental
illness in fiction is often used as a way to strip individuals of their
humanity and, in doing so, reflects a cultural fear of what happens
when we, too, descend.</b> The horror of Eternal Darkness therefore lies not
in the monsters your character must fight, but in the long-term impact
of encountering those monsters.<br />
/.../<br />
<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/eternal-darkness-psychonauts-and-sanity-in-videogames/"><b>While
Eternal Darkness explores the descent into madness and casts insanity
as something to be avoided at all costs, Psychonauts takes a more
comprehensive view.</b></a><br />
/.../<br />
<b>the
game does not equate “mentally healthy” with being neurotypical in a
direct fashion, nor does it tie competency to lack of mental illness or
past trauma.</b> Not only does pretty much every camper training to become a
Psychonaut have traits that code for a mental illness—two happy campers
are plotting suicide in attempt to gain more powers, a boy wears a
tinfoil hat to avoid making things explode, and another child has
extreme hydrophobia—but so do some of the camp instructors. Even
characters that don’t have obvious coding, such as Raz, are shown to be
wrestling with a deeper issue of one kind or another. For Raz to “fix”
an issue obviously associated with a mental illness or help to resolve
feelings over a past trauma, the person must be afflicted by it on some
level; he does not assume particular eccentricities are a problem in the
absence of related distress.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>If Eternal Darkness is a game
that speaks to “normal” people’s fear of going insane, Psychonauts is
one that delves deeper into what being mentally healthy actually means.
Eternal Darkness assumes it is impossible to see terrible things without
going mad; Psychonauts largely assumes you’ve gone through something
terrible, but recognizes the impact of that on your psyche is dependent
on how you handle it and how your mental landscape looks otherwise. </b><br />
<br />§<br /><br />I was taken aback by the idea of having a conversation with someone who my mind immediately identified as another enemy. Another body to add to my ever-increasing count in the game. But instead, here I was, talking and trying to coerce information out of someone who was clearly an intelligent being. This <a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/selves-and-others-in-vampire-the-masquerade-bloodlines/">seemingly mundane occurrence of gently subverting the horror genre’s traditional Othering of its enemies into flawed but complex portrayals was one of the many achievements of Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines.</a><br />
/.../<br />
Games, particularly the ones that rely on having the players commit violent acts, have a poor reputation of stigmatizing mental illnesses through a negative portrayal, often equating people with such illnesses to monsters. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>One common way the horror genre antagonizes those with mental health issues is by depicting them as exhibiting violent, psychopathic behaviour that threatens the safety of the player character.</b> The endangerment of the player’s own well-being in the virtual world is a condition many action-based horror games use in order to justify the violent actions the player is then encouraged to commit towards the disabled bodies.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>However, Othering goes beyond the problematic representation of enemies. Mechanics like sanity meters are commonly used in games like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem to describe the mental state of the player character.</b> If the meter is filled to its maximum, it would generally result in the player character going “insane” and trigger a fail state. This mechanisation is deeply problematic, as on top of reinforcing existing stereotypes about a group of people, it further deepens the stigma surrounding them by misrepresentation. One of the most common misconceptions perpetuated by the stigmatizing mechanics of horror games is the false notion that mental illnesses lead to criminally violent behaviour.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>By establishing a setting which treats characters with mental illnesses with respect, Bloodlines tries to humanize key Malkavian non-player characters, and communicate empathy to the player.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Bloodlines is a strange and fascinating game on several levels. This is apparent already in the character creation scene. One of the six possible clans the players can role-play as, the Malkavians, are a group of vampires who suffer from a variety of mental illnesses including hallucination and schizophrenia. However, within Kindred — the colloquial term for the community of Vampires in the game’s universe — they are respected and treated as equals, and are often regarded as seers and oracles. Even within the Camarilla, the ruling body of the Kindred, Malkavians are given an equal seat of power, and thus represented fairly. By establishing a setting which treats characters with mental illnesses with respect, Bloodlines tries to humanize key Malkavian non-player characters, and communicate empathy to the player.<b> Bloodlines consciously avoids this negative stereotyping by carefully portraying every Malkavian NPC you meet during the course of the game as non-aggressive. </b><br />
/.../<br />
dissociative identity disorder (DID). Bloodlines deals with this issue in an interesting way by utilizing the same approach it does with Malkavians. It treats them as who they are, first and foremost — humans. This can be seen with how the game deals with The Twins.<br />
/.../<br />
Both Therese and Jeanette are respected by other NPCs in the Bloodlines world and it presents an example of the game providing a safe space in its universe to the Malkavians. Seeing the world treat Malkavians like Therese/Jeanette with respect acts as a deterrent for the player to Other them for their mental illnesses. Bloodlines, by adding a personal background to the characters, humanizes them and makes it easier for player to empathize with them. By foregrounding their humanity, Bloodlines allows Therese/Jeanette’s character to evolve without forcing stereotypes pertaining to their condition. However, it doesn’t fully evade the problematic aspects of the representation of Malkavians. By presenting their personality traits as eccentric and mystical, it creates a stereotype which reduces every Malkavian to that specific set of characteristics.<br />
/.../<br />
Bloodlines’ ambition comes to the fore when the you as a player choose a Malkavian character to be your protagonist. Unlike other clans, a Malkavian Player Character (PC) has a largely different script and they often speak in convoluted and vague dialogues to other characters. These dialogues have a vague tone which may be cryptic and opaque to a first-time player. However, what’s interesting to note is that these very dialogues are designed to serve as foreshadowing to a player on a repeat playthrough of the game. Many of them subtly hint at major revelations well before they are actually scripted to occur in the game’s plot.<br />
/.../<br />
By doing that, Bloodlines also implies that while words of someone suffering from mental illnesses are often relegated to ramblings by society, they may contain wisdom that may require a deeper understanding. It still can be seen as a form of Othering, but without much of the negative connotations that stigmatize people with mental illnesses. The kind of understanding, which in the context of the game, that only players who have experienced the game would have.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>while representing Malkavians as non-violent eccentrics subverts expectations established by horror tropes, that does not necessarily make them more relatable. Or do the methods Bloodlines employs fetishize characteristics we associate with people having mental conditions? It’s worth asking if representation in media always runs the risk of objectification on some level, no matter how nuanced it might be.</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
As a therapist, I’d like to say that every group session I’ve done with young people goes great. Unfortunately, the truth is that <a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/gaming-analogies-in-group-therapy/">some sessions are marked less by epiphanies and more by blank stares, fighting, and crayon-eating. The main difference? Whether the day’s topic actually resonates with the group.</a><br />
/.../<br />
Instead of tearing up the floorboards and replacing all of our current analogies with gaming references, I suggest that we recognise video games as a font for cases where kids have already encountered (and often triumphed over) real-world issues. Mario Kart wasn’t just a thing that those kids knew — it was a place where they felt anger and betrayal. It confronted them with the fact that their friends don’t always support them. For those kids, a reference to Mario Kart was an acknowledgement of these complex experiences.<br />
/.../<br />
There was a pause as the boys mulled these questions over. One boy disagreed. He started to tell me how the situations were nothing alike, when another boy leapt to his feet. “I’m stuck, and I don’t know what to do,” he proclaimed. “But there could be something, I just haven’t thought of it. There’s no CPS wiki. But there could be.” That’s <b>the power of gaming analogies. I didn’t have to sell them on changing their perspective or altering their behaviors. They found their own way in, using examples that were relevant in a context that was meaningful to them.</b> Minecraft provided real experiences of being stuck and having to wait. Minecraft provided real alternatives to “think of all the people you’d like to threaten.” The boys had already encountered their current problem. What’s more, they’d already triumphed.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/the-year-in-anxiety/">tension
between the potential freedom afforded by games and the baggage that
cannot be outrun is especially pronounced in games about anxiety and
depression.</a> How do you try on new identities when an emotional
condition tinges everything? Is anxiety one of the things players leave
behind or a part of real life that bleeds into games?<br />
/.../<br />
There
is no shortage of <b>games about anxiety and depression. The past year and a
half has seen an explosion of small, personal games, all of which
sought to address this subject in their own way</b>. <br />
/.../<br />
I don’t
want to be happier. I’d gladly settle for that, but it’s not a real
goal. Instead, I only wish for a bit more perspective, just enough to
get through the day with a minimum of fuss. The same is needed from
videogames: A little more perspective on what they can and cannot tell
us about others or ourselves. As in other media forms, anxiety and
depression aren’t signs of artistic seriousness—you can be a serious
artist or author without these afflictions—but they are challenges that
should be taken seriously. <b>We now have enough games to form a group
therapy session and hope some greater context comes of the exercise. </b>
That context is needed—it is one of the few areas in which I am
confident of not being alone.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
One 2013 review from the American Psychological Association found that <b>strategy videogames enhanced problem-solving skills in young children, and had the potential to increase “emotional resilience” in daily life. </b>In-game failures aren’t a dead end for children, the report argues; rather, when presented with a conflict, young players create coping mechanisms that help them advance through the game. In real life, investing energy into everyday life can be an overwhelming experience for gamers with mood disorders. <a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/escapism-mental-health-the-double-edged-psychology-of-gaming/">The sheer abundance of negative thoughts and feelings from depression can make the outside world feel too complex to handle. </a>However, videogames are designed with a solution in mind for the player to achieve. They present an interactive space for the player to overcome conflicts without any real world consequences for failing. In gaming, we tend to believe, there’s no such thing as a permanent loss — just restarting.<br />
/.../<br />
XCOM also lets players choose Easy or Normal difficulty options for a much more manageable experience. In most situations, in-game risk has been diminished to the point where players simply have to use cover and prioritize enemy targets in order to win missions. So as the player learns the game’s mechanics at their own pace, they can also become more confident in their abilities to succeed, and subsequently move onto the harder difficulty levels. This is particularly important for players with depression or anxiety, who might have a low threshold for in-game challenge. Afterwards, they can take on the harder difficulty levels.<br />
/.../<br />
Take one article review published in the American Journal of Play, “Video Games: Play That Can Do Serious Good.” According to the authors, <b>action, puzzle, and strategy videogames enhanced logical and visual information processing capabilities for their players. </b>Extended time playing the strategy game Rise of Nations, for instance, improved “task switching, working memory, and abstract reasoning” among individuals suffering from age-related cognitive declines. Likewise, action and puzzle videogames improved players’ ability to prioritize decisions and quickly switch between tasks. Alongside cognitive therapy, videogames help the brain operate more efficiently while observing and understanding information. <b>Hard data also shows that videogames can improve cognitive functioning, diminish the effects of depression and anxiety disorders, and can even be designed for therapeutic purposes</b>. According to TIME, the cognitive behavioral therapy videogame SPARX successfully helped 44% of players completely overcome their depression, with 66% experiencing decreased depression symptoms after playing the game. Likewise, in a recent study at Michigan State University, researchers found that their shape-identification videogame “improved concentration and lessened anxiety for the anxious participants [who played the game].” Associate professor of psychology Dr. Jason Moser even concluded there was a potential to open a new market specifically for videogame therapy.<br />
/.../<br />
However, videogames are not a saving grace from mental illnesses. Overuse presents real barriers for behavioral therapy, and relying on a videogame for personal happiness can develop addictive habits in players. <b>Without healthy boundaries and proper health care, mental illnesses can fester under gaming addictions.</b><br />
<br />§<br /><br />
<a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/27/editorial-horror-and-a-maddening-lack-of-imagination/">The spinning blades are no more nonsensical than the chainsaw wielding maniac. Neither belongs in a mental institution,but they do belong in a campy/creepy game environment.</a> The fact that the place purports to be
some kind of madhouse probably won’t matter very much to what little
narrative there might be. It’s wallpaper to act as a backdrop for
bludgeoning and butchery. It could as easily be a carnival full of
insane clowns or an abandoned hotel full of insane bellboys, or an
insurance office full of insane filing clerks.<br />
/.../<br />
Earlier today, I had a peculiar reaction to the footage of The Evil
Within that oozed through the clogged pipes of the interweb from the
Eurogamer Expo and directly onto my screen. As Craig pointed out, <b>the
spinny-blade room is so daft that it’s immediately rendered
non-threatening. Finding such a machine in a mental institution raises
logistical questions rather than the hairs on the back of my neck.</b><br />
/.../<br />
at their best, games can implicate us in ways that traditionally observed media cannot and turn the screw an extra few degrees.
