21/8

§HER STORY
It’s a Gothic story, fundamentally, the bones of Radcliffe and Bronte still visible under the wrappings of more modern genres. 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.
/.../
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 Her Story. 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. 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 on purpose 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 something about the deliberate self-making of Eve that spoke to me.



§MGS
And this is why many of the dramatic twists within and surrounding the codec work. Miller’s reveal as Liquid is a betrayal because it’s a long, subdued invasion of Snake’s most Snake-like space. The banjaxed AI Colonel disrupts Raiden’s sense of reality because it’s a deep-seated subversion of what we felt was sanctuary. The strangers Deepthroat and Mr. X unsettle us because they don’t belong here, so secretive, withholding, despite appearing vaguely benevolent in the advice they share.

§

Although many games have “bodies” and many games involve stabbing, shooting, slicing, and dicing them, few series have gone so far out of their way to showcase, alter, mangle, deform, transform, and violate them as Metal Gear Solid.
/.../
From early in the series, Kojima works to make his characters simultaneously more and less than human.



One of my goals with Hollywood Visionary, released by Choice of Games earlier this year, was to create a game with more interesting representations of gender identity.

§

Making Sense of Shenmue 3


§

"Hundreds of Hours of Content"

§

Dear Esther is best left as an unsettling howl of grief into the sea wind.

List of good games with bad review scores

Games that are enough critically recognized as to be ranked on metacritic/gamerankings and are far from critically acclaimed but would certainly get a higher review score from me if I were to review them. Well not necessarily, but all of these games have a special place in my heart and didn't get very good aggregate review scores, even if some of them are indeed critically acclaimed nonetheless. Most of these games mostly focus on story and narrative, to the detriment of graphics, sound, and general production values.

Pathologic (66%) 10/10 - my score
One of the most astounding and intriguing gaming experiences in my adult life. I'm awaiting the remake with anticipation, which will have a better translation/localization and more resources for the technical side of things.

Dear Esther (71%) 10/10
Very beautiful and haunting, even more so with the updated graphics of 2012. The music still rings in my ears.

Unrest (69%) 9/10
An adventure RPG which has some of the most intricate political intrigues I've ever seen, and you're dropped right in the smack middle of it all. But it's not just clever, there is actually a lot of wisdom in the game as well. It leaves much to the imagination, but I can live with sparse graphics and a lot of text when it's done this nicely. I'm awaiting the first AAA-title with this kind of narrative ambition and focus.

Consortium (66%) 9/10
This one's fresh, so I might be infatuated beyond the point of reason right now. It's a very suspenseful one-room (or rather one ship) title with lots of depth and interactivity. The characters may look alike, but they are very fleshed-out due to backstory, the events in the game, and the voice actors. The sci-fi mystery of the game is super exciting, the lore is well-written, but perhaps the game doesn't have much worthwhile to say in the end. It's leaves one puzzled in a different way than say Pathologic or Unrest, two titles which are really existentially relevant for me. And it doesn't touch me the way games such as Dear Esther or The Novelist do for example. Maybe it's a case of having more style than substance, which is definitely the case with Device-6, an awesome experience, but yeah, I wish it would lead to something more in the end.

Knock-Knock (57%) 8/10
From the creators of Pathologic, this kickstarted experiment is definitely something else. I didn't even understand all main gameplay elements (how do I progress in the forest?!), but the experience in itself was different and worthwhile, always leaving things unsaid, the mystery unresolved. Maybe it attempts something similar to P.T, a game which has murky affordances, players never sure why they got a specific ending or how they made the game progress. There is potential in that kind of experience, and some of it is realized in Knock-Knock.

The Novelist (69%) 8/10
A game about responsibilities, about marriage, about child-rearing. A sober yet affecting story about the inadequacies of people and life in general. Main mechanic of the game is kinda forced (why would I be a ghost in a game that has nothing to do with ghosts otherwise?) and doesn't need to be there for justification, but I was touched by the fates of respective family members. It's not as fresh, well-made and designed as Gone Home, but there is a moving story here too.

Journal (59%) 8/10
A game about a young girl and her troubles, with divorce, disease, school, etc. Slice of life game with much warmth.


Borderline Cases

Due to nostalgic blindness:
Hexplore (66%)
One of my favorite games from my childhood. It's an ok dungeon crawler but these are dime-a-dozen. Still, I love it.

