CHRISZAMANILLO.COM

It’s been a noisy week, folks. Loud like the plaintive whirring of my PS3 as it struggles to keep up with all these games I’ve been playing (for research, I assure you). Loud like the fracas that’s been kicked up by the launches of SimCity and an Anita Sarkeesian video in the same week. Good grief! Let’s launch right into the madness. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

First up, issue two of the magazine helmed by BoRT coordinator Alan Williamson, Five out of Ten, is now out! For five quid you’ll get yourself ten essays penned by some of games criticism’s most prolific. Yours truly poked curiously at Sleep is Death and the female monsters of Silent Hill: Downpour, but my personal favourite? Denis Farr’s exploration of gender in XCOM: Enemy Unknown and The Sims. There’s enough material in this mag to fill its own TWIVGB post, to be honest, so definitely pick it up if you just can’t cram enough criticism into your cranium.

Meanwhile, over at Indie Game Magazine, Marc Isaacson describes the dangers of in-app purchasing. While this editor is not 100% sure she agrees with the idea of IAPs being scammy generally – I am sensitive to the fact that games are a business, and that developers need to eat, after all – I think it’s a conversation well worth having as the free-to-play model only grows more and more prominent.

The Globe and Mail has a fantastic long piece, by Ian Brown, which asks: “Are video games like Assassin’s Creed rewriting history?”

This is one way history still gets taught: At 6 p.m. in a pink-and-beige lecture hall at the University of Toronto, 100 young men and women in HIS217Y are writing down everything, absolutely everything, Erin Black is saying about Woodrow Wilson and his efforts to keep the United States out of the First World War.

Here’s another way history is inhaled today: At 3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday in a precise, book-upholstered apartment, Mark Brownlie, 42, and his fiancée, Erin Dolmage, 39, sit before their 60-inch plasma TV and play Assassin’s Creed III, a video game about the American Revolution.

Ah, I love this stuff: Jill Scharr of Unwinnable makes evident some really interesting links between videogames and well-known artworks.

Headline of the Week Award goes to Troy Goodfellow, with “The Pope as a Game Mechanic” at Flash of Steel. But, hey, once you get past that title, the actual text isn’t that bad of a read either. If you’ve ever wondered what exactly the Pope does, Goodfellow suggests looking through the lens of gaming to understand: “Well, if you play historical strategy games, then the Pope is there to make your life a little more complicated. He is a prize to be fought over, a lover to woo, or a dispensary of tasks.”

Critical Distance’s newest editor Mattie Brice, writing for her own Alternate Ending, examines how the design of games such as Depression Quest serve to drive home their message. It’s the first of her video series, but she’s helpfully posted a transcript as well.

Depression Quest is for a couple different audiences, and a player could fit into more than one. Mainly, there are two ways a person can approach it; looking for solidarity in a shared experience and gaining empathy through a shift in perspective. It is possible to do it both ways because this game both is and isn’t about depression, is and isn’t about a particular person.

And now, for a pair of Tomb Raider reviews. At the Gameological Society, John Teti muses that Lara’s promising story is unfortunately constrained by its narrow-minded game design; at the Mary Sue, meanwhile, the wonderful Becky Chambers praises the evolution of Lara Croft, videogame sex goddess, to Lara Croft, someone we can actually relate to:

Forget everything you’ve read about Lara needing your protection. Forget about her needing to be “broken down.” It’s nonsense, all of it, the remnants of some truly misguided remarks about a character who is, without a doubt, one of the best action heroes I’ve ever seen. Not female action heroes — action heroes, period, full stop.

If you’ve noticed a lot of articles here exploring women’s issues, well, that may be because we’re not the only ones celebrating Women’s History Month.

The Border House is doing a callout for submissions on women’s history in games, to be compiled in a pdf collection – check out the post for details.

This week also marks the launch of the project Women In Development (Games and Everything Tech), or: WIDGET! Run by Leena van Deventer and Liah Clark, it’s a website that says it will “support women developers by means of supplying resources, showcasing role models, and providing an encouraging space in which to ask questions and learn from others.” Successful lady developers, such as BioWare’s Karin Weekes, have already used the space to write about their craft, and I’m sure there’s only more to come.

And that brings us to one of the week’s two meatiest issues…

Anita Sarkeesian’s highly publicised web series has finally launched, following the huge Kickstarter campaign and the horrific haters that came with it. Part 1 of Damsel in Distress is pretty basic knowledge on the common trope, but still important; as I said on Twitter, I’m hoping this really makes its way into games studies classrooms. Check out the accompanying Tumblr, too, for further examples of the trope.