However, games can also fill their corridors and torture chambers
with the mad, and make otherness and illness things to defeat or to hide
from rather than to engage with. That’s much less imaginative, much
less empathic and, most damning of all in a creative industry, much less
interesting.<br />
<br />
§<br /><br />
<b>This, we are made to understand, is how you become a heroine, a tomb raider. </b>Our
lead characters have to be hard, and while we accept a male hero with a
five o'clock shadow and a bad attitude generally unquestioned, <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/219074/What_did_they_do_to_you_Our_women_heroes_problem.php">a woman seems to need a reason to be hard. Something had to have been done to her. </a><br />
/.../<br />
<b>When you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you
want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.</b><br />
/.../<br />
"Sherlock Holmes gets to be brilliant, solitary, abrasive, Bohemian,
whimsical, brave, sad, manipulative, neurotic, vain, untidy, fastidious,
artistic, courteous, rude, a polymath genius. Female characters get to
be Strong." Further, we seem to have problematic ideas of how women
become Strong -- men break them, we assume.<br />
/.../<br />
Abstracted ideas about post-traumatic stress disorder or the catch-all
"mental health issues" are common in games -- apparently the logic is if
we're trying to advance narratives in action games, we need to find
nuanced rationales for why we're killing so many people with aplomb.<br />
<br />§<br /><br />
<b>The mentally ill make for good villains, across all media in fact</b>. You
see, we just don't stop, we don't know how. We can't listen to reason,
so the question of the appropriateness of force is taken away from you,
the protagonist. We make things easy as well, because ultimately, we
want to die. Not the clean, pure death urge of the hero either, who
stakes his life on the promise of a better world; we just want to be put
out of our misery.<br />
/.../<br />
<a href="http://madnessandplay.blogspot.se/2013/12/getting-shot-at-in-all-my-guises.html">We need to be able to show the difference between madness and malice, because ideologies spread in a way that madness doesn't.</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
This is <a href="http://videogamesoftheoppressed.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/depression-quest-and-active-empathy/">why <b>Depression Quest </b>is not simply an “empathy game” that MAKES you understand depression, and why it is something more valuable.</a><br />
<br />
§<br /><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=js1OsJZq2Vg">Errant Signal - Actual Sunlight + Depression Quest</a><b> </b>(Spoilers) <br />
<br />
§<br /><br />
I wanted to start from one simple word, one that is used by marketing
departments and journalists alike; it pervades reviews, previews, the
lexicon of indie games and it trickled down to gamers themselves. The
word ‘addictive’. <b>Gaming is, as far as I know, the only community in which the word <a href="https://melodymeows.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/on-defending-myself-from-videogames/">addictive</a> is considered a positive</b>.<br />
<i>[This piece is really personal and hit home for me, even if my story
with depression is quite different and has made me play less and not
more games for the last ten years (but before that, yep, had me playing
Baldur's Gate 2 constantly for three months).<br /></i>§<br /><br /><span class="st"><span class="f"> </span><a href="http://spideyj.itch.io/final-girls">A visual novel about a group therapy session for final girls.</a></span>Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-13116753242846820402015-12-30T09:39:00.002+01:002015-12-30T10:34:48.565+01:00Brendan Vance on form, content, ideology and appropriation in modern media - a series in three partsFor a Twiney interactive context of the three texts in question, check out <a href="http://detritus.brendanvance.com/">Brendans website dedicated to the three texts</a>.<br /><br />1.<br />
<br />
Any designed work can be decomposed into two different kinds of features:<a href="http://blog.brendanvance.com/2013/11/02/problem-attic/"> Intrinsic features and extrinsic features</a>.
<b>An intrinsic feature is something we judge to be a non-reducible atom
of actual value that the audience wants and the work provides—that is,
the work’s purpose—while an extrinsic feature is anything that exists
solely to realize that purpose, providing no actual value in itself. </b><br />
/.../<br />
The
intrinsic features of Art media like literature or film, unlike those
of hammers and map APIs, are not easily reducible into language. Whereas
to design a hammer involves finding ways of realizing features whose
value is readily apparent, to make Art is to search for value lying
beyond the edges of our understanding: To capture something we know is
important to us even though we cannot quite say why. <br />
/.../<br />
Videogames
inherit a little from Art but mostly from product design, which has
been kind of a problem for us. As an industry we put faith in the idea
that there is intrinsic value in the games we develop, although we don’t
think very expansively about what that could be; instead we abstract
it, using ugly words like “content” as placeholders for value without
ever proving that it truly exists. We then set about designing
incredible machines that shuttle players towards these placeholders with
extremely high efficiency, which as designers is really what we’re good
at. We make the interface as usable as we can because players need it
in order to learn the rules. We teach the rules very carefully because
players need them in order to grok the dynamics. We shape our dynamics
strategically because enacting them is what will stimulate players to
feel the aesthetics. Somewhere at the core of all this, we suppose,
lives the “content” players are attempting to access: That which we have
abstracted away so that we could hurry towards doing safe,
understandable product design rather than risky, unfathomable Art.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>Problem
Attic is an unfashionable game.</b> It does not aspire to resemble that
which currently exists but with a cool twist, nor to stuff all its value
into the margins of a popular genre format. It is authored, rather
than just designed; its intrinsic features take the form of complex and
multifaceted statements that it realizes at all levels of the modern
videogame, from core systems all the way up to the user interface. It is
messy and, therefore, alive.<br />
/.../<br />
Everything we see is built
from colourful, patterned tiles. Although there are perhaps twenty or
thirty different kinds, most are not mechanically distinct from one
another; all space is partitioned into two contiguous parts, ‘wall’
versus ‘not-wall’, with each patterned tile corresponding to one of the
two. Our first instinct is to label this a poor design choice because
its affordances are unclear. (Why should the player have to learn
through physical experience which tiles can be traversed and which
cannot when it could be made visually obvious?) This, however, would be a
mistake. Conventional thinking conditions us to believe clear
affordances are unequivocally good because we view videogame design as
an exercise in catapulting people towards the mythical content unicorn
lying beneath all of our systems; this belief becomes invalid, however,
when unclear affordances better support some other intrinsic purpose
lying elsewhere in the structure of the work, and that is the case here.
The environment of Problem Attic models the mind of the protagonist,
and the walls represent the tangled mess of every habit and belief he
has ever internalized. Each person possesses such walls; they are the
reason why we act against our own best interests, making the same
mistakes over and over again.<br />
/.../<br />
Here is another unfashionable
choice. Punishing us for touching the Cross Guys even though that is
exactly what we must do to proceed reeks of poor affordances; it seems
to place the design at cross purposes, obfuscating the rules of the
system and causing us to form an inaccurate cognitive model of how the
game works. Again, however, Attic demonstrates that clear affordances
are not unequivocally good. This game is about human beings, who result
not from mythical content unicorns but from a roiling maelstrom of
culture and fraying DNA. The Cross Guys are characters, not mechanics,
and the game characterizes them as simple-minded horndogs who give no
consideration to the protagonist’s goals and, in fact, seek solely to
gratify themselves at his expense. In their role as the protagonist’s
jailers they must usually be avoided; in their role as the wielders of
power, however, it is occasionally necessary to exploit them even when
this does us harm. (The mechanics deceive, in other words, because they
model deceptive power structures.) That the world forces some among us
to use the ugliest of personal traits to their advantage would, in any
other context, be considered a thoughtful bit of hard-won wisdom that
speaks to the human condition. In videogames we are, for many
discomforting reasons, unaccustomed to receiving such wisdom.<br />
/.../<br />
We
may not confront the Cross directly; it cannot be destroyed or
pacified. We must instead discover a circuitous route through a maze of
nearly-invisible wall tiles, the room’s muddy platforming permitting us
to feel the protagonist’s paralysing fear. Interestingly, pressing the
magical ‘R’ key here does not reset the stage as it normally would, but
instead fades the world to black before casting us out to the attic’s
entry point. This particular stage, I hereby surmise, is not a place for
trial and error, to learn or to grow; it is more like a wound that
won’t heal, a nightmare to which the protagonist returns nightly. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>Problem
Attic changed the way I think about videogames. I am now convinced that
the virtues of clarity and craft, to which I had subscribed absolutely
as a matter of course, impose significant limitations on our expressive
potential that can be difficult to see until you play something like
this. </b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
2.<br />
<b><br />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.</b><br />
/.../<br />
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.<br />
/.../<br />
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.<br />
/.../<br />
<a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrendanVance/20140106/208092/The_Cult_of_the_Peacock.php?print=1">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.</a> 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.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>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</b><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
3.<br />
<br />
<br />
I develop videogames for a living, but I spent last year
really hating videogames. I questioned how it was I could consume 60
hours of ‘content’ for Assassin’s Creed 3 yet feel utterly unsatisfied
by my act of consumption. I questioned what it was I had consumed, other
than my own time. I questioned what it was I sought from the game in
the first place. I questioned the nature of the ‘content’ it claimed to
offer me; privately I began to suspect it might not even exist.<br />
/.../<br />
I awoke from my yearlong stupor the night I encountered a game called Problem Attic by a person named Liz Ryerson.<br />
/.../<a href="http://blog.brendanvance.com/2014/07/16/usurpers/"><br />This
is a story about how Steam, Twitter and the App Store came to exist.
It’s about how these services present themselves as our friends while
behaving as our enemies.</a> It’s about how they stole the internet
from us, creating a place where everything is ‘free’ but liberty remains
unavailable. Before I can reclaim my lost appendages we must first reclaim something
more fundamental: Our language, the medium through which we think.
Consider the power inherent in the words ‘form’ and ‘content’. ‘Form’
describes what the things we make <i>are</i>; thus they who define form decide what things <i>can be</i>. ‘Content’ is more powerful still because it defines what we <i>want</i>;
they who define content decide what is and is not valuable. Like all
powerful words, ‘form’ and ‘content’ have a political history.<br />
/.../<br />
To Hegel what we want from our media is not merely a convenient way to
waste 60 hours of our lives: What we want is access to universal truths.<br />
/.../<br />
When we consider Art in Hegelian terms its purpose is not mysterious or
difficult to grasp. For him Art is simply one of three different kinds
of form (the other two being philosophy and religion) through which
humans access the same content: <i>Geist</i>, the omnipresent mind and spirit of living ideas. <br />
/.../<br />
Hegel once declared, famously and obliquely, that ‘art is dead’.
Scholars do not agree on precisely what he meant by this, but my
preferred interpretation suggests the art we fully understand is, by
definition, already in the past. Art of the present must be alien,
unfathomable and difficult to identify because it is of young
mind/spirit. It is the bleeding edge of truth, reaching beyond what is
achievable through discursive means to seize something new and untamed. <i>Spelunky</i> has a spirit I can feel as I play it. I need not feel anxious about whether its procedurally-generated elements (its <i>Rogue</i>-like
parts) permit some kind of ‘meaningful artistic statement’. Rather, it
is through enacting and observing the movement of these elements that
its spirit, the <i>Spelunkengeist,</i> shall gradually come to life<i>.</i> <br />
/.../<br />
I believe our intrepid capitalists of yesteryear used newspapers, and
other forms of mass publication, to introduce a new politics of form and
content to the world. Where Hegel used these terms to distinguish ‘the
work itself’ (form) from ‘the ideas behind it’ (content), the newspaper
uses them to distinguish ‘the machine that aggregates/distributes’ from
‘the writing that fuels this machine’. What once was called ‘form’ is
now ‘content’, and what Hegel would call content can no longer be
described; it has fallen so far into obscurity that I must resurrect a
19th century German term just to communicate it in English.<br />
/.../<br />
The concept of ‘replay value’, so critical to today’s hottest
newspaper-likes, stems directly from this formula: Since we evaluate
‘content’ quantitatively it follows that a publication or videogame
could increase the value of its ‘content’ either by improving yield
or reducing the cost of production. We have hereby come to prefer our
‘content’ the same way we prefer our pig feed: Smooth tasting, from an
Ikea-branded trough. Think about how a 19th century philosopher like
Hegel might regard the concept of ‘replay value’. Would he commiserate
with us about how the mind/spirit of romanticism just doesn’t make for
large enough murals? Or would we have to pull out a bunch
of obscure 21st century English words just to explain to him what the
hell we were talking about? It’s important to realize that ‘replay
value’ is not some timeless virtue sought by all media for all of
history. It is a political viewpoint wrapped in a sales pitch
perpetuated by people trying to improve the market position of their
mass-produced entertainment products. By appropriating the word
‘content’, which denotes what we <i>want</i>, our intrepid capitalist
marketers have steered us away from the conceptual, spiritual and
artistic content Hegel envisions. All we want now is more stuff for a
lower price.<br />
/.../<br />
As a multicast medium the internet is not a
seller’s market; it is, in fact, the greatest buyer’s market of all
time. The writer’s predicament no longer involves convincing some
corporation
to make copies of her words; that part is practically free. Her
predicament now involves capturing the attention of an audience with
virtually limitless options available to it, then somehow converting
this hard-won attention into half of a living wage (presumably through
a pagan ritual like crowdfunding).<br />
/.../<br />
our intrepid capitalists sought to appropriate the concept of freeness
while appending a commercial twist: They planned for web services to
become <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre">free as in <i>gratis</i></a>,
turning “do it yourself” into “here, let me publish that for you in
exchange for the right to profit from it and oh, by the way, have a look
at this Chevy ad”. In the span of three or four years everything about
the internet changed: The do-it-yourself, Geocities-like, weird internet
of the mid ’90s became the professional, social networked,
boring internet we have today. We retroactively labelled this movement
‘Web 2.0’, a term describing the set of technologies and design/business
axioms that on the surface intend to anoint the user as a free (<i>libre</i>) contributor rather than powerless consumer while on the underside exploiting her contributions as freely given (<i>gratis</i>) ‘content’
to be sold as a commodity. The idea was to craft a sales pitch
around the prospect of creating Hegelian content, content as <i>libre</i>, while simultaneously converting readers’ contributions into ‘content’ as <i>gratis</i> to
fill the paper’s pages. They no longer intended to act as gatekeepers
between producer and consumer; all consumers would now become producers,
multicasting ‘content’ back and forth to one another through the ‘form’
of the all-in-one medium/product/town hall/marketplace the newspaper
would soon become. <br />
/.../<br />
Where the newspaper transfixed the reader by telling her what happened recently the web service would tell her what’s happening <i>right now</i>.