Castlevania 64 (72%)
I realize it's not the best game out there, but it's actually still one of my favorite Castlevania games, up there with Symphony of the Night. Another case of just having the game and loving it at a time where quality wasn't as important for enjoying myself.

Because the score isn't all that low:
Jazzpunk (75%) 9/10
Super childish game which made me laugh out loud quite a lot of times. That doesn't happen often, so I have to commend the game!

Because the game isn't all that good:
Contrast (64%) 7/10
Even though I would only give the game a 7, my seven is probably much more worth than the seven of the general video game community. The game had its magical moments and touched me with its story and presentation of it. But, as often is the case with the games on this list, the technical side of things wasn't very good. Buggy as hell.

Dark Eye (67%) 7/10
A pain in the ass to play, since progression comes down to clicking all interactable items on all screens quite often, and you get stuck because you can't find all items to click on, basically. No really, it's horrible. But if you manage to get the tempo up and play through it, it's certainly one of the most chilling subdued horror games I've played. The slowness of it all almost makes it more creepy.

11/2

TOPIC OF THE WEEK: #CRITIQUE

an alternative a “cyborgian” approach to game criticism that accounts for the whole socio-technical, embodied assemblage of digital gameplay rather than cherry-picking one or two essentialized aspects to stand in for the whole.
/.../
What I have called “expansive gameplay,” the imposition of optional rules and limitations to enhance or re-frame one’s experience of a game, might also be an example of a critical “reading” strategy (ha ha) that enables the kind of “bottom-up, descriptive analysis” Keogh is after - some examples might include Ben Abraham’s experiments with “permadeath” in Far Cry 2 and Mattie Brice’s "Pokemon Unchained," which turns Pokemon into a disturbing slavery allegory. As philosopher Manuel de Landa argues, the introduction of new capacities into an assemblage at any scale (such as using a new tool or learning a new skill) can precipitate a break in the habitual, destabilizing and reconfiguring the entangled elements that constitute the assemblage. If the goal of game criticism is, as Keogh contends, to describe and critique “the player’s actual [embodied] engagement with formal and material properties,” I’m curious to see what other critical tools, skills, and strategies might be mobilized to this end.
http://reading-strategy.tumblr.com/post/74181657281/reading-strategies-for-game-criticism

§

Despite being the focus of academic studies for close to two decades and a significant part of popular culture for much longer, the humanities generally and cultural studies in particular lacks a coherent vocabulary to perform strong, analytical criticism of individual videogame works. The solution is not another prescriptive, top-down model that attempts to understand all videogame play the same way, but a descriptive, bottom-up conceptual toolkit that understands particular videogames in the moment of play when videogame and player come together. This article highlights the values inherited by game studies that have resisted the creation of such a toolkit and suggests one path forward grounded in the phenomenological pleasures of videogame play across worlds and bodies. After exploring game studies’ historical hostility to critical and textual readings, it conceptualises the ‘videogame text’—the critic’s object of study—as the coming together of the player and the videogame in a cybernetic circuit of embodied pleasures. This circuit flows across both the actual and virtual worlds of play in a convergence of form and content. Ultimately, this article lays a groundwork for academic roads into videogame criticism that is primarily concerned with understanding videogames as videogames to complement those ad-hoc methods already being developed by a nascent scene of online critics and bloggers.
/.../
The first of these sections observes how the concept of ‘immersion’ obscures critical analysis of videogames as cultural forms that actually exist, as it leads to the same separation of form and content that Susan Sontag (1964) so completely dismantled half a century ago.
/.../
the dichotomy of action and representation is perhaps the most contested in the formalist wars to assert what a videogame is. Eskelinen (2001), along with many of the ludologists, privileges videogames’ “remediation of [nondigital] games” over what he sees as the insignificant window dressing of audiovisual representation.
/.../
A videogame’s mechanics and audiovisuals are symbiotic, a singular and irreducible component of videogame play. Claims, such as Newman’s and Aarseth’s above, that Lara Croft’s depiction in Tomb Raider as a human female matters less than what her body allows the player to do ignores the very fact that the player only considers ‘walk’, or ‘run’, or ‘jump’ as viable options because Lara Croft is represented as a human being capable of such actions.
/.../
Immersion, effectively, splits the game’s content from the game’s form, reintroducing the Cartesian split that “takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there” (1964, p.13) that critic Susan Sontag so convincingly dismantled half a century ago in her essays “Against Interpretation” (1964) and “On Style” (1965). Immersion, deployed uncritically, privileges a desire for immediate experience of the ‘content’ of the videogame while ignoring the fact that this content “is, as it were, the pretext, the goal, the lure which engages consciousness in essentially formal processes of transformation” (Sontag, 1965, p. 25). As a theatre critic accounts for the performances of actors or an art critic accounts for the brushstrokes that contribute to a portrait, the videogame critic cannot hope to understand the virtual world of the videogame text without accounting for the player’s active involvement with formal, material elements and construction of an imagined fourth-wall
/.../
A postphenomenological approach to videogame play accounts for the overlapping worlds active during videogame play. It allows the critic to account for what Psycho Mantis makes explicit in Metal Gear Solid when he collapses Solid Snake and I into a single addressee of his speech, and what Mother 2 makes implicit inside the two-walled house: that the ‘content’ of videogames—their virtual worlds and the player’s presence inside of them—is a product of the player’s actual engagement with formal and material properties.
/.../
While the purity complex of game studies with its values of ‘action’ and ‘autonomy’ can be traced through hacker identities and notions of a liberal human subject, the hybridity of the videogame text demands a cyborg identity that understands the player as posthuman, as a subject distributed and emergent (Hayles, 1999, p. 290).  To recognise the fluidity of bodies and identities is to understand that virtual worlds, like human capability, are not imperiled by the splice, but depends on it (Hayles, 1999, p.290). When Psycho Mantis uses the second-person address to say “you haven’t saved the game often” he is not talking to either me the player or Solid Snake the character, he is talking to the cyborgian, gestalt identity that is the two of us combined across bodies and worlds (5).
/.../
With the videogame text located in the circuit, the challenge for the videogame critic is to focus on the flow back and forth across the actual and virtual worlds—form and content flattened into the videogame text as played as a flattening of form and content. By starting with the experience of play across worlds and bodies in particular videogames, an academic videogame criticism can begin to understand what a videogame is without being distracted by what it should be.
http://gamescriticism.org/articles/keogh-1-1