If you needed an example of why Sarkeesian chose to disable YouTube comments – and of why we so badly need a series like this in the world – see Mathew Jones’ round-up of what people are saying about Tropes vs. Women.

And for those who might ask “whers my tropes vs men vdieo???”… check out Stephen Beirne’s investigative piece on just what happened to that project, anyway. It’s fairly hilarious.

The other hot topic of the week? The disastrous launch of SimCity, whose always-online DRM kept many players from actually being able to play the thing. It’s brought up a lot of questions about the usefulness of the ever-expanding popularity of such DRM, and in the wake of Polygon’s twice-revised review score, it’s had many questioning how the review process works, too.

Tom Chick argues that those who reviewed it highly, despite the launch day server issues, were not necessarily misleading consumers:

SimCity does not work yet. And anyone who has reviewed it favorably at this point is reviewing it entirely on its promise. If that’s how you want to evaluate games, have at it. There is pretty much no reason any game shouldn’t get a stellar review. The industry should be grateful for your enthusiasm.

And finally, Raph Koster believes that always-online DRM is not going to go away; it’s a “march towards ‘everything you used to buy, you now rent as a service,’” he says, “With all the good and bad that entails.”

That’s it for this huge week of TWIVGB! Mattie Brice will be doing the next two weeks’ round-ups, so be sure to tweet or email to ensure your favourite pieces of the week are submitted for her consideration. Why not contribute to our themed Blogs of the Round Table topic, too, while you’re at it?

Critical Distance

Sorry, what’s that? It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging already? You mean, only the best and most interesting games criticism, analysis and commentary on the web? Well all right then– let’s get started.

AROUND THE WORLD

We start rather unassumingly at Kotaku, where guest contributor Hussein M. Ibrahim, one of the writers behind At7addak.com, criticizes Western games’ depictions of Arabs in shooters: “A lot of shooters aim for realism using current real world conflicts or inspirations. Medal of Honor and its cooperation with actual navy seal soldiers comes to mind. That’s fine, but a lot of times the ‘authenticity’ is only on one side.”

From there, we hop on over to the Philippines, where educator Lukas Velunta has just launched Kambyero, “the first Filipino publication dedicated to discourse on video games.” And where better place to start than with an essay on his own gaming origins?

It’s a little known fact we here at Critical Distance welcome non-English contributions, provided we have a decent overview from the submitter about the article’s subject. With that in mind, our next article hails from France, where Sachka Duval proposes that Ron Gilbert’s The Cave is more like a cathedral. In the author’s words:

[The Cave] resembles a moral Christian tale without any psychology or social realism, like the ones illustrated in a cathedral’s stained glass windows. The article suggests that, by doing so, the game inadvertently shows the emptiness of the bad/good endings structure of many recent games.

The last stop on our tour brings us to Nairobi, where Joe Keiser shows us through the local knockoff games market. If you don’t unironically love these, something is wrong with you.

WARFIGHTING

Over on The Escapist, Robert Rath hits another one out of the park with this article tracing the US military’s history of involvement with Hollywood, and the relative freedom games have instead:

Ironically […] the action games that mimic summer blockbusters actually tell stories most military action films would never get away with. Just in the Modern Warfare series, we see members of the U.S. military die in an atomic blast, gun down civilians in order to maintain their undercover identity, torture targets for information and bring down a rogue American general. Splinter Cell: Conviction has Sam Fisher hunting down conspirators within the U.S. government. Even the infamously pro-military Medal of Honor (2010) includes an ugly portrait of a desk general who accidentally calls air support on his Afghan allies. In other words, even the most jingoistic games criticize the military more than the blockbusters of “liberal” Hollywood.

Rath also goes on to highlight how recent events have perhaps made the US military warier of their cozy relationship with the entertainment industry. A very worthy read.

COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

Samantha Allen (whom you’ll see pop up a few times in this roundup) showed up on The Border House this week with an essay questioning the rhetoric of complete spatial freedom as the evolutionary end-point of game design:

Different styles of movement produce different emotional effects and both should be available to us as players and as game-makers. To regard “fun” as the ultimate litmus test for the success of a video game is to sell short the emotive capacity of the medium itself. Games can return us to an innocent state of childlike play but they can also, in the words of Merritt Kopas, teach us that “being an other can be painful and horrible.”