Where the newspaper monetized its audience through crude instruments
like subscriptions and broadly-focused mass advertising the web service
would seek to monetize everything: The user’s personal relationships,
her attention, her demographic data, her politics, her labour, her
secrets, her entire life. Our beleaguered dreamers would finally get
their wish. The user would no longer be a powerless consumer. Instead
she would become something much worse. She’d become ‘content’ itself, a
person qua commodity whose only real power lies in her potential to be
consumed. She would be a human AA battery, in other words, digested one
limb at a time by the hundreds of giant software systems now
descending upon her.<br />
/.../<br />
Gone is the HTML/CSS with which we contended in the MySpace era; gone is
the bloated wall of features we encounter every time we open
Facebook. Just like a videogame the Tweet<b style="color: #252525;">™</b> is easy to learn, difficult to master and punctual with its feedback. (Twitter has excellent game feel.)<br />
/.../<br />
When we encounter a situation like Sarkeesian’s, something outside the
parameters of the sales pitch, our typical response is to blame it on
some hostile other (‘the trolls’) or some fundamental defect in the
internet. Though we may chide Twitter for failing to develop
effective anti-harassment policies we reason the blame must lie
ultimately with us users; after all, the sales pitch convinces us that
Twitter makes us free as in <i>libre</i>, and ‘a few (hundred
thousand) bad apples’ may therefore choose freely to do harm. We neglect
to consider the possibility that Twitter did not fail at anything; that
preventing harassment has never been Twitter’s goal because the service
has far more to gain from permitting this sort of bullying than it
does from preventing it (new and more interesting ‘content’, increasing
entrenchment in its role as town square, more investment from users,
etc…). As far as Twitter is concerned the ideal anti-harassment policy is just
effective enough to prevent Sarkeesian from leaving while simultaneously
permitting thousands of people to enjoy harassing her every day. In
this way Twitter doesn’t need to engage directly in the Charles Foster
Kane-style yellow journalism of its predecessors; it reaps the same
rewards (while incurring very few of the risks) by allowing users to do
so on its behalf. So long as we continue holding Twitter solely to the
standard of its sales pitch the service remains free (as in <i>libre</i>) to preside as a ‘neutral third party’ over the very culture wars it facilitates, dropping a Promoted Tweet<b style="color: #252525;">™</b> or two into our timelines between all the vicious bile.<br />
/.../<br />
We ought to regard the Tweet<b style="color: #252525;">™</b> suspiciously,
as a glorified status update tuned more towards Twitter’s data mining
business than to our ostensibly free expression. We ought to insist
Twitter shape itself around our work rather than shaping our work
eagerly into Twitter’s business model (and thanking it for the
privilege). We ought at least to demand Twitter use some of its
extraordinarily lucrative data mining expertise to fight the harassment
of our peers rather than tacitly affording it. Instead we fixate on the <i>libre</i> hand dangling a new social appendage in front of us while the <i>gratis</i> hand converts all our ‘freely given’ energy into its own money and power.<br />
/.../<br />
The ‘form’ of Twitter, like that of the newspaper, demands a constant
stream of new things to bury all the old ones. It wants there to be
cases in which we miss things so we’ll adopt the underlying assumption
that work should shoot past us like a copy of <i>The New York Times</i>
rather than stand in permanence like the Bible, awaiting our approach.
The bell curve we see is not the inevitable product of posting work on
the internet; it’s the product of routing our work through a host of
different web services designed to consume the new and then discard it.
We chide Twitter for how ineffectual its search functions are, how
challenging it is to obtain any legible historical record of our
contributions to the free dialog its sales pitch claims is taking place.
We ignore the implicit acknowledgement that Twitter does not want us to
remember this history; that in fact, Twitter wants us to
forget. It wants us to depend on new ‘content’ rather than dwelling
in the old. It wants us to have a presence to <i>maintain</i> rather than construct. It wants us to forget the name of the author we just read but remember to Tweet<b style="color: #252525;">™</b>
it at all our friends no more than two or three times. It wants to be
a windswept desert made from a billion atoms of homogeneous
and disassociated ‘content’, ‘freeing’ us to build castles in the sand.
The <i>libre</i> hand promises us an oasis while the <i>gratis</i> hand c converts the whole internet into a desert.<br />
/.../<br />
As
developers our game can be good or bad; we can self-promote or be
totally obscure; we can spend a year in development or three days. All
these variables are completely non-predictive. Nobody knows how success
on the App Store actually works and no one ever has; hiring some
ex-Apple consultant to help us would be about as effective
as ritualistically slaughtering a goat. The App Store is a madhouse in
which success is entirely arbitrary. Usually when we find
ourselves participating in an arbitrary selection process granting
invariably low odds of success we don’t call that ‘egalitarian’; we call
it buying a lottery ticket. Every game theorist knows lottery
tickets are a waste of our time and money. The mistake we make when
dealing with the App Store is, once again, watching only the <i>libre</i> hand as it offers us the chance of a generous reward for our hard work; we ignore the <i>gratis</i>
hand tossing our name into a hat. This is why, looking upon the
madhouse, our response is to assume there is some defect in the service,
perhaps poor ‘discoverability’ or a lack of curation. We neglect to
realize that from Apple’s perspective <i>these are not defects</i>.
Apple presides, as a ‘neutral third party’ of course, over a lottery
that generates ~30% royalties regardless of who wins. They have no
reason to ‘curate’ or to make our apps ‘discoverable’. Their goal is to
do just enough to keep players and developers imprisoned in the
‘ecosystem’, locking everyone inside a horrific Thunderdome of their
creation (oops, I mean a ‘walled garden’) while charging admission for
the privilege. When we observe today’s class of small,
broke, powerless game studios subsisting from tiny mobile project to
tiny mobile project, we typically attribute their existence to
an apathetic audience and/or soulless business executives. We neglect to
notice how convenient our ‘neutral third parties’ might find it that
these developers are incapable of renegotiating the royalties they pay
or, say, founding a new ‘ecosystem’ of their own. Today we see Valve
travelling in the same direction as Apple, and we wonder whether Gabe
Newell can ‘fix’ the madhouse. If you’re Gabe Newell the madhouse is not
broken.<br />
/.../<br />
Consider, most damningly of all, the ways in which the web service makes
our work interchangeable. We approach Twitter, Steam and the App Store
with the newspaper-like mentality that wider distribution is always
better. We neglect to realize the internet is a buyer’s market:
Maximum distribution means maximum competition between ‘content
creators’ alongside minimum risk for the marketplace itself. Not only
does this make it difficult for developers to carve out an audience; it
also creates tremendous downward pressure on the value of our work.
Anyone intending to charge money for their videogame faces an army of
competitors willing to give theirs away for less, or for free. The
audience sees little difference between one piece of work or another; it
wants what the medium tells it to want, so what it wants is ‘content’.<br />
/.../<br />
We do indeed face an existential threat. Our wallets, however, are the
only place we shouldn’t look. We fail to realize the closer we get to
‘free’ the higher the hidden cost, and the more our intrepid
usurpers profit from the ruin of everything around them.<br />
/.../<br />
the change I want must resemble the form of <i>Attic</i> itself: A tiny fire in a mound of corporate detritus, growing a little at a time.<br />
/.../<br />
For
years beforehand my thinking had actually been fairly
pro-capitalist; I often espoused the myriad benefits of currency and
commerce. What I never did was consider the problem in terms of
consumption versus communion. I realize now I had fallen for the sales
pitch. This is not to say, however, that I currently advocate some
bloody communist revolt circa 1917. Instead I believe in sublation as
Hegel describes it. The internet is not some idyllic communist utopia
ruined forever by capitalist invaders; that is not the
whole truth. Without capital the internet would be a weird
intellectual ghetto; without community it would be a hopeless corporate
nightmare. It was the coalescence of these forces that gave the
internet its mind/spirit and created the Information Age.
Neither force is capable of simply erasing the other; thus, the whole
truth must result from both of them. The only way forward is to let
them merge together into something completely new.
The heart of my complaint, then, is not merely that predatory
corporations exist on the internet. It’s that we don’t recognize them
for what they are. It’s time to accept what ‘free’ really means, and to
demand an equitable share of the proceeds our labour generates.<br />
/.../<br />
The most important tool you have against capitalist hegemony is
understanding the whole nature of the transactions you perform. Remember
you are not merely a ‘content creator’ if you don’t want to be. You
don’t have to alienate the form of your work from its content, shaving
all the edges off so it can exist as a grain of sand in someone else’s
desert. Make the work YOU want to make and shove it down the
internet’s throat.
We who Twitter views as ‘content creators’ now live in a world where,
paradoxically, the most anti-capitalist measure we could take is to
charge money for things. I believe we need to do this whenever possible.
<br />
/.../<br />
Recall that Hegel models ideas as fundamentally historical:
Free structures of thought whose lineage stretches all the way back into
antiquity, guided forward by the recollection of past mistakes. Yet in
the capitalist dystopia we are quickly coming to inhabit there are no
‘ideas’ anymore. There is no form, no content and no <i>libre;</i> we live in a world where ‘free’ means<i> gratis</i>, ‘form’ means Twitter and ‘content’ means Tweets<b style="color: #252525;">™</b>.
Recall that appropriation is what capitalists do best. The goal of
appropriation is to erase history entirely: To focus solely on the
eternal <i>now</i>, divorced from all context, leaving us no basis on which to make choices.<br />
/.../<br />
Your latest project does not need to exist solely as two weeks’ worth of
viral bait in someone else’s ‘ecosystem’. The projects you’ve done in
the past do not need to languish as half-eaten corpses somewhere in a
forgotten database. Create a history for your work by interconnecting it
in meaningful and permanent ways (not just in Twitter mentions).
Provide paths from the new to the old. Connect it permanently to other
people and ideas so that these ideas can grow. Your work is not a
commodity; it’s alive. Build a home for it.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-43284056345053874682015-12-29T12:37:00.002+01:002015-12-29T12:37:37.404+01:00Me and horrorI've always enjoyed horror. It's part of who I am. I love horror. But do I, really? I used to love the exhileration of running home from a friends after having watched a horror movie because I was so scared of what might be out there. I even enjoyed the fact that I had to run with my hands in front of my face because I thought someone had maybe strung a line of some sort to cut my face up in my path home. It becomes more bizarre still -- I actually cherished the nightmares I had because they were such a creative outlet and inspiration and seemed so much more real than my waking life in some sense. And so I've always loved horror. But those nightmares are long gone, and I don't run home from friends apartments anymore, and if I do hurry on my bicycle, it's because I''m afraid actual people might hurt me, and not Chucky the doll or a Terminator . And that's no fun -- that's no fun at all. There is a difference. But I do still love feeling alive, and I do love the bizarre and surreal.<br />
<br />
I've come to the conclusion that I don't enjoy traditional horror anymore, but that I do enjoy horror tropes, existential horror and some form of <b>cozy horror</b>. You know, the eerie conversations between characters that take place in Silent Hill 3 to the sound of triphop beats. I feel that Kentucky Route Zero at times is the Silent Hill game I've been waiting for. It is a different beast altogether in many ways, but it has that surreal nightmare quality over it that I associate with Silent Hill as well. I loved Pathologic as a horror game, but don't think I at any time during it felt I had to take a break because I was too scared. And that's a good thing, it made it possible for me to enjoy the horrific qualities of it all the more. The darkness of Undertale isn't visceral but sublime. The horror of Silent Hill: Shattered Memories isn't visceral, but realizational. Slow-paced. It's the same with Kitty Horrorshows, David Szymanskis, Sherlock Connors and Cameron Kunzelmans horror games. They all have a long tail and haunt me after I've stopped interacting with them, because they bring something else to the table than a good scare. I'm not afraid of Chucky running after me in the dark anymore, but I still love how good horror experiences can get under my skin.<br />
<br />
In theory, I adore the horror design of Amnesia: The Dark Descent. It's pure genius that you can't look directly at the horrors that haunt you, and that you must hide in darkness from them - the very place where your sanity is depleted. But an hour or two in and I just don't care anymore, even if I try to follow the story that takes places in the notes found. I thoroughly enjoy reading Thomas Grips blogposts about video game horror design and the philosophy by which Soma was created, but I need more than good horror mechanics to be interested, and if something's too scary, well, then even the parts that are "more than just good horror mechanics" become fuzzy enough to be blocked out. And fuzzy isn't cozy nor existential.<br />
<br />
I can't wait to play Until Dawn with friends!Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-77580410298294802132015-12-29T12:37:00.001+01:002015-12-29T12:37:27.800+01:00Focus: Three horrific and Lovecraftian game devs in the walking simulator genre<div style="font-weight: normal;">
<a href="https://connorsherlock.wordpress.com/games/">Connor</a> <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/tag/connor-sherlock/">Sherlock</a><br />
<i>“In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."</i><b>Recommended game:</b> <a href="http://connor-sherlock.itch.io/marginalia">Marginalia</a>, made together with Cameron Kunzelman who also made the awesome horror game <a href="http://heylookatmygames.com/press/sheet.php?p=catachresis">Catachresis</a> and the quite funny <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/2013/04/23/released-slavoj-zizek-makes-a-twine-game/">Slavoj Žižek Makes A Twine Game</a>. (Kunzelman has an interesting <a href="http://thiscageisworms.com/">blog</a> as well.) <br />
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§</div>
<a href="http://sufficientlyhuman.com/archives/1067"><br />Kitty Horrorshow</a><br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;"> <i>"I still like telling stories, but I
want to make environments to contain the stories, so that people can
walk around and feel present and be absorbed and crane their necks up at
things.”</i></span><br />
<b>Recommended game:</b> <a href="http://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/chyrza">Chyrza</a>. No frights, just chills down my spine, all the way down. Exactly the way I like my horror.<br />
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§<br />
<a href="http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/"><br />David</a> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/popmatters/moving-pixels-185-the-music-machine?in=popmatters/sets/moving-pixels-podcasts">Szymanski</a><br />
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<i>
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this. - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.YzHZfC6F.dpuf</i></div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
<i>
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this. - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.YzHZfC6F.dpuf</i></div>
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<i>I’ve
dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties.
