Brendan Vance on form, content, ideology and appropriation in modern media - a series in three parts

For a Twiney interactive context of the three texts in question, check out Brendans website dedicated to the three texts.

1.

Any designed work can be decomposed into two different kinds of features: Intrinsic features and extrinsic features. 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.
/.../
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.
/.../
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.
/.../
Problem Attic is an unfashionable game. 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.
/.../
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.
/.../
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.
/.../
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.
/.../
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.



2.

DOET [Design of Everyday Things] judges the user’s needs most important, and her perspective most valuable. It is about the apotheosis of the user; it makes her into God, and with holy might it strikes the fear of Her into objects and those who make them.
/.../
DOET, alongside all the important research around it, culminated in something called User Centered Design, a philosophy in which “user error” does not exist and programmers are sad.
/.../
This school teaches that if it’s not fun (or at the very least quick and painless) to be taught about some feature, we shouldn’t include it; that clarity is better than complexity; that elegance is better than messiness; that one button is better than two. It teaches that the purpose of a game is to explain itself to you, and that somewhere in the act of explaining lies that game’s intrinsic value. We have thereby converted the scariest, most contentious question of all (what should this thing be?) from an artistic decision into a design decision.
/.../
Our belief in clarity and elegance, though it has yielded spectacular results, is not the very best way to make videogames; it may not even be a particularly good way. We suffer from the bar we’ve set for ourselves and the burdens we place upon designers. We are wrongly convinced, even in the critical community, that works like Problem Attic are unworthy of attention solely because they prioritize different features and challenge players in a way we deem to be unfashionable.
/.../
I plan on thinking much harder about how I evaluate potential game features. “Because then the user doesn’t have to think” or “but how do we teach that?” should not be trump cards in every single argument about whether to include stuff. It’s easy to turn everything into a neat little design decision, but making a few more artistic ones would be better in the long term for users and for my sanity



3.


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.
/.../
I awoke from my yearlong stupor the night I encountered a game called Problem Attic by a person named Liz Ryerson.
/.../
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. 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 are; thus they who define form decide what things can be. ‘Content’ is more powerful still because it defines what we want; they who define content decide what is and is not valuable. Like all powerful words, ‘form’ and ‘content’ have a political history.
/.../
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.
/.../
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: Geist, the omnipresent mind and spirit of living ideas.
/.../
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. Spelunky has a spirit I can feel as I play it. I need not feel anxious about whether its procedurally-generated elements (its Rogue-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 Spelunkengeist, shall gradually come to life.
/.../
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.
/.../
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 want, 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.
/.../
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).
/.../
our intrepid capitalists sought to appropriate the concept of freeness while appending a commercial twist: They planned for web services to become free as in gratis, 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 (libre) contributor rather than powerless consumer while on the underside exploiting her contributions as freely given (gratis) ‘content’ to be sold as a commodity. The idea was to craft a sales pitch around the prospect of creating Hegelian content, content as libre, while simultaneously converting readers’ contributions into ‘content’ as gratis 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.
/.../
Where the newspaper transfixed the reader by telling her what happened recently the web service would tell her what’s happening right now. 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.
/.../
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™ is easy to learn, difficult to master and punctual with its feedback. (Twitter has excellent game feel.)
/.../
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 libre, 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 libre) to preside as a ‘neutral third party’ over the very culture wars it facilitates, dropping a Promoted Tweet™ or two into our timelines between all the vicious bile.
/.../
We ought to regard the Tweet™ 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 libre hand dangling a new social appendage in front of us while the gratis hand converts all our ‘freely given’ energy into its own money and power.
/.../
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 The New York Times 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 maintain rather than construct. It wants us to forget the name of the author we just read but remember to Tweet™ 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 libre hand promises us an oasis while the gratis hand c converts the whole internet into a desert.
/.../
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 libre hand as it offers us the chance of a generous reward for our hard work; we ignore the gratis 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 these are not defects. 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.
/.../
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’.
/.../
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.
/.../
the change I want must resemble the form of Attic itself: A tiny fire in a mound of corporate detritus, growing a little at a time.
/.../
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.
/.../
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.
/.../
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 libre; we live in a world where ‘free’ means gratis, ‘form’ means Twitter and ‘content’ means Tweets™. Recall that appropriation is what capitalists do best. The goal of appropriation is to erase history entirely: To focus solely on the eternal now, divorced from all context, leaving us no basis on which to make choices.
/.../
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.