DON’T YOU DIE ON ME

Coming to us from Pixels or Death, here’s a pair of interesting, opposing viewpoints on the role of character permadeath. Tom Auxier would rather go without, while Ben Chapman contends the player only cheats herself by avoiding it.

WOULD YOU KINDLY

Samantha Allen (told you she’d be back) also appeared this week in a guest post on This Cage is Worms, with a measured response to both Mattie Brice’s “Would You Kindly” and Jonas Kyratzes’s “Would You Kindly Not.” The article, titled appropriately “Can We Kindly,” advocates for “a careful conversation […] about the role that experience plays in games writing.”

BUT CAN ART BE GAMES

Why yes, says Alexander Feigenbaum. And here’s an interesting essay on Pippin Barr’s “Duchamping” of the medium in Art Game.

Samantha Allen (say her name three times and click your heels) also turned up on Kotaku this week to pose a different hypothesis: maybe games are like a certain kind of sex.

Writing in his regular Moving Pixels column, Nick Dinicola poses that Journey’s co-op is effective in the later levels because it provokes “the more subtle emotions of safety and reassurance.” Elsewhere on the topic of last year’s indie darlings, David Carlton writes about recently playing Papo & Yo and muses on how it turns a certain gaming trope on its head.

A bit essential, but this post by Diana Poulsen on Kill Screen is still valuable little essay, drawing a connection between Skyrim and the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

On his blog Critical Damage, Brendan Keogh has very generously pointed us to a recording of his recent presentation on why we should stop worrying and love the notgame (or stop trying to define games, anyway).

Proteus developer Ed Key is on a similar bent, reacting to a Gamasutra op-ed by Mike Rose by arguing that attempts to put a fine point on the definition of games are misguided: “Outside of academic discussions, encouraging a strict definition of “game” does nothing but foster conservatism and defensiveness in a culture already notorious for both.”

Following on this back-and-forth, Culture Ramp’s Luke Rhodes also challenges this push for definition, in particular pointing out what he sees as an underlying desire for self-justification:

Let’s say, just for a moment, that Proteus is not, as its creators would have it, a game. A wild genius pops up, say, and provides a definition of “game” that everyone immediately recognizes as right on the money, and oh, hey! did you notice that Proteus fails to pass muster? Would anything about the experience change in light of that fact?

That’s the salient question, really: how does categorizing it one way or another change our experience of Proteus? It’s possible that the wild genius’ unassailable definition will irrevocably alter that experience, even for people who have already played and enjoyed the experience, like being told that the main course in the fantastic meal you’ve just finished was actually the family dog. That doesn’t seem very likely, though.

I’ll end this subsection with Dylan Holmes, who proposes a more open-ended approach for evaluating games: the 3 Es – Entertainment, Education, and Enlightenment.

88MPH

Back on Gamasutra, Nathan Fouts furnishes us with a developer’s eulogy for XNA.

Elsewhere on Gamasutra, Luke McMillan shares with us a bit of his PhD dissertation on the geneology of the shoot-em-up.

And on Games on Net, here’s an interesting retrospective via David Rayfield on Manhunt, the “game still so controversial nobody is willing to talk about it – even ten years later.”

GO AND MAKE A FREAKING GAME

Jay “Rampant Coyote” Barnson shores up some good tips for managing indie development against a full-time day job.

MATURITY

On The Guardian, Keith Stuart responds to Warren Spector and David Cage’s (now notorious) DICE presentations with the suggestion games are already maturing as a medium:

It’s still possible to look at the best-selling retail games of the year and see only titles aimed at young, predominantly male audiences; you’ll find the odd dancing game, a smattering of Marios, but mostly it will be soldiers and assassins, saving humanity or themselves.

But then of course, taking this list as your reference group is like glancing at the top ten movie blockbusters and declaring that all films are noisy, idiotic and soulless. And no one in Hollywood bothers to stand up in front of their peers and say, “you know, perhaps we shouldn’t let Michael Bay make any more movies”.

(Actually, that’s precisely what I feel like saying to Hollywood most days.)

On Bit Creature, Lana Polansky suggests there are better, more enlightened ways to go about discussing and portraying sex in games. Elsewhere on the same publication, Joseph Leray performs a deep read of Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, revealing there’s a lot of edgy content in this alleged kids’ title.

On Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez again battles the commenters with an in-depth piece on women who earn money by streaming their gaming sessions.