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.VHvUGoxC.dpuf</i></div>
<div id="stcpDiv" style="left: -1988px; position: absolute; top: -1999px;">
<i>I’ve
dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties.
That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of
uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something
better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game,
because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying
life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost
instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than
just this - See more at:
http://www.relyonhorror.com/in-depth/david-szymanski-interview-the-journey-to-horror-via-story-faith-and-impressionism/#sthash.VHvUGoxC.dpuf</i></div>
<i>"I’ve dealt (and still deal) with a lot of questions and uncertainties. That’s kind of the underlying theme of The Moon Sliver: the horror of uncertainty and the yearning that maybe there’s ultimately something better than this. I don’t think it’s specifically a Christian game, because I think everyone struggles with these questions. It’s portraying life as I see it. A lot of confusion, but there’s this deep almost instinctive knowledge that something isn’t right, and there’s more than just this."</i><br />
<b>Recommended games: </b><a href="http://jefequeso.itch.io/the-moon-sliver">The Moon Sliver</a> and <a href="http://jefequeso.itch.io/the-music-machine">The Music Machine</a>, and not because of their tangential story connection, but because they affected me the most. The have the best characterization of hir four games and explore hir relationship to faith most succinctly. <br />
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§§§<br />
<br />
<span style="font-weight: 400;">Rough, discontinuous edges; looming
architectural masses; bulging swathes of colour—all of them luminous, or
cast in shadow. These are just some of the effects you encounter in the
growing genre of freeware horror and landscape <b>games, spearheaded by
the likes of ceMelusine, Kitty Horrorshow, and Connor Sherlock.
Together, they constitute a <a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/making-sense-of-the-static/">“</a></b></span><a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/making-sense-of-the-static/"><b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">glitch art</span></i></b></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/making-sense-of-the-static/"><b>”</b></a> known for its lethargic smearing-together of retro graphics with dreamlike and impossible aesthetics. </span><br />
§<i><br /></i>Dialogue and thought texts appear where the speaker or thinker would
have been standing. The pop-ups thus work like stage directions overlaid
onto a 3D environment, adding another layer of interpretation to the
scene: Not only are you piecing together the flow of conversation, but
the flow of movement as well. This gives the empty, dead, and lonely
world a surprising dynamism and life that makes the story feel more
immediate, more in-the-moment.<br />
<i>/.../<br /><a href="http://www.popmatters.com/column/meaning-is-fleeting-in-the-moon-sliver/"><b>The Moon Sliver</b></a></i><b> is all about interpretation and misinterpretation
and reinterpretation, and the presentation of its story forces us to
live in that same state of confusion as its characters.</b><br />
/.../<br />
So when we do find the titular Moon Sliver, that holy document of
prophecy, and we hear of its concrete morality and its precise
blessings, the simplicity and straightforwardness of its divination
becomes very attractive. Precise prophecy is so much more comforting
than the vagaries of life. It’s no wonder these people worshiped The
Moon Sliver. It offers understanding.
<br />
But now The Moon Sliver is gone, and we too feel the oppressive
confusion that consumes the remaining islanders. Is its prophecy true?
Are its blessings real? Who are we without it to guide us? Who are we in
general?<br />
/.../<br />
The text never prioritizes one point of view, preventing us from forming
a sympathetic bias towards the protagonist. Or rather, <b>we’re allowed to
form a sympathetic bias towards each character since any one of them
could be the protagonist, could be “us”. </b> <br />
/.../<br />
The game combines past and present, purposefully trying to confuse us
about identity and time because it knows both of those things add
context to a scene that change its meaning, and <i>The Moon Sliver</i> wants us to be aware of this change.<br />
/.../<br />
<i>The Moon Sliver</i> is a story of four worlds, one belonging to each
character. Each of us constructs our own world through our own
experiences, and when those experiences aren’t enough, we may or may not
turn to others to fill in the blanks. It’s tempting to live in our
world only, but <b><i>The Moon Sliver</i> forces us to live outside of our own head, showing us a drama from every perspective</b>.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-52703809707720899872015-12-28T12:49:00.000+01:002015-12-28T12:56:41.048+01:00Crit Links 28/12<a href="http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/10/not-manifesto.html">Games are primarily conceptual / performance art; games are culture; it's more important to witness a game than to play it.</a><br />
/.../<br />
Invoke other games or cultural phenomena; your game is a piece of interconnected culture, not a walled garden.<br />
/.../<br />
We often think of game development as a technical discipline, but so much of a video game has nothing to do with code or technology.<b> You don't have to release a software patch to update a game; all you have to do is to change how people think about it and interact with it. To totally murder this metaphor: your voice is the most powerful auto-update utility ever.</b><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://brkeogh.com/2015/11/10/a-play-of-bodies-read-my-phd-thesis/">Chapter One</a> introduces a bunch of theory and argues that how <b>the participatory nature of videogames does not render them immune to textual analysis</b>.<br />
/.../<br />
Chapter Four makes the argument that <b>‘action’ is too reductively considered when we talk about videogames and that ‘looking’ and ‘listening’ are acting in their own right.</b> To say a play ‘does nothing’ during a cut-scene greatly misunderstands how bodies engage with moving images.<br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lHcTKWiZ8sI">Propaganda Games: Sesame Credit - The True Danger of Gamification</a> - Extra Credits <br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.arcadereview.net/ar02">The Arcade Review #2</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<b>"I was surprised how many people watched my rather strange film. At the same time, looking at the stats, I was even more surprised how few of the viewers actually watched the entire movie to the end. </b>There is a lot of scrubbing going on. I somehow thought I'm the only one who jumps around on the timeline of internet videos, but it's everybody." His reaction was to produce a new short film, which eventually would become a short computer game, called<a href="http://www.etterstudio.com/en/pnp.php"> Plug & Play. The idea was to give the viewers, who are all so eager to jump around the narrative, more control over his movie.</a> At the same time he wanted to have more control over the way the audience experiences the film by not allowing to skip the narrative without interacting with it and therefore become part of it.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
It’s a time when we’re increasingly within reach of each other, unbounded by physical distances due to digital technology, yet the overwhelming volume of information and possible number of connections to be made leaves us … where?<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/plug-play/"> Through Plug & Play‘s black-and-white binary world of male and female electronics—the plug and the socket—Frei seems to propose that we have become obsessed with fitting in with each other.</a> The tragedy, it is suggested, is that we find it to be a difficult desire to fulfill.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>The duration required for us to reject one another has been decreased substantially through these digital roulette wheels. And yet the time and effort required to actually connect with one another, to become friends or lovers, has not lessened at all. </b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/the-year-of-mom/">motherhood is often kept out of the creation, consumption, and conceptualization of popular culture.</a> A society ruled by the Kingdom of Fathers, as Rich
describes, relies on the devaluing of motherhood while also
simultaneously tasking motherhood with the most invaluable work on the
planet. A mother’s reward for breeding humanity is exclusion,
marginalization, and disregard. At most, motherhood appears in popular
culture as a concept: a perfect, selfless mirage or a horrid, selfish
monster. Her story is never told in full: from her exclusion in
something as silly as #dadbods, to the continued absence of significant
maternal stories in mainstream videogames, TV shows, and films,
patriarchy puts the mother in opposition to pop culture—after all
there’s no quicker way to kill a trend than to see your mom do it,
right? However, 2015 revealed glimpses of the mother’s elusive profile.<br />
/.../<br />
While
mothers are busy getting refrigerated, there’s no shortage of videogame
dads who capture the multiplicity of a three dimensional human being.
The dadification of games took place long before fatherhood became the
focus of a few “gritty” big-budget titles. <b>As an echo of our culture,
the paternal mentality has defined videogames for most (if not all) of
the medium’s existence: from Space Invaders to Pac-Man, the notion of
protecting your territory, conquering death through iteration, and
measuring success through monetary gain birthed the medium, and
continues to dominate game design to this day. </b><br />
/.../<br />
So we return
to the million dollar question: <b>what would a truly maternal videogame
look like? There’s no doubt that Toby Fox’s Undertale relies on the
inhumanly selfless portrait of motherhood, but it does so with a
purpose.</b><br />
/.../<br />
Most players kill Toriel on their first
playthrough, even if they’re aware of the game’s morality system. But
this choice, rather than serving as a reflection of the player’s lack of
moral fiber, instead holds the mirror up to videogames themselves.
This, Undertale says, is the kind of player patriarchal game design
produces: impatient, quick to quit, and more than willing to sacrifice
their own mother and humanity in the name of…what, even? Progress? A
positive feedback loop? This vague and arguably meaningless concept of
“leveling up” through “experience points”—whatever the fuck that even
means in this context? As games like Undertale show, maternal game
design isn’t just about telling worthwhile yet disregarded stories. The
popularity of paternal game design is indicative of deeper issues,
ranging from how we as a society measure success and who and what our
laws protect. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>After decades of paternal game design, I am
eager to unleash the potential of videogames born of woman. Motherhood
deserves more than a cursory glance, and play deserves the benefits of
creation instead of destruction. If and when that will happen, no one
can say. But in 2015, we captured a glimpse of what fruit it can bear. </b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
The only visible measure in <a href="https://killscreen.com/articles/orchids-to-dusk-lets-you-find-a-quiet-place-to-die/">Orchids to Dusk</a> is the oxygen level on the left of the screen (and there’s no way to refill it). <br />
/.../<br />
It’s <b>like directing your own funeral. </b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/a-lonely-walk/">The beautiful terror of Year Walk</a> is that in it, your deepest fears and anxieties are based on the truth. In a deranged twist of events, what I am experiencing is essentially a love story.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>My deepest fear is to have her eyes burn through mine and see her mouth the words, “I don’t love you anymore.”</b><br />
<br />
At the end of the jump scares, ominous soundtracks, and haunting creatures, <b>the fear of loss and betrayal is what lingers the longest in my Year Walk.</b> We give ourselves entirely in seeking the truth and yearning for love to the point of a physical and emotional breakdown. Perhaps this journey is the most accurate description of love and heartbreak: a series of signs and symbols we have to decode, and we receive either the answers that provide us warmth, or remain lost in the freezing woods until we are freed to walk again.<br />
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§<br />
<br />
<b><a href="http://ontologicalgeek.com/how-it-feels-to-play-at-all/">As an adult, how does one learn to play electronic games?</a> </b>With no older sibling or friend down the block to teach, no community of mates to check in with, no memory of games from childhood, how does one begin, how does one progress? <br />
/.../<br />
I really think this could be easier. Can’t someone create a graduated list of games for adult-onset players, a series of games to take on, in sequence, that would build familiarity and component skills and even attitudes, in a conscious way? Most players I know have only the blurriest memories of how one learns this stuff, little sense of the parts that make up the whole: sorting it out might be an interesting project.<br />
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§<br />
<br />
<b>“The journey is more important than…the other thing,”</b> muses one of your passengers, too enraptured by the pure alcohol of the drive to bother to complete philosophical cliches. And in a sense, that’s Glitchhikers. The emotion is more important than what the emotion might mean. Just being in the game matters more than…the other thing. The antithesis of other videogames, where making me feel something, some specific and preferably unclaimed by another developer emotion is the only and final goal, <a href="https://shutupvideogames.wordpress.com/2015/05/26/keep-talking-glitchhikers/">Glitchhikers allows me to ruminate, to imbibe, to simply “be”.</a><br />
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§<br />
<br />
<b>[Three Fourths Home]</b><br />
<a href="https://melodymeows.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/poverty-powerlessness-part-1-three-fourths-home/">the dream of climbing the social ladder </a>puts emphasis on the economic costs and benefits of ‘making it’, but ignores the more immaterial costs, such as separation from one’s family and loved ones. That narrative does not factor in those costs because they are not part of its implied values.<br />
<br />
the family is almost entirely dependent on a medical corporation, possibly a health insurance company. <br />
<br />
another effect of the family’s limited options and urgent needs is that they are hoping Kelly becomes a part of that same oppressive structure, which is very twisted if you think about it, but it’s a consideration that they cannot afford to do.<br />
<br />
<b>People don’t fight back against the powerful abusing their power, they beg them.</b><br />
<br />
in CL [Cart Life] there is a sense that one may very well hold on and live another day, if they try hard enough, if they know their way around the city, if they balance everything just right. And even that is a slightly more optimistic perspective than Three Fourths Home has to offer, because systems can be read, can become not scary but familiar, and they can be manipulated. <b>TFH offers nothing but a one-way street, with an emphasis on the emotional resonance of that mechanic, but also on its inevitability</b>: there are no choices to be made, the dialogue options offer only superficial alternatives. <b>The player has no power to shape the story, because the Meyers have no power to shape their story, like they have no power over the tornado that is approaching their house.</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dNsI3cp6-k">Is Language a Virus? Starring Punished "Venom" Snake | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios </a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
So, let's talk <a href="http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/12/sex-games-part-0-sex-games-awaken.html">sex games</a>.<br />
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§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/12/sex-games-part-1-sex-as-bodies.html">Sex games, part 1: sex as bodies</a><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/12/sex-games-part-2-sex-as-gesture-sex-as.html">Sex games, part 2: sex as gesture / sex as poking</a>Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-84862025274874725562015-12-28T12:48:00.004+01:002015-12-28T12:55:32.343+01:00Critical Compilation - Cibele<b>§CIBELE</b><br />
<b>One of the reasons why <a href="http://www.avclub.com/review/cibele-showcases-expressive-power-autobiographical-227929">confessional storytelling</a>
is so rare in games might be because of the way it puts a lie to one of
our most commonly held assumptions about players and the characters
they control. We generally imagine that, when you play as someone, you
are becoming them</b>—adventuring as Lara Croft, saving the human race
as the Master Chief, etc., etc. Confessional narratives shatter that
illusion with experiences so specific and so tied to their creator that
the distance between the player and the character is always present. <b>When we see Freeman’s pictures and hear her voice, her personhood is inescapable.</b><br />
/.../<br />
For
a few years as a teenager, I imagined myself living a double life, an
awkward teenage boy in one world and a creative, vibrant young man
somewhere beyond the bounds of an LCD monitor. Playing Cibele
highlighted the dissonance of my young identities and the way I used
technology to shape them. I was neither; I was both. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>Even if you can’t relate, Cibele still insists on a personal response.</b>
If anything, my tendency to distrust Ichi made every moment with him