9/11

§VIDEOS
The Importance of GoldenEye’s Guns! | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios - YouTube

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Game Maker's Toolkit - Why Nathan Drake Doesn't Need a Compass

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Viral Dusty Dead Identity Quiz - Minicrit

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The Trans-Pacific Partnership, Videogames and You!

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RetroAhoy: Soul Edge - YouTube






§ARTICLES
Explorable Explanations is my umbrella project for ideas that enable and encourage truly active reading. The goal is to change people's relationship with text. People currently think of text as information to be consumed. I want text to be used as an environment to think in.

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The Dusty Dead seeks to expose the narrative wiring that underpins our collective engagement in and identification with fiction

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Critical Distance is proud to present this Critical Compilation of Nintendo’s series-spanning heroine Samus Aran, curated by Video Game Heart‘s Grayson Davis.

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an extended look at what makes Catan great. I’ll be examine the game’s major systems, the rules underlying them, and the emotions they create.

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Hi, Alexandra the Translator is back—with more wordweaving, bits, and pieces.

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The beauty of Barksdale’s work is in capturing the creeping unease that can come from wanting other people’s lives to make too much sense.

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It's based partially on real people and events, but fictionalized and edited to make for a more coherent story—it's more like two truths and a lie. But because the character has a similar gender identity, people assume it's literally me. That wouldn't happen if I were a white guy writing about a white guy, since white guys are seen as more Universal Representatives of Humanity than genderqueer people of color.







§SO LONG AND THANKS FOR THE FISH
On a personal level I look back at my huge contribution to the games that we’ve made and I have had to watch Dan get the credit time and time again.  I’ve had journalists assuming I’m Dan’s PA, I have been referenced as “Dan Pinchbeck’s wife” in articles, publishers on first meeting have automatically assumed that my producer is my boss just because he’s a man, one magazine would only feature Dan as Studio Head and wouldn’t include me. When Dan has said “Jess is the brains of the operation” people have knowingly chuckled and cooed that it’s nice of a husband to be so kind about his wife.

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i'll be leaving games.

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Cathedral-in-the-Clouds: contemplation in the digital age

29/11

§KICKSTARTER
Late To The Party : A Cold War Espionage RPG in the Baltics
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pyrodactyl/late-to-the-party-a-cold-war-espionage-rpg-in-the/posts

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Unrest: An Honest Postmortem of a Kickstarter Success
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=23830




§MISC
Here’s what happened when Wreden and Pugh dug into the ideas behind The Stanley Parable’s disorienting and utterly impossible building.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/21/the-stanley-parable-architecture/

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The Game Design of IKEA | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKCDJ89ODyM

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queer as in fuck me – a design manifesto
/.../
((Provocation: Queerness resides not within the game but in the way we relate to the game and to each other. Answer: Design games that draw awareness to participation in relationships.))
http://www.mattiebrice.com/queer-as-in-fuck-me-a-design-manifesto/

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Extra Credits - Interactive Video - How Cloud Chamber Makes a Game out of Movies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dU70hOX5_X8

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What is a game? And why it matters! | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0ReU2tvLFo

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I really liked Bioshock: Infinite, but upon replaying it with an audience, I have noticed one thing. When you aren’t hypnotized by the constant combats and strong visuals, and when you break apart from those to share your observations with somebody else, you perceive the interplay of dialogue and gameplay very differently. By which I mean you realize how award-winning game-changing Nobel-peace-prize-getting they really are
http://www.chocolatehammer.org/?p=4762