§

rather than trying to portray a realistic world, metafictional texts try to portray the process of creating that world by “plac[ing] fictionality, structure, or language at their content’s core” (29). This form of mimesis leads to “the unmasking of dead conventions by a mirroring of them” (10). The goal is to change the medium by showing the ways in which it is relying on the same old, tired methods, meaning that metafiction can be an agent for artistic innovation and renewal.
/.../
As with any good piece of metafiction, however, The Stanley Parable isn’t just interested in commenting on the way games are made, but also interrogates the role of the player in the game world.
/.../
As Campster says in his analysis of The Stanley Parable, “I tend to approach it [analyzing games] from two general directions – a narrative-focused reading that looks at the plot structure, characters, dramatic arcs, that sort of thing, and a play-focused reading that looks at mechanical systems and how they interact with one another.  Then I try to reconcile the two into a cohesive whole.” This is a trend that permeates the way we analyse games as a community. Beyond the influence this paradigm has on game criticism, it also influences how games are received. If the elements of narrative and gameplay fail to intersect to a satisfactory extent, the game opens itself up to critiques of “ludonarrative dissonance,” while if the developers succeed in interweaving the two, we can praise the “ludonarrative harmony” of their game. It’s the Venn diagram of game criticism, looking for as much overlap between the two circles as possible, and serves in the minds of many as a litmus test for game quality.
/.../
to consider choice as only a part of the narrative is to understate the importance of its function: it is one of the principle ways “the player is able to interact with the game-world.” In The Stanley Parable, it is one of the only ways we interact with the game. By foregrounding the functioning of choice so clearly, Galactic Cafe complicates a simple or dichotomous understanding of choice, forcing us to examine the game in a more holistic manner.
/.../
Repetition isn’t something we generally conceive of as a distinct gameplay mechanic or as an aspect of the narrative.
/.../
But in The Stanley Parable, repetition, including repetition due to the death of the protagonist, isn’t a narrative disruption, but is rather a key element of the way the game functions.
/.../
Once again, a dichotomous reading of the way repetition functions in the game is impossible: it can’t be strictly confined to being part of gameplay or narrative exclusively.
/.../
If we truly want to understand how games affect the player, we’ll have to move a bit past the concept of “ludonarrative harmony,” and take a more holistic approach to game analysis. And maybe if we do so, we can at last exorcise the ghost of the old narratology/ludology debate. I think that the field of game studies would be better for it.
http://theanimistblog.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/that-wasnt-supposed-to-be-a-choice-metafiction-and-the-stanley-parable/