feel all the more intrusive and significant. I wanted to see myself in
his relationship with Freeman. Or maybe I wanted to see what she saw.<br />
<br />
<b>This
is a game about that drive to connect, to see others and yourself
clearly. It’s an experiment in how a creator might put themselves into a
work and make a game that speaks honestly about their real life to the
people who play it.</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
I often think about the fact we don't really have 'online lives' any more. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>online is real life now. </b><br />
/.../<br />
Nina
Freeman's Cibele is a gentle but involving callback to a youth when the
realm of internet chat—here, visualized quite literally through an
online fantasy game—could be an all-consuming, furtive repository for
everything fraught and unexpressed in our real lives. <br />
/.../<br />
<b>There
will always be stories of young love, and people probably meet online
now more than ever, perfunctorily, but it fascinates me that these
stories will never again happen in exactly this way. </b><br />
/.../<br />
Virtual
communication is no longer magic. It's no longer rare and risky, and as
time passes, more and more of us will be much the same person "here" as
we are "there." Lots of us today spend more time on devices than we do
off them. Friends and colleagues report being overwhelmed, not
intrigued, by Reddit threads, Twitter replies, Tinder messages, Facebook
notifications, Google Calendar invites, iMessages and texts. Now, for
me, meeting someone in a club late at night who has read my articles
actually recalls that old sinking feeling of finding out someone in your
internet roleplay group actually goes to your school—they've
accidentally found the real-life me, the secret me. <b>The script has
reversed: nowadays, in the age of remote working and Real Name Policies,
some corners of real life feel more forbidden, more secret, than the
internet does or perhaps ever will again. </b><br />
/.../<br />
<a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/11/11/cibele-and-the-end-of-an-era-f.html">Games like Cibele and Emily is Away are not just memoirs; they're memorials.</a> <b>When
today's young people want to whisper their secret longing and
loneliness into the night in search of others, will they still put it
online? If not, then where? </b><br />
<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<b>This is <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/258896/How_Cibele_Taught_Me_to_Love_Existential_Sex_Crises.php">a game about a young woman’s experience</a>,
fundamentally; it is her role you adopt, after all, her eyes through
which you see. But Ichi (voice acted expertly by Justin Briner) also
emerges with nearly equal vulnerability, showing a side of young men
that is only ever ruthlessly mocked if it is portrayed at all.</b> He is
initially presented as that most loathsome figure in MMO gaming: the
tough-talking, foul mouthed, exacting raid leader who sees himself
cursed to be surrounded by idiots. But as you play, you see that <b>he
is, in certain ways, Nina’s mirror; MMOs afford her the opportunity to
thrive socially in a world where she is not judged for being a nerd who
cheerfully describes her aesthetic as mahou shoujo, and they afford for
Ichi the opportunity to socialize without getting too close to people.</b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.popmatters.com/post/exhibitionism-and-the-video-game-confessional-nina-freemans-cibele/">exhibitionism
and a confessional style of video game seems appropriate in this case,
given the game’s thematic interest in adolescent infatuation.</a><br />
/.../<br />
It’s a clever game, told in a clever way, that produces a very authentic representation of a fairly universal experience, but<b>
it feels like that in presenting the story in as raw a form as Freeman
has that events here haven’t yet been considered with any maturity, only
idealism. </b><br />
/.../<br />
The game knows how to express itself well enough, but <b>the
reason that it doesn’t really enlighten us in any way seems to be
because there is no sense of transformation of the character of Nina
herself.</b> <br />
/.../<br />
Nina at the beginning was a girl
infatuated with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her
world, and Nina at the end is a young woman that still seems infatuated
with presenting a certain idealized image of herself and her world.<br />
/.../<br />
<b>Maybe,
though, Cibele is simply intended as a fable or allegory. It’s just
disappointing to me because it initially seems to promise an
investigation of identity and exhibitionism that might uncover something
a bit richer, perhaps, more oracular, than those genres typically allow
for. </b><br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="http://caneandrinse.com/cibele/">There’s
only so much you can read into the game as a broader commentary on the
intimacy of play and on formation of sexuality in the digital age.</a>
It’s not as didactic as one might expect, to the point where I
occasionally found myself tempted to read straight past the game into
the phenomenon it portrays.<br />
/.../<br />
For all its shortcomings,
which should not be either ignored or overstated, Cibele has remarkable
fidelity as a communication of a personal experience, and that makes it
an exciting and successful piece of autobiography.Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-19390124059865695992015-12-28T08:36:00.003+01:002015-12-28T10:26:15.892+01:00Every playthrough is equal, some playthroughs are more equal than others<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-before: always;">
I've now
written three texts about games (Planescape Torment, Undertale, Life
Is Strange) where the way I played them and the outcomes of those
playthroughs affected my understanding of them<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>.
And in all three cases there are other ways of playing the game which
if one took into account all the possible playthroughs for ones
understanding of the game and tried to stack them on top of
each-other, one would have to alter ones conclusions drawn. Because
how can one be an asshole to ones companions yet still regain ones
mortality in Planescape Torment? How does all the themes of
acceptance in Life Is Strange fit in with the ending where one
decides on saving Chloe? Do those alternative (to mine) endings
contradict my conclusions simply because my conclusions were wrong to
begin with? I don't think that's the case, and I don't necessarily
believe that games should be only understood in the context of all
possible states that they might finalize in (or indeed be understood
primarily based on their final states). <br />
<br />
All playthroughs of
games are worlds in themselves and can be regarded as consistent and
perfect. That doesn't mean that there isn't anything to gain from
going through a videogame with a different playstyle or thematic
predisposition compared to ones older playthroughs in order to inform
ones understanding of the universe that is a specific game as a
whole. Perhaps I'm wary of going down that path in part because it
takes more artistic genius to make all paths point in the same
general direction or at least give tools for satisfying
meaning-making in all paths. Then there's also the question of my
choosing the path which makes the more sense for me. It's not weird
that other paths don't seem as well-made – they weren't made for
me.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br />
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>To
be completely honest I did make it seem as if the actions I took in
Planescape Torment were necessary to reach the best ending at all,
but most of them really weren't. That's different from how ones
experience of Undertale might vary according to the path taken,
because in Undertale my interpretation might still hold in a
no-mercy run – the game is very different but it's not <i>essentially</i>
<i>different</i> or dissonant with the Undertale of a pacifist run.</div>
</div>
Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-81591228462936626052015-12-27T08:27:00.001+01:002017-08-25T15:09:26.951+02:00Life is Strange<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-before: always;">
<i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVLTpRjt0PU&t=547s">Music.</a></i><br />
<br />
<i><br /></i>Chloe: <i>"Do you read minds as well, or did you travel back through
time and know I stole the chair?"</i><br />
<i> </i>Max:<i> "It's the power of
best friendship. I know how you roll."</i><br />
<i><br /></i>Max Caulfield
has a super power – <i>time traveling</i>. But more importantly, she has
another super power – <i>mind traveling </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(mentalization/theory
of mind/vibratory telepathy</span><i><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a></i><span style="font-style: normal;">)</span>.
This power is the power which makes us all potential "Everyday
Heroes", potentially "super" - potentially <i>to the
max</i>. It's the power with which Max reads the minds of the people
in Arcadia Bay, but also the power she uses to understand all the
possibilities that is herself. It's the power we as players use to
understand Max and all the possibilities surrounding the gamespace of
Life is Strange. It's the power the developers utilized when they
filled the world of Arcadia with clues as to what the focal point of
the story, a scene, or an exchange should be. It's the power of
imagination, introspection, prediction, questioning, of what-ifs,
maybies, chance, compassion, <i>empathy</i>, and with it we travel
both through space and time. It's the power that enables Max and us
to reach out to others. The power which enables Max and us to
treasure and value friendship and love, and ultimately to form <i>bonds
that go beyond death itself</i>. This power is an ability that, like
family, binds both ways, and it's what allows my existential
tethering to the strange lives of Max and Chloe, and enables your
traveling here, dear reader.<br />
<br />
At the destination that is Life is
Strange, photography has a prominent and multifaceted role. There,
people use photography as a means of expression, and it's a means for
us as players to understand the people there. A way for us to gain insight into the
world and its inhabitants and their relationships to one another. It's a means through which we might come to understand others better in
some ways than they do themselves, and it's a way through which
people express things which they otherwise would not be able to, or
know <i>how</i>, to express. Max's diary was filled with drawings, pictures
and words which helped me to take her<i> perspective </i>and mantle "the role"
of Max Caulfield, photography student, teen girl, and a bunch of other descriptors. Max's diary was the picture through
which I could frame Max and the choices she made, or I made through
her – playing is, after all, a two-way mirror. Through me, Max's introspection
changed both the (meaning of the) past and the future.
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
Through photography we find out
different sides to people, see them in a new angle, or just in
hindsight see something which we missed the first time around, making
us go "<i>I should have fucking suspected there was something wrong
with that guy, just look at his photographs!</i>", but then realizing
that we didn't in fact blink twice because that shit's just the way
things are – both in the world of Life is Strange, and ours.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>Photographs are also something which
we might remember people by, a bond beyond death, when they are no longer with us. </i>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
In Life is Strange, a photography isn't only something which is looked upon, but something which is used
for understanding and presenting oneself, a way of conceptualizing
and framing oneself in a broader, social context. Max is shy,
insecure, and uses her powers to gain social leverage – at least I
did in my playthrough and that playthrough is my phenomenological
reality of Life is Strange and thus the basis for this text. What kind of pictures does Max take?
Self-portraits, or "selfies". One might say that Max <i>hides
in plain sight</i>, and she certainly isn't the only one, being a
teenager and all. Max is the typical, overly socially conscious
high-school kid who knows very well the potential of photography and
how it might be used for an array of means – why else would she
take up the study of it? That pictures can be used for both
good and evil is an especially poignant point in the context of what
happened in Episode 2 of Life is Strange to Kate, a girl who was drugged and
filmed for the whole world to see on the internet,
girls-gone-wild-style. In a world where that kind of social stigma
and the wounds that follow it can be ripped open with a lazy click on a received link, it becomes
all the more important to at all times be prepared for "the flash", and
never forgetting to strike a pose. No wonder teenagers today are more self-conscious than ever. Then again, if one has the power
to turn back time, one might have other ways to deal with
embarrassment and a different way of grounding it in ones personal
and social narratives.<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
For my Max it was very important for
things to go just the way she wanted to, exploring different
timelines as one might explore different clothing styles, making it
second nature to appear more savvy than she really was. Chloe (her
old-new best friend) on the other hand seemed to live life without
regrets, was notoriously reckless and managed to get herself killed
in all five episodes, no matter how much Max and I tried to prevent it. Incidentally, Chloe is also a total <i>wreck</i>
and doesn't even attend Blackwell High after having been kicked out
of there. What of her pictures, then? They are basically just missing
posters of Rachel, the Laura Palmer of the story, of whom we learn
more as we see pictures of her with the most varied of people in
contexts we couldn't imagine when starting out, forcing us to
constantly re-frame what we think of her and the people who she
appears with in said pictures. Like the Prescott family, Rachel seems to
tie in with every aspect of the local community, as she does with the
other events which Life is Strange centers around and seem to be
collapsing upon; The <i>Vortex</i> Club and the End of the World
Party; Max's time traveling powers (symbolized by a <i>spiral</i>); the viral video of a drugged Kate gone-wild on the <i>web; </i>the
visions of a <i>tornado</i> which destroys Arcadia Bay (the actual
end of the world?); and the Everyday Hero Photography contest (its
promotional poster has a clear sky in it).<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Being a (super) hero is no easy task
with all of these things superimposed on top of each-other. Under such circumstances (or indeed all teen circumstances), it might
even become an ordeal to be regular and just fit in, or understanding who you are and being yourself. Things get out of hand in Arcadia Bay and Max's world soon enough, and in
order for Max to get her happy ending we (think we) are forced to expand the
scope of our powers and not just settling for rewinding time 30
seconds in order to get the answer to a question in class right. Eventually Max learns that she can go back<i> years</i> in
time by focusing on the polaroids she's taken with her instant
camera. Through these we travel to little "time pockets of regret" where Max did something she regrets, but
also to scenes which we aren't a party to, share no blame in, but Max now thinks that she with
her new-found powers has responsibility to correct anyway, such as the case
of Chloe's dad dying in a car crash. Accompanying our mastery of
time-traveling are more frequent nosebleeds and more intrusive
visions of the end of the world, and so we start to suspect that
perhaps we can't, <i>shouldn't</i>, have our perfect ending after all. Not that this stops us in our tracks - our efforts to correct every wrong in life are instead doubled, as are our nosebleeds. We start noticing
small cracks in our grand plan, cracks that go back to the very first scene in Episode 1 where
we are chastised by the popular girl Victoria for not being able to
answer a question put forth by the teacher about "the derregiere
process". There, we first discovered our powers, rewinded time, and the very
first lesson from this very first rewind was that there were consequences even to the smallest of time-travelled changes, and that some things simply couldn't be "fixed". Victorias mind, and her fate, seemed to be fixed - we answered the question correctly and thought we wouldn't be chastised this time around, but we got shit from Victoria anyway,
because now Victoria thought we were a <i>know-it-all,</i> and had
no qualms telling us so. These cracks exist, because <i>life isn't perfect</i>, it's <i>strange</i>, and
its inhabitants are too. And fate, the<i> strangest of them all</i>, seems to have a sense of irony...<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
§<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<i>There is a lighthouse at the end of
the world.</i> It stands erect on a hill overlooking all of Arcadia
Bay, in the eye of the tornado which is forecasted to destroy the
world. As such, seeing how it's perspective is that of one who has all of creation behind and thus in a way in front of them, it's a place for assuming the bird's eye view, but not only that, but also the best spot for opening the mind's (third) eye and contemplate all that has taken place. It's the site for
self-examination and revelation – for <i>brain</i>storms. It takes a while
for Max to reach there, but she does, eventually. On her way there, she goes
through a nightmarish vision quest full of different scenarios that
are all about assembling data and courage for the gathering storm and
the final sacrifice that must be made at the end of the world. In that vision quest,
Max solves puzzles by narrowing data points and <i>focusing on what's
important by looking in mirrors</i>. There, Max gets closer to her truth by rummaging through the internalized
voices of all the residents of Arcadia Bay, hiding from some of them, and learning from others.