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PS4: A One Year Anniversary
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/quhrmg/the-final-bosman-ps4--a-one-year-anniversary

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Extra Credits - The True Genius of Dark Souls II - How to Approach Game Difficulty
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2dDF4B9a4

21/8

§HISTORY LESSON
A few years ago Kirk Battle, going under the pseudonym L.B. Jefferies, was one of the most prolific critics of the burgeoning amateur bloggers arising from the boom of 2007 and 2008.
http://www.critical-distance.com/2014/08/15/episode-19-a-critic-by-his-window/

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43 hours after the Wasteland 2 Kickstarter launched it was funded. Fargo was at inXile's office outside Los Angeles at the time. The team was "doing a little jig" he says. "It was like a New Year's Eve countdown. The first 10 years I couldn't even get the trademark. Then another eight years of hardcore pitching getting nowhere. It was a great moment."
/.../
"It was amazing to me," Fargo recalls. "When you do contracts they come from anywhere but trust. You have 10 pages of pain about how to get paid. What happens if you're not on time? They could take your project away from you. They could take your trademark. They could shut down your company. They could take over your company. They could sue your company. You can have damages that are related not just to that but to their stock market price dropping. You can be on the hook literally for a billion dollars for screwing up a contract. I came from that world to, 'here's the money up front, Brian. We trust you.' What a difference."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-08-05-the-long-journey-of-wasteland-2

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The Secret History of Videogames & The Military | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VsNrHwPdIDc







§ZELDA

Some could argue that, because Yuga is the one who patronizes and objectifies women, and because Link eventually kicks Yuga’s ass, the game itself is presenting these behaviours as unacceptable. I disagree. Just as a text is not feminist just because its heroine is strong a game does not become un-sexist when it features a villain rather than a hero acting in a sexist manner. Let’s face it: The Legend of Zelda’s history does not do it any favours.
http://big-tall-words.com/2014/07/28/my-last-princess-women-as-objects-in-the-legend-of-zelda-a-link-between-worlds/

The Zelda series is a garden you can keep inside your drawer, not a wide, expansive landscape that absorbs you. The environment in Oracle of Seasons, and to a less direct extent, in other Zelda games, is both an enemy and a lover. It’s the uncomfortable source of conflict, theme, plot — it’s something to be feared and understood and respected, but also something to overcome. It has authority over me as the game system, but it can also be gamed. It can destroy me, and it can also be destroyed. It has a precarious but learnable pattern. Master that pattern. When it swings left, go right. Harmonize with that pattern, like Din’s dance. Master the dance, and master nature.
http://www.pushselectmagazine.com/2013/07/17/man-vs-dungeon-ecology-in-zelda-and-the-conquest-of-nature/





§VIDEOS
Game Theory: World of Warcraft will SAVE the Economy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDfNoCjtXvQ

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Queer Mechanics in Tabletop Games
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1vxuNdMCF-dlHcWFf5mYAGw55FwqNFtSYPYk83zB8O8I/edit#slide=id.g24620197_09

§

PlayStation Now Is Here. Streaming is Popularizing. God Save Us.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeX38RD52-4

§

How Are Games Biased Against the Disabled? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyASY5wv_Qo








§DESIGN
Wayward Manor goes most wayward in terms of game design, such that the possibility of interacting inside a Gaiman story in a meaningful way becomes impossible. We are left with a game that, rather than immersing us in story, stands as proof that games don’t just need better writer to make game stories better.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/how-does-wayward-manor-fit-neil-gaimans-ouevre-it-doesnt/

§

Violence is seldom framed for what it is: uncontrollable, self-perpetuating and unpredictable. Games treat violence as a stable fuel for their ambitions.
http://big-tall-words.com/2014/08/13/everything-looks-like-a-nail/