§

How I analyze a game
The first thing I do is set aside my experience. It is only mildly useful, a single data point, when everyone’s experience is subjective.
/.../
 Mechanics, inputs and processes, rules and tokens and actions. I strip away the surface until Gone Home is a game about flipping over cards on a desk to see what is underneath them. Papers, Please is a Spot-The-Difference game. The Stanley Parable is a choose-your-own-adventure where some of the options are written in invisible ink.
/.../
All of these things are elements on my tuning checklist for my own work. I look for them so I can look at the craft at this mechanical level.
/.../
And now comes the crux of it.

    I know the intent of the systems.
    I know what the systems actually teach.
    I know the intent of the experience.
    I know what the experience actually says.
http://www.raphkoster.com/2014/01/06/how-i-analyze-a-game/

§

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Mods
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIYx0zov8wM



§DESIGN
The violator/violated cycle of The Castle Doctrine self-perpetuates because, it seems, it’s enjoyable to violate. In reality, the relationship of a burglar and the mansion owner is a ton more complex than swapping a binary.
/.../
Rohrer’s distillation creates a gulf between the issue in reality and the issue as TCD discusses it. For the most part, people don’t suddenly materialise into criminals one day. There are causes that drive them there, making their roles in society much more tragic than Rohrer’s moustachioed caricature. As game designer, he adopts the teleology of the world within TCD, and with it responsibility for the system’s narrative dynamics falls upon his head. So, whereas in reality these criminals are created by the horrors of the world, in TCD they are selfish, greedy opportunists with nothing better to do.
/.../
But it’s fixable. Some tweaks and the introduction of a rudimentary economy would suffice to ground the message in relevance.
http://www.gameranx.com/features/id/20011/article/fixing-the-castle-doctrine-s-self-defense-parable/

§

In this sense, the “authentic” titles are not games that simulate WWI at all – in their mechanics, their play-style, even their attention to period detail, they render a war that is both recognisable and yet uncomfortably distant from the object that it seeks to reproduce. The team-based capture the flag and death match modes have a fluidity and activity that the “real” war rarely, if ever, had.
/.../
Moreover still, because the team death match style is so closely associated with other, more cinematic titles and contexts, the effort that has gone into the landscapes seems a let down, less important. Almost as if you’re playing against a backdrop, rather than in a landscape
/.../
To be representational, however inadequately, there is a need for games to reach beyond conventional and rule-bound mechanics and toward the jarringly unfamiliar, toward the red poppy “a little white with the dust”, toward Paul Nash’s rugged, imbalanced collage of shade and shape and fragment. Toward something just a little more like Super Trench Attack, and a lot less like Counter-Strike.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/scarce-heard-amid-the-guns-below/

§

A script can give me the most dramatic, apocalyptic, life-and-death scenario in the world to try to make me care; but knowing that I can help someone in the smallest way, and then giving up the chance, is much, much more painful.
http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/16/5311820/the-power-of-weakness-you-cant-save-everyone-nor-should-you

§

Determinism comforts, and nondeterminism unsettles. But there’s something frustrating and unsatisfying about living in a universe that’s entirely mapped. When a universe can’t be mapped at all, it frustrates in a different way. This tension lies at the center of much videogame story design.
/.../
Esther’s nondeterminism creates more possibilities, without needing a designer to define them in detail. At the same time, the information gaps it leaves are, on average, going to be filled with things of average quality. Stanley’s deterministic branching lets the player feel in control, but also makes that control feel pointless. Taken together, these sum up a lot of the current tradeoffs in interactive storytelling.
http://nightmaremode.thegamerstrust.com/2013/03/17/esther-and-stanley-and-fate/

§

This is the first section of a four-part essay on the history of videogame design.
http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/GDH_1.html

§

Extra Credits: The Magic Circle
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ-EY9gTsgU

§

Difficulty is the point, not the problem. The play's the thing.
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-01/17/difficulty-in-video-games






§COMMUNITY
What eSports could learn from an amazing four-person Super Metroid speedrun
http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/15/5311460/esports-super-metroid-speedrun
http://kotaku.com/four-person-super-metroid-speedrun-may-consume-next-hou-1502246487



§HISTORY
Does Legend of Zelda Exploit Nostalgia? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAP6Anq2j9Q