Before she reaches the lighthouse, she also gets to see her and Chloe's friendship's defining moments, a reminder of all the good that's been, and all the good she needs to let go of.
Before doing what needs to be done – <i>letting her best friend die</i>. <br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
In Life is Strange, there were important decisions concerning Max's coming of age besides the final
one at the lighthouse, and other decisions which had nothing to do with the time-traveling that upset the natural order of the universe (as opposed to the mind-traveling which made us grow). It was when we were out of "time-traveling juice" that we talked down Kate
from jumping off the school roof. There we managed to save Kate
<i>as well</i> as the fabric of the universe, and we did it through non-supernatural means
– by knowing when to kick up dust with destiny, and when to accept it. We
didn't win the Everyday Hero competition, because we were too busy
saving lives, and had to make a choice, and accept the consequences that followed upon it. We were too busy doing everyday good deeds for Kate, such as erasing the link to “Kate's video” written on the mirror
in the girls bathroom, and other people whom we might call <i>friends</i>. Our Max Factor didn't turn out to be the ability to do everything at once, being "outside of time" but
<i>communication</i>, the power of having shown a big enough interest in
people in our vicinity that we might give solace to them when they
needed it, the most important example of this being that we took the time to understand Kate's situation well enough so that we might change her mind concerning suicide. <br />
<br />
Speaking of time (do we ever do anything else here?), the pacing of decision-making in Life is Strange is
a bit "strange", or "outside of time", which is worth noticing. What I mean by that is that the decision making isn't timed as it is in similar games such as the Telltale ones, because Life is Strange isn't about tension during time, but about deliberation and <i>taking ones time</i>, in the sense of
<i>preparing</i>. About laying the groundwork for the future to come. About moments of decision as
photographs and echoes of future choices yet, and thus about looking back upon past decisions, re<i>visiting </i>and learning from them. And perhaps we weren't able
to rescue everyone that we wanted to, but our bonds with them weren't cut because of that, but instead remained strong, were
<i>saved</i>, by our having shared something special together. And through our super
powers of mind traveling, we might even ask ourselves just what those
we didn't save might be saying to us right now if they were here. We
just might even have photographs, or <i><a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/ve/mundane_magic/">psychometric traces</a><a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="sdfootnote2anc"></a>,</i>
<span style="font-style: normal;">of those special moments </span>which
we can go back to in time and remember them by. Because the
"Psychometric Tracer" can not only leave impressions of emotions,
history and knowledge, the user of this ability contains a smaller,
imperfect echo of the entire universe within themselves, enabling them to search out
paths through probability to any desired future, effectively making
it a form of “time-traveling”. </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
At one point in Life is Strange, Max gets a plant from her parents, and
it survives to the end only if you water is <i>just enough</i> – not too
much, not too little, but manage to strike a <i>balance</i> between the two. Some things you can't save no matter how much
you water them, and your watering just becomes fuel for a storm of
some kind. Sometimes you never even get to see the consequences of
your actions, as with Alyssa, the kid you save from incoming
projectiles of different kinds in every episode. And that's part of
life as well. The more Max time-travels, the more her power expands
the scope of her vision, and the more she realizes that there are things
that she simply can't <i>solve</i>. The more conflicting
perspectives she tries to take into account, the less she feels like
the master of her own destiny, and the less capable she is of taking good decisions that stem from her own, imperfect self. It's as if power on that kind of Godlike
level seems to be constant, and no matter how great your ambition or
scope, it all comes back to the lowest level of actions – those in
the <i>present</i>. We use our capabilities of prediction to understand
others, but there are no certainties as to what the outcome may be.
In some time-lines and playthroughs, Kate didn't even survive and
what I would have taken away from Life is Strange would be quite
different. But in my world Kate did survive, and afterward she
acknowledges us being both not perfect <i>and </i><span style="font-style: normal;">good:</span>
<i>"You're such a good person, Max. Even if you're full of crap.
But I'll come with you... You're my friend." </i><span style="font-style: normal;">In
a way, we are not only Kate's friend, but also her Guardian Angel, and
Kate is not only our friend but also <i>our</i> Guardian Angel for reminding
us that we aren't Gods, nor ever will be, but that we are in it together, for good or worse, and that that is (just) <i>enough</i>.<br /> </span> <br />
§<br />
<br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrfVaPNMCM8"><i>"Goodbye
to the children we'll never meet, and the children we left behind".</i></a><br />
<br />
Chloe is the driving force behind the main quest in the Life is
Strange. Max has the powers, but always uses them to protect Chloe
and further Chloe's goals. Who gave Max powers? Rachel? The
Prescotts? Some old Gods? Arcadia Bay itself? It doesn't matter, all
that intellectualizing draws our attention away from the heart of the
matter and what really hurts – the fact that <i>we left our best
friend</i>, and came back to find out that she had had a really tough time
while we were gone. The fact that we promised each-other that we'd
always be there for each-other,<i> yet weren't</i>. The fact that in our
absence Chloe had somehow managed to lose her childhood, but never
found a way to grow up. <br />
<br />
Faced with all of this pain and regret, we
did the seemingly responsible thing and tried to make it all up to
Chloe, to protect her. But that decision (we realized just in the nick of time) was grounded in
the insecurity of the girl that was Max, a decision born from pain, denial, and immaturityl. Again and again we tried saving Chloe, both from destiny and
herself. Because we wanted to assuage our guilt. Because we wanted to
make things <i>right</i>. Because we suffered from the magical thinking of a
child, taking responsibility for everything bad in Chloe's life after
we moved out of Arcadia Bay. But growing up, we realize that we can't take responsibility for the
actions of others - that doesn't make us masters of<i> </i>our destiny, and in fact makes it harder for us to take responsibility for that which is ours to own up to.
The signs concerning Chloes undeniable fate have been everywhere, practically screaming at us, and standing by the lighthouse with Chloe and looking her in the eyes, we
know now, <i>at last</i>, what we have to do, which is leave our best friend –<i> again</i>. First we get the chance know them, and when we come to love them, life demands that we <i>let them go</i>. I told you - fate is the strangest of them all...<br />
<br />
§</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
In Life is Strange, people are
<i>always-already diary entries</i> – approaching them, they become
objects of interaction with their becoming outlined in the style of
our notepad sketches. All of the world is already "out of time" as they
are non-corporeal objects in Max's subjectivity, but they are also out of time
because the central conceit of Life is Strange - that we can save Chloe if we <i>just play good enough</i> - isn't a possibility, making
all of Life is Strange a picture rather than a movie - a <i>memento mori</i> where the challenge lies in letting go, rather than winning, and accepting the passing of Chloe, rather than passing some sort of skill test or trying to "game the system". Nor Chloe's nor Max's
quest was ever primarily about saving lives, but about saying goodbyes. For Max, it
was about having one final, awesome week as authority-defying
teenagers flying in the face of fate itself with her best childhood
friend. About getting a short moment as almost grown-ups together at the
lighthouse, immortalized in them being brave in the face of death and
inevitability. And in the end when the storm has blown over and our
time traveling capabilities are but dust in the wind, there are no
illusions of grand gestures left, only the power of friendship,
and the reality of both grief, and <i>hope</i>, in the aftermath of death. And though we've lost something precious to us, we still
have the world and all of the people there who we can travel to, and since we're still technically teenagers - kick up some dust with. We still have our mind traveling which we can visit Chloe with, and that's <i>hella super</i>. It just took us having been gifted with supernatural super powers and then losing them, to make us understand that. Ironic, isn't it?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
§<br />
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDuBHWWwQiI">Don't
you forget about me.</a></div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<br />
<br />
______</div>
<div class="sdfootnote">
</div>
<div class="sdfootnote">
</div>
<div class="sdfootnote">
<br />
<br />
<br />
1<i>Vibratory
Telepathy:</i> "By transmitting invisible vibrations through
the very air itself, two users of this ability can share thoughts.
As a result, Vibratory Telepaths can form emotional bonds much
deeper than those possible to other primates."
(<a href="http://lesswrong.com/lw/ve/mundane_magic/">http://lesswrong.com/lw/ve/mundane_magic/</a>)
<i>Mentalization </i><span style="font-style: normal;">(psychology):
</span>the ability to understand the mental state, of oneself or
others, that underlies overt behaviour.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
______<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Special thanks to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrrUm7--GP3NQbYVMoQxA2Q">Geek Remix </a>for
their wonderful contribution to the Life is Strange community in the
form of critical videos filled with astute observations which helped me
to better understand and appreciate the artistic merits of Life is
Strange.<br />
<br />
</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote2anc" name="sdfootnote2sym"></a></div>
</div>
Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-5636585868442209062015-12-26T15:20:00.002+01:002016-01-08T11:00:16.066+01:00We Know The Devil<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm; page-break-before: always;">
This is a
follow-up post to an <a href="http://mindinggames.blogspot.se/2015/12/the-true-indie-test.html">earlier post of mine</a> where I mentioned We Know
The Devil and A Good Gardener, two games I bought last week. This
post will detail mainly We Know The Devil, seeing how A Good Gardener
was somewhat of a disappointment and I barely have anything to write
about it. Yes, some of the plants you grew looked like weapons, so
that was a bit of environmental storytelling foreshadowing. But there
was just too little of everything, even if the game was under an
hour. It ends in a loop of Sisyphean prisoner-of-war effort, but I'm
not sure it's very interesting or satisfying. I just wish the
experience was more fleshed out, or more suggestive. As it is now,
it's neither, just a short conceptual piece with gardening gameplay
that feels like doing chores and doesn't lead anywhere in particular.
I guess that's part of “the point”, but yeah, that's what I have
to so about that!</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
So. In the visual novel <a href="https://datenighto.com/game/we-know-the-devil">We
Know The Devil</a> (WKTD), queer teens Jupiter, Venus and Neptune are
in a Camp for bad teens. In this camp, participants are in groups of
three, are told that the devil is among them, and that the devil will
show hirself during camp week. You play through the last night of the
week, and you will know the Devil.<br />
<br />
§<br />
<br />
I understand
WKTD to be about how structures of oppression are handed down from
generation to generation and the rituals that are performed to
solidify hierarchies and separate insiders from outsiders. The Camp
is such a ritual, and the way in which the activities during that
camp are set up shows us how such rituals might take place and also
how one might resist them. The common knowledge in the game seems to
be that being alone, or different, means that the chances of becoming
the Devil dramatically increase. And yet the groups of threes (our
planetary trio is named Group West) are told to fix sirens when they
start wailing in the forest, but also that they must stay in their
cabin. The groups can't do both, and thus pairings must take place.
Ideology goes in, the Devil comes out.<br />
<br />
But there is more to
the indoctrination than double-binds and unfair camp experience
design, as it would seem that to various degrees the participants
have internalized the ideology or oppression handed down to them
(even if they also resist that very same internalization and
throughout the last day negotiate what it means to not like oneself,
“be wrong”, wondering how normal teens would do, wanting to
sacrifice oneself, being part of a group, apologizing all the time,
having self-respect, wanting to be like their friends, having ones
own identity, etc). One might wonder why they don't just stay in
their respective groups, not leaving anyone alone, thus not bringing
out the Devil at all. One might wonder why Neptune only brought two
shot glasses, and why that means that only two of them can drink and
drunk-talk together. And the answer is ideology and how structures of
oppression work in a modern, self-policing, social context
(post-Foucault).<br />
<br />
<i>"Group South does everything
perfectly and is the fucking worst. The best kids in a camp for bad
kids are absolutely certain to be the fucking worst.” </i><br />
<br />
What does it mean to be good or bad? Is it a good thing to be
awful? Is getting in trouble a good thing? Is being perfect too much?