And on VGResearcher, Wai Yen Tang provides a valuable distillation of an academic study by Jeffrey Kuznekoff and L.M. Rose about the ratios of verbal abuse experienced by male and female players on Xbox Live.

PROJECTS

Many have picked up on the rather uncomfortable racial subtext of Pokemon Black/White, but Mattie Brice has gone one further: she’s doing a modification of the Nuzlocke Challenge, replacing the words “trainer” and “Pokemon” with “master” and “slaves.” You’ll love the name too.

ROBIN KRIS AND HER MERRY BAND

As always we would like to thank our wonderful readers who submit links to us each week. Have something you want us to consider for This Week in Videogame Blogging? Just drop us a line via our email submissions form or by @ing us on Twitter.

This week saw an unusually high number of international submissions, and that is a trend we’d like to see continue! As noted above, we do welcome non-English submissions! Also, if you are multilingual and would like to help us curate more non-English writing for Critical Distance, please consider contacting us about becoming a contributor!

Next order of business: Alan Williamson has February’s Blogs of the Round Table theme up and running, so do check it out.

Lastly: I hinted at this before, but I can now confirm that this March we at Critical Distance will be doing a month-long series of features as part of Women’s History Month. We’ll have more details for you soon, so keep an eye out!

Critical Distance

Step right up, step right up! Solid Selling Swain here to show you the deal of a lifetime! You are not going to find any wares better than what you see here. I have testimonials a mile long that you’ll find none better. For it is This Week In Video Game Blogging.

But before I get to show you the new goods, I have heard the complaints and I am here to tell you about the recall from the manufacturer. Kill Screen has issued an apology for the lack of forethought that went into the previous week’s piece by Michael Thomsen on the Hitman trailer.

And for those still a little wary, let’s get all the bad news out of the way up front: Chris Hornbostle of the Quarter to Three has published a full explanation of ‘What happened to 38 Studios.‘ Good? Good.

Now– Onto those great alchemists, Dylan Holmes and Tom Auxier of the Nightmare Mode, who have done it again with two new scrolls to help you understand your way through the troubled art of business and the serious business of art, first by showing you how the greatest FPS of this generation failed to find an audience and then how surrogate ruins the otherwise grand Diablo 3.

Ah, no no. You want something more substantial, something more meaningful, something more political? You are in luck, madam! Thanks to a shipping error I have an abundance of just such a thing from Medium Difficulty. I have a Kyle Carpenter unpacking of the polemics of Tentacle Bento and examining all of the unsaid assumptions of such a thing. Also, a certain Megan Townsend bit on where Harvest Moon goes wrong with female representation. But far more bombastic is this Adam Maresca piece on the violence on display at E3. You might call it a trip into the heart of darkness. He certainly does.

No, wait come back. I have more. So if that doesn’t interest you. Something fresh perhaps. The Ontological Geek has a new site and they have christened there new abode with two new spectacular works just this very week. Bill Coberly on the probably (read definitely) deserved nostalgia of Baldur’s Gate the first and Hannah DuVoix’s dive into the player’s relation with the various PCs in games.

I see you sirs and madams are coming around to this old barker. Then perhaps something a might more mainstream to further slake your eyes. A duo of Kotaku pieces may perhaps: Kate Cox’s “E3 Makes Me Really Appreciate the PAX Ban on Booths Babes” and Patricia Hernandez’s “Committing Genocide in Pokemon Helps Me Shape Who I Am.” I believe the origin of such vintages speak for themselves.

And let us not forget the ever faithful, ever constant producer that is PopMatters. For you consumers your weekly haul included G. Christopher Williams talking about ‘Alan Wake’s Women‘ from the newest installment of that franchise and Nick Dinicola closely examining the superior writing of Max Payne 3, by looking at what is largely missing from the dialogue.

Writing for Gamasutra, editor Kris Graft gives up on writing an E3 puff piece and focuses on a single theme, the disillusionment with the AAA video game industry.

Meanwhile, Julian “rabbit” Murdoch wrote for Gamers with Jobs about his experience with the ultra fun game of Johann Sebastian Joust. Finally, a great use for those Move controllers.

I jest, I jest. (*cough*)

Now, I know to all you fine customers out there that this may seem a little tiny itsy bitsy bit like nepotism and that’s because it is, but NEVERTHELESS is what I present to you a supreme work by our very own Kris Ligman. My lady, do take a bow. It is a piece about game maps and game territory as formed by the environment and how it is shaped and enriched by other players.