11/4

§TEXTS
We’ve bought into the idea that storytelling is about a journey to an endpoint, an authored destination. The real destination is the creation of meaning, whether that be the reader’s interpretation or reconstructing the author’s intent.
/.../
Hypertext tales are often sold as games of choices, of agency, of your version of the narrative – when it would be better to embrace what they are good at, which is telling a different kind of fiction: one which is host to multiple narratives, narrative superposition for want of a better term, from which meaning can be derived.
http://www.electrondance.com/stop-crying-about-choice/

§

"I HATE how people who aren't straight white cisgender men are treated in the game industry. I HATE that so many women can't come to a professional event without getting hit on by some creepy dude… and I HATE that it never, ever happens to me. I mean, who even thinks this? Shouldn't I feel happy that I'm not getting hit on?! No, I feel like SHIT. I start to wonder, what's wrong with me? I clearly don't look manly or bearded or stubbly enough, so I don't get to be treated like a real human, but I'm also not hot enough for any of their creepy attention. I'm like invisible or something."
/.../
"I didn't last in the industry very long, as you can probably imagine," Deirdra Kiai continues after a long pause. "I was pushed over to the margins, where I quietly worked alone on my own projects, desperately struggling to find my voice."
"They could exclude me all they wanted, but they couldn't stop me from making games."
/.../
"I've been able to do these things, but only IN SPITE of the industry's social pressure not to. Imagine what I could have done if I'd been encouraged instead of IGNORED. Imagine how many other brilliant, talented people could be making weird, wonderful games along WITH ME."
http://tmi.kotaku.com/making-games-is-easy-belonging-is-hard-1551649858

§

...if the factors that lead to replay do not exist solely “in the games themselves” that does not mean they aren’t worth talking about – indeed, as Fernández-Vara’s insights show, the middle-ground between game and player is fundamental to a “game-type experience” as such.  This paper admits both to the elusive and idiosyncratic nature of replay value, while attempting a tentative outline for a mode in which replay value may be described and analyzed.
http://www.firstpersonscholar.com/the-games-people-replay/





§VIDEOS
Top 5 Reasons Game Reviews Don't Matter | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzkVlQ3nlVM

§

Game Theory: Are Gamers Killing Video Games?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q

§

Is VR the future of Gaming? A look at nearly every VR device shown at GDC.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2myY_pQEMk

§

Net Neutrality - What a Closed Internet Means for Games - Extra Credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQtiIazfoQM






§DATA
A new study out of Ohio State University is suggesting that playing aggressive, Black characters in video games might make people who already have a tendency towards racism more racist.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4882

§

Some data available from games with moral decision systems show that gamers are generally unwilling to play as evil characters. In a study, over 1000 gamers were surveyed to see how the average player interacts with a game system that allows the player to choose a "good" or "evil" path through a game story. The finding was that the average gamer prefers to be good or heroic in such games. Gamers are most interested in exploring a character whose moral choices closely match to their own. However, those players that experience a game for the second time are then more likely to choose evil. The article includes an exploration of which actions gamers felt particularly evil, and what kind of choices turn out to be more difficult for them.
http://gamescriticism.org/articles/lange-1-1/

1/2 Crit Links

In 2012 I realized videogames were holding me back, artistically speaking. Or rather: my tunnel vision focus on videogames as "my" medium was holding me back.
/.../
Every medium is imbued with the exact same amount of possibility: it’s like the density of the Real Line. The density of the Real Line between 0 and 1 is infinite, as is the density between 0.2 and 0.4, which is the same as between 0 and 100, etc.

You can always drill down, and there will always be more to discover about a medium.
http://tinysubversions.com/fuckvideogames/#slide1



§DESIGN
Chess has problems.

Not for most of us, perhaps - not for the bluffers and the fudgers and the seat-of-the-pants players who prod a path through matchups in which each side's strategy is a winsome, wobbling comedy of errors. No, chess has problems at the grandmaster level. Those people who really love chess, that devoted few who have given their lives to it and for whom chess really should be a great game? They're not getting a great game - and they haven't been getting one for a while.