If it is, why would one be jealous of someone who is perfect? In
WKTD, there are a lot of mixed emotions that Jupiter, Neptune and
Venus express. Their communication is playful and especially Neptune
can be quite sarcastic, and I believe that their speech patterns are
a product of the double expectations and/or the wrong expectations
placed upon them by the adult world and the imbalances which takes
root in their hearts because of it. It becomes a way for them to
maneuver the world, trying to make sense what is expected of them and
who they really are. God might always be at the same frequency
(109.8FM) in this world, and God is the one who finally announces
what one person is the Devil, but other than that, our trio is very
confused as to how they should behave. Even that doubleness in itself
is a minefield of a double-bind: the system is designed to encourage
fear and uncertainty in what one should do, and yet doubt is in its
essence wrong – the Devil is never at the same frequency but is
heard between radio stations, which means one has already taken a
step away from Gods channel and tried at walking <i><span style="font-weight: normal;">between
</span></i>the default paths.<br />
<br />
There are more seeming
paradoxes in how one navigates the world in WKTD. How one might be
hanging out with the worst crowd so they'll leave you alone. How one
might bully someone because one likes them. How one might be in a
place where people force one to do things one doesn't want to do, yet
is willing to pick dare in a game of truth or dare. How one might be
considered good even when one claims that one isn't good because what
else kind of person would hate themselves but someone who was really
good?! And then there is the question of the Devil hirself. The Devil
and the double nature of being good, the double nature of being bad,
and the fetishistic appropriation of both. About the fear of turning
into the Devil and the pain that brings, but also about the lure of
being the Devil and how liberating it might feel not to care about
the opinions of others anymore. How liberating it might feel not to
hate oneself and hide anymore.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
At one point, Neptune tells Venus that
zie is too nice – that zie wants something and believes that being
nice is going to get them that something, but that until they figure
out what it is they want, every kindness of theirs will be full of
that unknown want. Well, when Venus turns into the Devil, it is not
as a man (everyone has referred to Venus as a man throughout the game
and we aren't told otherwise), but as a woman. That zie doesn't have
to be nice anymore seems to follow. But when our trio chooses to not
separate at one of many crucial moments, it is not God who speaks to
them and announces who has fallen – it is the Devil. What zie tells
them is critical – <i>“there is room for three in my world, but
only room for two is His”</i>. It's all about scapegoating in His
world, then, and about trinity and multiplicity in the Devil's. Or as
Jupiter says: “<i>What's ugly isn’t having choosing one to be the
scapegoat, but to choose at all”.<br /> </i><br />
There is power in
“not choosing”, and there is power in numbers. Group South fell
back on the default path of being identical to each-other (<i>learn
teamwork, be the same!</i>) in fear of becoming unique and alone, but
when our Trio sticks together and doesn't leave anyone behind more
than anyone else, they choose unity through difference and become
Devil's all three. The planets align and the meaning of the adage
“<i>the devil is weak, humans are strong – even a child can kill
the devil, all she has to do is try” </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is
flipped on its head; “the devil is strong, humans are week – even
a devil can kill an adult”</span>.<br />
<br />
But isn't becoming the
Devil bad? In the non-true endings (which means the endings you
probably got the first couple of times) it would mostly seem that
way. But there is a difference in becoming the Devil alone and out of
self-hate, and in becoming the Devil by ones own free will. When one
does it by ones own free will, <i>dares</i> it together, then the
opinions of others don't have to stop to matter and one doesn't have
to unleash the beast inside and become a monster as the Devil. One
doesn't have to shut out the world in order to give in and live out,
but can negotiate a position in-between, as both part and whole. <br />
<br />
The devil is lonely, it's been claimed, but here, in the true
ending<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>,
the devils song is loud and lovely. There is nothing to fear when
there is two against the devil, it's been claimed. But our trio has
claims of their own now, and they can't wait to see what the others
will do with their exorcism-radios and their spells and their God
against the three worst girls since Eve.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§§§<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Caveat: there is danger in solely
defining oneself as an outsider, even if there is power in that as
well. I've always considered myself an outsider, and I've had it both
empowering and disempowering me. I've long been fascinated with the
liminal figure of the “alienated other” (the outsider who can see
things in their capacity as outsider), and the idea of fetishistic
attachment through distancing by means of the “oppositional
stance”<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote2sym" name="sdfootnote2anc"><sup>2</sup></a>.
Sometimes when we try our hardest to break free, we don't realize
that the tools of fighting back have become so ingrained that we
start fighting shadows as well as oppressors. And this is a dangerous
thing. It is not the point of community, or society, or being a
Master – it is the equivalent of someone screaming at you but
really being mad about something else. Instead, every “circle” is
the exploration of a <i>modus vivendi</i> which permits the situation
to be lived in such way that when it comes undone, those who will
have participated in the weaving come out of it more alive, having
learned and become capable of teaching others what they have learned,
capable of participating in other circles, other weaving processes<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote3sym" name="sdfootnote3anc"><sup>3</sup></a>.
One cannot do that if one decides to never leave a circle.<br />
<br />
After
the trio has become Devil's, it is <i>claimed</i> that the Camp
Captain has no stories left to tell because they were all lies. I do
wonder about that. Surely the Captain has a story with some truth in
it? Thinking zie does not is turning hir into an unwilling Devil. And
although it's not everyone's responsibility at all times to bring out
the good in others or in trying to leave safe spaces, there is little
to be gained from black-and-white color palettes.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
Another danger I wish to warn
about is related mostly to some trans women, who as Venus don't
believe being mad is OK and rather would be made fun of than being
“mean”. I think this can be a real problem. Trans women and other
women might try to live their lives as women and thus follow ideals
concerning women, which in turn might lead to confusing having
integrity and being assertive with being masculine. When one
associates masculinity with something negative (and ones own
masculinity in particular) then one just might throw out the baby
with the bathwater and in fear of being perceived as being masculine
one might instead become submissive. <br />
<br />
Related to this, for
me, is the paradoxical relationship I have with queer communities in
that I don't necessarily feel more comfortable or safe there than
anywhere else. I've thought that this might mean that I probably
don't have need for safe-spaces and thus don't belong in queer
communities, but I think that's just the voice of the evil queer
hive-mind in my head. I think it has to do more with a feeling of my
not being able to assert myself the way I want to in those type of
communities and often second-guess myself and my actions in a way
that just makes me feel bad and isn't very productive for my personal
or social growth. The norms in queer communities can be really hard
to fit, much harder than those in society in general or other
communities. That's part of the practice of constructing a safe space
in a queer setting, but it's never been my safe space, and even if I
get comfortable enough not to see Devil's everywhere and think others
are out to get me, I'm just not sure queer communities will ever be
for me what I think it is for other queer people who seem to live
almost exclusively in queer communities. It goes without saying that
it's not only in heteronormative communities that some people (often
the loudest ones) confuse being an asshole with having integrity. And
you know, “the best people in the worst group”...<br />
<br />
If I
have some bad things to say about WKTD, then it's that it's very
static and non-responsive to input in the long run. Who in our trio
becomes the Devil is not foreshadowed very much, instead it comes
suddenly and only takes one small “mistake” from the player. The
work would feel much more deep and genuine if it didn't just tally
the pairings and make a judgment based on that at the end of the
game, but instead changed some dialogue around depending on the
pairings that the player chose and the conversations that took place
because of that. As it is now, all dialogue is the same throughout,
no matter what pairings are done during the game. When a game is so
short, more could be expected I think. Or rather than to talk about
expectations, let's just say that the experience would feel much more
alive if it acknowledged the path chosen by the player more. <br />
<br />
Shouldn't it be harder for one person not to become the Devil if
they've been left out a couple of times already? In WKTD that doesn't
matter as long as you just keep count and balance things out at the
end. I also wonder if the Devil couldn't conceivably come out even if
our trio is together, or paired. Surely one can be alone together
with others, or hurt other people without excluding them. These sorts
of things are not explored in WKTD and although it would take much
more work to acknowledge these sorts of possibilities mechanically
and in the narrative, I think the game would be much better for it
and I wish the creators would try out a more rich approach in their
future games. The dialogue and characterization are really strong in
WKTD, and on that much can be built.<br />
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym">1</a>Referred
to as such by the developers.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote2">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote2anc" name="sdfootnote2sym">2</a>Being
a rebel (without a cause or otherwise) means not necessarily that
you are free and autonomous, as you are bound still with the object
of your oppositional stance. Over-investing in this link can drain
the existential life force out of you. You will never be able to
join the community with those ties because as a rebel your identity
depends on your autonomy being the result of a screaming and if not
an indiscriminate “no”, then at least an over-invested one, that
entails being a cynic, or a critic for whom individuation equals
righteous insurrection or a taste so acquired as to be beyond the
insulting world of mere mortals, a community of non-humans due to
their being made simply <i>all too human</i>. The result is
perpetual conflict.</div>
</div>
<div id="sdfootnote3">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote3anc" name="sdfootnote3sym">3</a>Capitalist
Sorcery: Breaking the Spell, Isabelle Stenger</div>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>§§§LINK
COLLECTION§§§</b><br />
<a href="https://emberling.wordpress.com/2015/09/17/one-of-the-three-worst-girls-since-eve/">This
is their rite of passage to join society: by creating an Other</a>,
by knowing that the devil is somewhere outside themselves, in their
former friend, they hide the aspects of themselves that are also
demonized by that wider culture, and learn to assimilate.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The conflict between Jupiter and her
friends begins to arc toward concordance when she truly looks at the
inner self that emerged from the shell of Venus’s old body and
finds herself correcting her habitual “he” to “she.”</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>To be the devil is to be queer, to
go against the strictures imposed on us by our rearing.</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
§</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br />
In We Know The Devil, there are <a href="http://www.themarysue.com/we-know-the-devil-visual-novel-is-an-adolescence-apocalypse/">rules
that must be followed</a>, and authority figures are very insistent
on letting everyone know that they will be punished for breaking
them, yet the rules themselves are never made clear. This is true of
a lot of things, obviously, but it’s as teenagers that we, that I,
developed an acute awareness of how structural and unfair that is.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<b>Venus deals with the rules by
buckling and apologizing for any perceived slight the first chance
she gets</b>; she responds to the rules by making everyone aware of
just how aware she is, in the hopes that they will deem her
acceptable and let her move on. <b>Jupiter internalizes the rules</b>;
she has become so good at following them or appearing to follow them
that she sort of becomes the physical manifestation of the rules and
the idealization of herself. <b>Neptune, finally, kicks and screams
and swears and claws at the rules every chance she gets</b>; she
defines the rules by being opposed to them and tries to get everyone
else on her side.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
the power trio don’t really fit into
the world of We Know The Devil at all. No really, the shack where
they have to face The Devil is literally 2/5ths too small for them.
<b>There is no room for Venus As a Girl or a mythologically
incestuous lesbian power couple in God’s world, so they are left to
pick at their bodies as much as they pick at their surroundings. </b>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
Group West is kidding themselves. They
may have a future in God’s world, in the Real Scouts (the one where
the buddy system works and you get transformation sequences), but
only as deeply compromised selves. That future is one where others
will hate who they really are, where they will hate themselves for
who they really are. Already figures of authority—The Bonfire
Captain, God—are teaching them to look for evil in each other or
The other, The Devil, not in the system. In the mean time, those same
figures of authority assume the worst of their charges.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
one girl is far from unstoppable, even
if she is The Devil. It is because they are together that they can
fight against the third and drive her off. It is because they are
together that they can weather God’s kingdom and convince
themselves it is good. It is because two of them drew closer together
that they did not notice the third hurting as much as she did.
<b>Friendships are a powerful tool for survival, but if you’re not
careful with them, they can also be a trap: a little bit of honey
that convinces you your situation might not be so bad after all.</b></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
/.../</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
if they could all become The Devil,
then everything would just be fine and dandy, wouldn’t it? So, in
the fourth, final ending, that’s what they do. They all become The
Devil and they create literal Hell on Earth. And the jerks from South
Campus join them, all the kids do. Of course those kids hated God’s
world too! They were mean to the girls precisely because of how they
embodied its rules to them.<br /><br />§<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2015/11/09/know-devil-shadows-friends-left-behind/">Though God and the devil are central presences, it never really explores issues of faith. </a>There’s no question
of belief here: the main characters know for sure that these figures
exist. Nor does it really tangle with the institutional power of
religious organisations. It does, however, rely deeply on the cultural
power of religion, its ability to define right and wrong for whole
communities and the way that, over time, those definitions become
unchangeable. The use of radios serves to highlight and emphasise this. <br />/.../</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>the one who speaks least is the one
whose problems you see most clearly. The one you exclude is the one
pushed to the forefront.</b> At the very beginning of the game the camp
counselor says that he had two friends that he tried to treat equally,
but he always secretly liked one of them more. This, he says, was a
mistake. He should have been honest about his feelings, and it would
have been easier in the long run. His words set up the dynamic for the
rest of the game. Your choice defines who is liked less, who is slightly
excluded, and this isolation lets the devil in.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">/.../</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b> It’s hard to say that the fourth ending
is a truer ending than the others. All the endings are possibility
spaces, outcomes that exist in the tangle of emotions and choices these
characters could make.</b> But while the three individual endings seem to
spell out a painful inevitability—you can’t stay friends with everyone,
you can’t help everyone, you can’t love everyone—the fourth is
aspirational. It dreams a different way of approaching the world, and
perhaps a different way of emerging into adulthood.</span><br /><span style="font-weight: 400;">/.../</span><br /><b>The defiant embrace of the weird and beautiful and bizarre in <i><span style="font-weight: 400;">We Know the Devil</span></i></b><span style="font-weight: 400;"><b>
is a challenge to any conception of a normal adulthood.</b> It also acts as
a challenge to the notion that we should strive to be our best selves.