And over here, I have the esoteric, the cerebral, the theory analysis. Charles Wheeler knows The Rules on the Field as he does an East/West comparative analysis of the game show Ninja Warrior. In addition, Alex Curelea explains, scientifically, why Diablo 3 is less addictive than Diablo 2>A?. But, wait there’s more. Get both of those and I’ll throw in Eric Schwarz’s Critical Missive piece on the attempts to fix currency in games.

Yes, good sir or madam. I see you’ve been eyeing this little bauble. That is a very rare Darius Kazemi write up. You must have a poet’s heart within you to seek it out. For it chronicles the strange journey he had undergone with his magical Metaphor-a-Minute.

And let us not forget the every popular criticism of criticism. The Leveling Criticism of Craig Bamford is about a certain Gamespot interview on the new upcoming Medal of Honor game. The developer wanted it both ways, it’s art and just a game. Mr. Bamford calls this out.

And let us not forget my most exotic ware. I traveled beyond the horizon, you might say I had Gone to Strange Country just to bring back this piece, by the man known as Andre Lavigne. He writes about how the level design contributed to the racism and botching of the anti-colonial sentiment of Resident Evil 5. Be careful you read this once in only a thrice quarter green moon.

But of course I save the showstopper for last. The most easily digestible. Extra Credits is back on their A game by looking at the concept of Hard Boiled in video games and it often goes so wrong.

Thank you ladies and gentlemen for your time and patience. I know something from my wares must of caught each and every one of your eyes. I accept all links, payable to our email or by our twitter. The lovely Kris or Ben will take your orders and…What’s that officer? Yes. Yes, of course I have a peddler’s license. I am a legitimate businessman. No I don’t have it on me, I’m in the middle of a shtick. No I will not come with you I have business…g-g-get your hands off of me. Run for it guys, the jig is up!

(Hope you all had a lovely E3.)

Critical Distance

Welcome once again to This Week in Video Game Blogging, the best of the best of games journalism, criticism, and commentary from across the web! Let’s get started.

With the rerelease of Ocarina of Time for the 3DS, we start out tonight with a couple of commentary pieces about ol’ Hyrule. First up is Mitch Krpata writing in his Insult Swordfighting column at Joystick Division, in which he contends that the whole game is vastly overrated. Just an opinion in a sea of them, but Krpata follows up this statement with a strong critique of the classic game’s attributes:

Nothing afflicts open-world games these days more than design that forces you to traverse the map over and over for no real reason. Travel to one side of the map to learn your objective, and then backtrack to accomplish it. Hyrule Field was impressive the first time you saw it, less so the next time, and then by the six hundredth time you trudged through it, just seemed like the endless, black void where Sarah Palin’s heart is supposed to be.

Brady Nash at how curious also has some strong words for the series, arguing that the franchise has lost some of its splendor:

I’ll always respect Nintendo for their insistence on going against the tide, on going it alone with at least some semblance of philosophical conviction. No matter how corporate and annoying many of their practices may be, in comparison to most mega-companies, they ooze originality. [...] However, I can’t help but feel that maybe Nintendo’s consoles are no longer the place for the types of experiences that I’m most excited about: ones that other-worldy, exploratory, mysterious and, dare I say, magical.

Next up, our friends at PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog have been busy again this week. First from senior editor G. Christopher Williams is an analysis of performance of masculinity and chivalry in Shadows of the Damned, kicking off with the observation that the game’s damsel in distress is a clear nod to Donkey Kong. Our second Moving Pixels piece comes to us from Jorge Albor, writing on the dubious ethics of Tiny Tower.

In this same vein of ethics and morality, we venture over to GameSetWatch where contributor Andrew Vanden Bossche writes about engaging players’ emotions while making moral choices, using AAA title Mass Effect and indie title don’t take it personally, babe, it just ain’t your story as his touchstones:

Fiction starts at zero interest and has to fight for every inch of relevance. I believe that, too often, there is an assumption that players will see themselves as an extension of Shepard or Cole McGarth and feel the impact as if it was really happening to them. But players can tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Making morality matter means making it matter to players. [...] It’s one thing to make players kill polygons in the shape of little girls, but it’s another to make players feel that those girls are human.

Keeping the focus on players, J.P. Grant at Infinite Lag likens the Call of Duty franchise to Saw as a form of death porn. Taking this obsession with violence a step further, a recent feature at Edge explores its pervasiveness in games and tackles some of the conventionally held wisdom.