Chess, it turns out, has been in a bit of a rut for some time.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-11-03-chess-2-the-sequel-how-a-street-fightin-man-fixed-the-worlds-most-famous-game

§

Extra Credits: Affordances
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCSXEKHL6fc

§

DOET [Design of Everyday Things] judges the user’s needs most important, and her perspective most valuable. It is about the apotheosis of the user; it makes her into God, and with holy might it strikes the fear of Her into objects and those who make them.
/.../
DOET, alongside all the important research around it, culminated in something called User Centered Design, a philosophy in which “user error” does not exist and programmers are sad.
/.../
This school teaches that if it’s not fun (or at the very least quick and painless) to be taught about some feature, we shouldn’t include it; that clarity is better than complexity; that elegance is better than messiness; that one button is better than two. It teaches that the purpose of a game is to explain itself to you, and that somewhere in the act of explaining lies that game’s intrinsic value. We have thereby converted the scariest, most contentious question of all (what should this thing be?) from an artistic decision into a design decision.
/.../
Our belief in clarity and elegance, though it has yielded spectacular results, is not the very best way to make videogames; it may not even be a particularly good way. We suffer from the bar we’ve set for ourselves and the burdens we place upon designers. We are wrongly convinced, even in the critical community, that works like Problem Attic are unworthy of attention solely because they prioritize different features and challenge players in a way we deem to be unfashionable.
/.../
I plan on thinking much harder about how I evaluate potential game features. “Because then the user doesn’t have to think” or “but how do we teach that?” should not be trump cards in every single argument about whether to include stuff. It’s easy to turn everything into a neat little design decision, but making a few more artistic ones would be better in the long term for users and for my sanity
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/BrendanVance/20140106/208092/The_Cult_of_the_Peacock.php?print=1

§

At its worst a backstory driven piece can seem soulless and lonely, as the player wanders desolate locations from which all the other humans have already fled.

But there’s also an argument to be made that the backstory mystery is one of the most natural possible shapes for interactive literature.
/.../
The problem I have with it in Gone Home is that this interaction style enforces the distance and lack of agency that is backstory’s chief defect, and it does so without offering much of value in exchange. The player’s task is purely ergodic, methodically working through every explorable space, even though this is a story about understanding and insight, not about effort and dedication.
/.../
Hypothetical reading is most interesting if the reader is likely at first to form incorrect hypotheses.

Gone Home misguides the player initially, but it does so in a way that is completely orthogonal to the actual substance of its story.
/.../
Nor does Gone Home let the reader take an active role in guessing and testing the guesses. One may form hypotheses about the relationships between the people in the house, why they are absent now, and where they have gone. But there is nothing the player can do that can either ask additional questions about these issues or hazard a guess at the answer. The exploration can’t be directed by the player in such a way that it elicits more information of the kind the player is most interested in; it can only be performed systematically and with a greater or lesser degree of thoroughness. Where in the house would you go to express, or investigate, the suspicion that the mother is having an affair?

The house, I felt, was a distraction, the 3D exploration a red herring.
http://emshort.wordpress.com/2014/01/09/reading-and-hypothesis/

§

Gone Home tells a great romance story, but it tells a particularly brilliant video game romance story because it finds a way around all these problems; you’re not part of the romance. By placing the player outside that relationship, Gone Home can develop a romance that feels realistically nuanced.
http://www.popmatters.com/post/177701-gone-home-is-the-best-romance-video-games-can-offer/

§

Half the men who got the number of the girl on the scary bridge tried to call her up. Only about 12 percent of the ones on the blase bridge in the control group made use of those same digits. Also, remember those stories the subjects were asked to make up about the ambiguous picture? Those who did so while swaying slightly back and forth over the Capilano River were much more likely to come up with narratives involving sex.
/.../
I think this explains why certain games get overrated.