Rather, it proposes embracing the whole self, with all its
contradictions and painful conflicted feelings.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br /></span><i>[It could be argued that it is the faith in society, friendship and oneself that is explored. "Do I exist?", and "how do I exist?" are central questions explored.]</i></div>
Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7857033740312341889.post-39919604434836045042015-12-25T07:27:00.001+01:002015-12-28T10:26:49.883+01:00Gamer, I am<div style="page-break-before: always;">
Every now and then, I ask myself
the question what exactly makes me a gamer, and if I even am one. If
I should consider myself one. If I should continue being one. Why
it's important for me to refer to myself as a gamer, or perhaps not
refer to myself as one, but to still <i>feel </i>like I am one in the
sense of having stakes in the gaming community and the gamer
identity. I mean I cried when the trailer for Shenmue 3 came out,
even though I don't care much the continuaton of Shenmue 2. But, you
know, what a day for <i>gamers</i> it was<a class="sdfootnoteanc" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1sym" name="sdfootnote1anc"><sup>1</sup></a>!
Because being a gamer makes me value games more than other forms of
media. Being a gamer directs my attention toward games more than
other forms of entertainment, and it makes me consider whether
something should be considered a (video) game at all less than
someone else who doesn't give two shits if a walking simulator should
be considered a game at all, or someone who doesn't even consider
considering it being a game because obviously it isn't and so it
shouldn't be a part of any gaming spaces. And when it comes to the
definition of what a game is I have all these thoughts about
formalism, deconstruction, <a href="https://digitalkicks.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/wittgenstein-games-and-language/">Wittgenstein</a>,
<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-percent-people-playing-games-women-industry-doesnt-know">accessibility
to space</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTNi7SPnNA">privilege</a>,
<a href="http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/12/15/gaming-and-gamers/">identity</a>,
distribution forms and whatnot, but part of the truth is that I just
live much of my life through the lens of my being a gamer and my
playing video games. I want Dear Esther to be considered a video game
because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be on my "Favorite Video Games
of 2012"-list and it wouldn't appear on any other list either
because I don't make lists as comprehensive as those of other things
– I'm a gamer and quite frankly that takes a lot of effort and
time. I prioritize being a gamer.<br />
</div>
That's another important aspect of my considering myself a gamer –
<i>effort</i>. I try to keep up with the world of video games in a
way I don't with foreign or internal affairs, comics, movies, etc. I
even try to keep up with "the industry", and not just as a
consumer, but as, you got it – a gamer. I do usually skim over most
of the industry/big business side of video games though, in favor of
exploring more hidden indie gems and the analysis of these. Often I
even don't get into something new in favor of reading yet another
article about one of my favorite video games series, just for
purposes of my own personal history and nostalgia, seeing as I'm too
busy playing new games to go back and play those time-consuming
behemoths of my childhood. That too makes me a gamer (and a nerd of
certain franchises). But I put in effort and determination even into
that aspect of my gaming by using my expanded view of my favorite
series and bringing it into other aspects of my life where I explore
ideas of all kinds – philosophically, psychologically, spiritually.
I am a gamer because I put more <i>value </i>into games and the
exploration of them than I would say a movie or a play, whether that
be by playing or reading and writing. This is not due to some
explicit judgment of mine, it's simply a consequence of my <i>being –</i>
my being a gamer.<br />
<br />
<br />
A consequence of my valuing games a lot is that I become more
patient with them, because I am willing to cut them some slack for
failures in one area or another if there is a silver lining of any
sort, anything of interest which it attempts or if it's part of some
sort of video game canon which I deem myself invested in and
therefore should explore. This means I might be patient with a game
even if it doesn't appear to have any silver lining if I've heard
something good about a game from a <i>peer of gamers </i>with similar
ideas to mine concerning gaming, or just a similar enough taste. But
due to my valuing games more, sometimes I can also be more impatient
than someone else would be – I don't want to put up with bullshit
when I know that there is so much more potential and so much more out
there. <i>I give games more, and in turn I expect more</i>. I
construct my own meaning in the game on top of the meaning presented
as face-value, and I am a gamer because this type of relationship
makes me more of a player and less of a spectator than I would be if
I would be just along for the ride and play the part of the missing
cog that is the machinery of start-continue-you win/the end. Among
other things, this over-the-top meaning construction entails a
mindset of interpreting things charitably, and expecting games to be
well enough thought-out so that I can be expected to draw conclusions
from a wide array of its elements and not only those that are usually
considered when reviewing a game.<br />
<br />
I am an old gamer, but not because I believe things used to be
better (they are in fact getting better still), but because I am
frustrated with games and gamers. I am tired of gaming in many ways,
and my tastes have changed to accommodate my tiredness. I am most
definitely not a power gamer anymore and often get frustrated when
the gameplay mechanics bog down the flow of the “<i>game proper”</i><span style="font-style: normal;">.
I much rather prefer roleplaying and the sense of playing something
</span><i>well</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> in the sense of
having had a dialogue with the game that resulted in my feeling that
what I did was meaningful and satisfying as a narrative. I am an old
gamer because I give up two hours after booting up Batman: Arkham
City, tired of feeling inadequate and confused about the controls and
everything it throws at me. I am an old gamer when I realize that the
first Metal Gear Solid had the most fun stealth elements for me
because it had gameplay resembling 2D/top-down games of an era that
is mostly gone. I am both an old gamer and an Old Snake when I hang
in and continue playing the Metal Gear Solid franchise until the very
end even when large chunks of the gameplay elements don't cater to my
needs and preferences anymore.<br /><br />I am a tired gamer because I
always check howlongtobeat.com before venturing into a game world,
and often check out a let's play to see how much of the content is
mindless filler or mindful puzzling – either of which I don't care
for very much. I am the type of gamer that couldn't be bothered less
by yet another fetch quest or yet another door which can't be opened
until you find two keys, mold them into one, and then insert them
into said door. I value thematic consistency and depth, a developed
tone, juxtaposed motifs, hard-hitting symbolism and artistic
imagination and integrity over saving the world or turning levers. I
am pretentious that way, but not because I try but because otherwise
I wouldn't be able to be a gamer anymore, and I would have to move on
to something else – something way more pretentious. But even if the
content is interesting in one way or another, I do feel the urge to
move on quite quickly. Sure, I take notes and I'm patient in other
ways, but I</span> hurry on to the next project due to my desire to
experience as much as possible. Sometimes I think I take notes due to
my impatience, simply because I feel I need more stimuli and writing
starts up some thinking processes which would otherwise be <span style="font-weight: normal;">hijacked
by a more visceral aspect of the game I'm playing. Then again, I am
an old gamer, and I often take notes just to keep track of the names
of the dramatis personae...</span><span style="font-style: normal;"><br /> <br />I
love not-games, art games, avant garde games, experimental games,
newsgames, biographical games, personal games, lived games, virtual
exhibition games, walking simulators, transmedia, games which exlore
algorithms/systems for the design and implementation of dynamic story
techniques which can lead to games that are emergent yet still about
people </span><i>and</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> characters.
I read books about some of these type of games, and countless
articles and forum posts. I engage much less with these communities
other than through voting systems and playing games than I often wish
to, simply because there are too many of these communities and too
little time. I have a hard time settling on one over the other – I
am after all a gamer, and I want it all. But sure, I've taken a more
active role on some smaller forums, the smallest of which was some
subdivision of a Bioware forum where people discussed Baldur's Gate
exclusively. But that was way back, when I was a younger gamer... <br /><br />I
love niche communities with worlds of their own which I can explore;
Inform 7 Interactive Fictions, Adenture Games Studios
point-and-clicks, queer Twines, RPG Maker horror adventures, japanese
indie shmups, and so on. I check up on some of these from time to
time, and move on from others. And move on I need to indeed,
sometimes even from things which would seem to be very important and
thus in need of my attention. But move on I do indeed, because
sometimes I'm just really tired of gamers and their gamergates,
sexism, boneheadedness and immaturity and rather play games than read
yet another article discussing the dark sides of gaming. I do not
feel pride about being a gamer those days, in fact, I barely consider
myself a gamer at all. And yet, I am a gamer be</span>cause I care
where the industry is going. I care because I want there to be games
which I enjoy and dream about AAA titles which cater to my
preferences. I am gamer because I care about what games others get to
play, and I wish that others might see what I see, play what I play,
and not what the general media wants them to believe and play. I want
non-gamers to be able to play games and not being accused of ruining
it for “real gamers”. I even want to be a curator of some sorts
for gamers and non-gamers alike, because I care about my tastes and
believe them to be refined enough to recognize good games. I believe
in my ability in doing a good job and being able to recommend these
good games to others after having considered their tastes. I am both
gamer and curator of sorts when I don't delete obscure little games
from my hard drives because I'm thinking that there just might be a
slight chance that the world will forget about these games completely
if I remove them. What if somebody points at some game from one of my
lists and tells me that it's nowhere to be found? What is nobody ever
does? Ah, well then at least the game still exists and thus... is
important somehow?<br />
<br />
I write this text in the capacity of being
a gamer, and I do so as part of something larger. I do it not because
it makes me happy per se, but because I find value in it. The
hedonistic treadmill is the great equalizer of things and one could
always ask oneself if doing a thing would make one more happy. I
don't think that is always the proper question to ask, and believe
that there are things which would make oneself more <i>true </i><span style="font-style: normal;">or
</span><i>authentic </i><span style="font-style: normal;">rather than
happy, and that there is value in that too. It's a tightrope walk,
balancing that which cannot be measured with that which can. And it's
a hard line to draw between what is productive even though it doesn't
lead to happiness, and what's just destructive and part of a negative
pattern. Because let's be honest – oftentimes I do get the distinct
feeling that my time would be </span><i>better spent </i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">reading
a book rather than playing whatever videogame I'm currently playing.
So what am I doing playing the videogame? I'm a tired gamer, and for
me gaming isn't relaxing – if I wanted to relax I'd just watch a
television series. It comes back to value. But it also comes down to
identity – is there a better argument for my being a gamer than
that I rationalize my time spent on video games with my </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">identity
as a gamer</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">?
<br /><br />But this isn't an argument and I'm not trying to convince you
that I'm a gamer or what a gamer is. I hope that's perfectly clear by
now. What I also hope is perfectly clear is that I don't</span></span>
give up on video games (although I understand <a href="http://ellaguro.blogspot.se/">people</a>
<a href="http://www.thechineseroom.co.uk/blog/blog/why-im-sort-of-leaving-the-chinese-room">who</a>
<a href="http://www.develop-online.net/news/tale-of-tales-leaves-game-development/0208079">do</a>).
<span style="font-style: normal;">I do take games seriously, I do </span><i>mind</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
them, and I do believe that they affect us – gamers and non-gamers
alike. My believing games to be a powerful force for individuals and
in society means that I have to value them and their future. I have
to care. And I have to believe in a better future.</span>
<br />
<br />
So I do not play Fallout 4 as all gamers seem to be doing these
days. I haven't played most of the usual big contestants for game of
the year awards. I do not look forward to many AAA titles, and I
spend more time thinking about games and deciding what games to
actually finish, play at all, watch a playthrough of, listen to a
podcast about or don't give a fuck about. Sometimes I even read
articles about games I haven't played, when they provide interesting
perspectives on video games/the industry as a whole, or even are just
a lens through which something other than video games is explored.
Because the danger of considering oneself a gamer is that one
excludes things, and that in the end it may be too great a cost to
bear. But the question of access is also why I consider myself a
gamer, because the label “gamer” shouldn't be left to only a
select few who are considered to have the credentials to be labeled
such. It is not through playing certain (male) games that one becomes
a gamer. It is not through gaining achievements or recognition within
a community, or at least not exclusively. In reality, we are all
gamers – <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7821348-reality-is-broken">reality
is broken</a> and the whole world is a game. All those who claim that
they are gamers should be heard on their terms, and those who do not
claim the title should at least be given encouragement to realize
that they too might claim the label, make up a new one, take part of
the/a community or spin off of an existing one. I am a gamer
precisely because I realize that labels are a <i>play </i>of words
and a <i>play </i>between human beings – gamers.<br />
<br />
I am gamer because of all of the above, and more. How are you?<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
§§§<br />
<div id="sdfootnote1">
<div class="sdfootnote">
<a class="sdfootnotesym" href="https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=7857033740312341889#sdfootnote1anc" name="sdfootnote1sym"><br /><br /><br />1</a>Then
of course the whole aftermath of the Shenmue 3 kickstarter became
something to follow for gamers all over the world due to the ways in
which some gamers felt letdown due to Shenmue 3 effectively
alreadying having been "kickstarted" by a big game
publisher – Sony.
</div>
</div>
Eyvah Ehyehhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15007587014503441069noreply@blogger.com0