§

Down, down-forward, forward + punch: the controller input was designed by Nishiyama to mimic the onscreen animation of the move, as if grounding oneself with the downward stick motion, then lifting the hands upwards and towards your opponent. It is, alongside Mario’s ground pound and Sonic’s revving spin, one of the earliest and most enduring input sequences, one never forgotten once learned. The Hadoken may be science fiction, but in this way it has become part of us, something that can be summoned from the hands with concentration – just so long as they are resting on an arcade stick.
http://www.edge-online.com/features/hadoken-why-this-mashup-of-sci-fi-and-martial-arts-is-far-more-than-a-signature-move/



§MAGAZINES
The Arcade Review
http://arcadereview.net/main/



§OTHER
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/uxo4qx/the-final-bosman-nintendo--what-are-you-doing--man-

Critical links April

BIOSHOCK (best to worst)
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2013/04/thoughts-on-bioshock-infinite.html
http://crypticsea.com/twined/bioshoot.html
http://clockworkworlds.com/post/47514171804/i-can-see-my-house-from-here-bioshock-infinite
http://clockworkworlds.com/post/47663113342/this-is-not-an-agent-bioshock-infinites-elizabeth
http://bphennessy.com/bioshock.html
http://dropouthangoutspaceout.tumblr.com/post/47055663161/bioshock-infinite-the-end-of-history
http://badassdigest.com/2013/04/03/hulk-vs-devin-vs-bioshock-infinite/
http://howtonotsuckatgamedesign.com/?p=9309
http://leighalexander.net/bioshock-infinite-now-is-the-best-time/
http://kotaku.com/an-effin-ai-in-bioshock-infinite-is-more-of-a-human-th-470825011
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/06/about-a-girl-assorted-thoughts-on-bioshock-infinite/
http://www.snakelinksonic.com/2013/04/theres-subtlety-then-theres-cowardice.html
http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2013/04/apotheosis.html

Infinite Regress | Stay Classy BioShock Infinite: an intelligent, violent videogame? - Read - ABC Arts | Australian contemporary art and culture reviews, news & videos What — Gamer's Advisory: Bioshock Infinite On and Off the Rails: The Problem of Player Agency in Post-Bioshock Games | ClockworkWorlds The Hall of Heroes: BioShock Infinite's Fort Frolic? • Opinions • Eurogamer.net The Vigor Of Oz: Bishock Infinite’s Wizardly Parallels | Rock, Paper, Shotgun Adrian Chmielarz on the first 300 seconds of BioShock Infinite, and why game openings are so important | Features | Edge Online Bioshock Infinite is a Metacommentary on the Nature of Video Game Storytelling | KEVIN JAMES WONG bioshock infinite | action button dot net Modern shooters and the atrophy of fun - The Tech Report Bioshock Infinite: Part 1 – Art Direction and Visual Storytelling | Terminally Incoherent Critical Incredulity • Columbia: Problematic Racism Theme Park to the anon who asked about BioShock Infinite | Flutiebear: Rambling My Way Through Thedas In Defense Of Religion In BioShock Infinite BioShock Infinite ending explained - ComputerAndVideoGames.com 


Random:
http://www.choiceofgames.com/2012/03/we-almost-flooded-the-xyzzy-ballot-box/
http://www.secondquest.vg/2013/04/02/deeds-or-hofmeier-destroys-everything/

Planescape-forumet med ideas och annat
http://frictionalgames.blogspot.se/2011/11/problem-of-repetition.html

Dear Esther:
http://www.unwinnable.com/2013/03/28/close-playing-dear-esther/

Feminism:
http://zoyastreet.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/memory-insufficient-issue-one-women2.pdf

Essentialism/game formalism:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/04/09/a-letter-to-leigh/
http://www.mattiebrice.com/triptychs/
http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2013/04/a-letter-to-letter.html
http://dropouthangoutspaceout.tumblr.com/post/47791590888/on-universals-formalism-the-critical-reception-of
http://ohdeargodbees.tumblr.com/post/47911443396/mammon-machine-how-to-talk-about-a-system-and-who-gets


FROM:
http://www.critical-distance.com/2013/04/07/april-7th/

--

http://kambyero.com/tag/in-defense-of-bad-endings/
http://sortiv.com/?p=2177
http://brindlebrothers.blogspot.se/2013/04/quizzical-play-2-optimising-for-beauty.html
http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=1991