Or at least certain aspects of games. Take the first season of The Walking Dead for example.
http://www.psychologyofgames.com/2013/12/fake-feels-and-free-passes/

§

The Importance of Quiet Time
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rCxR__N0_is

§

Fast-paced choices and moral quandaries are the most prominent feature of The Walking Dead, but they seem to have no real consequences. Why did this game receive approximately all of the awards in 2012 if its main selling point is used so inconsequentially? I suggest that the most important aspect about this game is not the many difficult choices it offers the player – it’s the illusion of choice the game constructs
/.../
The decisions you make in The Walking Dead don’t change what happens, they change how it happens.

Your actions determine what kind of person Lee is, how he reacts to certain situations, and how the other characters see him. You could almost say The Walking Dead is an RPG: Is Lee a failed family-man who sees Clementine as his second chance? Is he short-tempered and violent? Or does he keep a clear head and talks his way out of hairy situations? Does he regret what he did? Is he a cynic or a wide-eyed idealist? Will the other characters be his friends, or just his companions? Is there even any coherence between what he does and what he says? Maybe he doesn’t talk at all, which is really stupid but really funny. It doesn’t change the overarching story, but all of this and much more is up to you.
/.../
The Walking Dead is not about choices, it’s about decisions. It’s about making the right decision in a world where everything goes wrong. It’s about doing what you think is right, even when faced with absolute despair, even though all hope seems lost, and even though this bleak world doesn’t give a single fuck about your decision. But you have to do it. For Clementine.
http://ontologicalgeek.com/clementine-will-remember-all-of-that/




§QUEER
Diary of a Western Videogame Protagonist:
Day 1 – I got a haircut today. It’s a lot shorter now but not working class short, not army short. Back at home, Sarah said that she liked it, that she could see herself playfully gripping tufts of my hair during sex. I said, “Why don’t we test that hypothesis?” and she obliged. God, I love her so much. If anything were to happen to her, I swear…

Day 2 - Sarah’s dead. And just one day after our scene of mildly erotic domestic bliss, too. To mark my loss, I refused to shave today. Shaving would somehow cheapen her passing. And besides, revenge is a dish best served scruffy.
http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=11663

§

One could read in Shadow a sexual politics in which the innate goodness of human-born-humans is counterpointed with the monstering of a man-made, non-human person. Without the involvement of sexual reproduction in their creation, gender becomes irrelevant precisely because the creature is unnatural. That this character became a villain is unfortunate, because it supports a conservative idea that morality relies on a heteronormative reproductive context. I prefer to see Homunculus as a queer anti-hero: a person who has very limited survival strategies, and opts to fight for their own existence at the expense of other people. Queer anti-heroes are unable to solve their problems using brute force or economic privilege, and must manipulate what advantages they do have with skill in order to get what they want. The hero must, in response, do the same.
Histories of gender & sexual diversity in games, Issue three June 2013, Gender in the shadows, Zoya Street

§

So, why do all but one of the females need to be warriors? The problem for me is, in the context of this whimsical game, I can’t really identify with a warrior-type character. The female characters in Rayman Legends simply aren’t as fun for me because they aren’t as whimsical and fun as their male counterparts are allowed to be. Not that there is anything wrong with playing a warrior in certain games or contexts (or, I guess, with playing a lovesick fool), but it just doesn’t work for me in this particular game. I would rather play a character like Rayman who is described as “always raring for a fresh adventure to save the world;” or Sir Gilbrax, “a very famous knight.” Out of the thirteen playable male characters only one, Raynesis, is described in a threatening manner similar to the warrior princesses: “A desperate case in need of serious anger management.” But, one threatening male character still leaves me twelve whimsical male characters to choose from.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4447

§

In the first part of this study of Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, I questioned whether the Bechdel Test was the best benchmark for judging whether or not a piece of media had something to offer in terms of good female characterization. Is the Bechdel Test enough, or does even this bare minimum set the bar too low?

In this second part, I’ll be looking at some of the games’ other character, particularly Clementine, in an effort to delve deeper into the presentation of women in a game praised for its characterization and narrative strength.
http://www.samanthablackmon.net/notyourmamasgamer/?p=4492

§

Long story short, I can see genre and contextual reasons that lead designers in some areas (like fighting games) to make broad-brush design choices that engage ethnic, gender, and sexual stereotypes. http://www.chaoticblue.com/blog/2014/01/shes-got-the-look/



§VIDEOS

Final Bosman
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/ur6ce9/the-final-bosman-nobody-finishes-video-games

§

Do You Think eSports Should Allow A.I. Teammates? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hkMhng4q74

§

Nintendoomed? A look at Nintendo's financials.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_ho5Y-Yw8g

§

Final Bosman
http://www.gametrailers.com/videos/7j4yfw/the-final-bosman-xbox-friends-with-benefits

§

Composing The Banner Saga
http://www.gametrailers.com/full-episodes/ntly7e/backtrack-composing-the-banner-saga

§

Why Comcast's 300GB Data Cap is Bad for Gaming
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nD8eqTIzjZM

§

Are Virtual Worlds Real or Fake? | Game/Show | PBS Digital Studios
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiEu5wMoEDs




§REVIEWS
Errant Signal - The Novelist
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VThsdoxwgc

§

Tim Schafer didn’t really give us what we said we wanted, which was an old school point-and-click adventure game. He gave us something better, a modern LucasArts game. He looked past our words to our intent and gave us a game that represents what we really wanted, not just what we thought we wanted.
www.popmatters.com/post/178507-the-beautiful-simplicity-of-broken-age/

§

Ice Pick Lodge seems to be reaching back into childhood to seek a resolution to very adult problems, the problems of memories that we don’t want to confront or that we think that we can simply hide out long enough from.
At some point, the game seems to argue, we need to be brave like children and make a run for it—even if that run might allow us to to be seen, to be found out for what we truly are.   
http://www.popmatters.com/post/178042-knock-knock-the-terrors-of-self-exposure/

§

Knock Knock is primarily an intellectual experience not an emotional one, which already makes it a poor horror game, but then it also fails to express anything intellectual because its central means of communication, the hide and seek puzzle mechanics, are awful. 
http://www.popmatters.com/post/178712-puzzles-arent-scary-in-knock-knock/




§COMMUNITY
Thoughts on Games Writing and Community Involvement
http://big-tall-words.com/2014/01/08/thoughts-on-games-writing/

§

Among the many elephants in the games criticism room, our relationship to academia is one that threatens to stomp on others the most often. It’s presence comes out in numerous ways, but most usually on methods of analyzing games and the craft of writing criticism. This month there seems to be a resurgence of it, so I want to spill some thoughts on how it effects me and some things I’d like to see develop.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/the-diy-of-games-criticism/

§

In the coming year, I want to see discussion and experiments on constructive, passionate uses of anger for social justice and change. I want people to express themselves honestly and without the degradation of others. We have our journals, our personal friends who understand us to be petty with. This doesn’t need to be an artificially happy place, but I’d like it to be somewhere no one is afraid to speak their mind and learn. I hope people who disagree with me contact me and let me know what they think, because I am ready for a change for the better, whatever it is we decide, as a community.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/on-anger/

§

What I want to dig into, and outline to respect, is the experience that Kim Delicious describes here in response to anti-toxicity articles. It’s a conflict between legit anger, anger that is cathartic and deserved, and understanding that it will wall off communication and education to another person. It shows where being an activist and simply existing as a minority identity blur.
http://www.mattiebrice.com/on-civility/



§MAGAZINES
The Arcade Review: Issue 1
http://arcadereview.net/main/?p=281




§PROFILE
I first encountered the unmistakable style of Stephen Murphy, aka thecatamites, back in 2009 with the hand-drawn adventure game Paul Moose in Space. Since then you may well have stumbled across any one of the otherworldly experience that he has provided on tap, like Space Funeral, Murder Dog IV: Trial of the Murder Dog, and The Pleasuredromes of Kubla Khan.
http://indiegames.com/2014/01/just_who_is_thecatamites_anywa.html