Keeping with the same publication but switching gears from players to designers, Clint Hocking has a new column up at Edge in which he contends that the “Viking” culture of game development needs desperate modification. Over at The Border House, meanwhile, Alex Raymond ripostes that the scatological humor of the culture isn’t the problem: “it’s the sexism that needs to be eradicated, not necessarily the crudeness. To conflate the two avoids the issue and perpetuates the sexist stereotype that women are sensitive flowers and men need to walk on eggshells around us.”

Sparky “Silver Lining” Clarkson of Discount Thoughts asks us to revisit Final Fantasy XIII and think about the good parts–namely, the underrated battle system.

Finally, we end tonight with a look to the future, with what Eric Lockaby promises is a different take on the videogame “preview.” In his essay on Journey at Nightmare Mode, Lockaby writes:

The world of Journey exists in the remnants of communication. Venturing beyond the silent deserts we cross as if into a peristylium—each canyon houses within it a garden of History; each footfall is a Great Listening. And yet our listening alone will not repair this world: the language that failed it will fail us too. Journey asks us to build something stronger.

That’s all for this week! As a reminder, you can send us your links through email or Twitter. We are always on the look-out for new, excellent content, so don’t keep it all to yourself!

Critical Distance

Oh dear, I’d better stop daydreaming about the gig I’m about to go to and make a start to this instead. It’s This Week In Videogame Blogging and there’s no shortage of good reads to go round. And hey, Critical Distance is exactly two years old to the day! Let’s celebrate by raising a glass to you, dear readers, and to all the fantastic bloggers, writers and critics out there.

First up, John Sharp writes about the meaning of Drop 7 for the ETC Press blog. Which is odd, since those who know of Drop 7 will be aware it’s a puzzle game, not a story game. So what gives?

I would like to propose the term Drop7 practitioners for people like myself— individuals who find something more in the game than one might suspect an iPhone game could provide. This essay is an attempt to understand the game’s effect on me.

Jason Killingsworth at the UpUpDnDn blog writes about creating his own family Tetris lexicon with his brother in ‘Throwing Shapes’:

When we lived together briefly during college, my younger brother Josh and I played a lot of Tetris. Like a whole lot of Tetris. We played so much Tetris, in fact, that we quickly found ourselves needing a more nuanced language to discuss the types of scenarios we encountered in the game.

At The Fremen Blog, Miles Snell writes about ‘Why I never connected with Duke Nukem, and never will’. I remember playing Duke3D when I was younger and being generally oblivious to most of its worst excesses. Here’s Snell’s take:

The characterization and attitude of Duke was something altogether foreign to me. I hadn’t seen any films with hyper-masculine or stoic lead characters (unless you count Ripley). I certainly hadn’t seen “They Live” which is where “I’ve come to kick ass and chew bubblegum…” came from. I had been raised thinking it was acceptable for boys to play with cabbage patch dolls. Mr. T was my most traditionally masculine childhood hero. It’s a fact that Mr. T beat up bad guys but he also drank milk and pittied fools.

Christian McCrea writes for Gamasutra this week what I think is the definitive piece about Australia’s lack of an R18+ rating, taking a very long view of the whole socio-political situation. Sadly, McCrea has little hope for change:

I am beginning to lose hope Australia will get an R18+ rating for games. We have a culture of cynical manipulation around the issue that is firmly entrenched. Twenty years ago, it began with cynicism, and it continues to this day. How children and young adults use media, choose games, play games and go about their lives with and without parental guidance has been put aside in favour of easy answers.

Simon Ferrari writes brilliantly for the Georgia Tech Newsgames blog this week, talking about a ‘newsgame’ called Zangief Kid, about the experience of bullying victim Casey Heynes. Yet the game fails in one damning respect, says Ferrari:

The invocation of “just fun” on the game’s opening screen isn’t the defense of a speech act. It’s an excuse, one for being completely incapable of capturing even a sliver of Casey’s experience.

At the Alive Tiny World blog Katie Williams has been writing a series for the past fortnight called The New Vegas Diaries. First a short story-esque piece about the character ‘Boone’ and then this week she talked about ‘Wasteland Romance’ and the how the game treats sex.

It’s not the sex so much that piques my curiosity (after all, it is only politely and very vaguely alluded to in New Vegas, with a blackening screen signifying the act). No – I am more interested in the way portrayals of sex, and the sex industry especially, are handled in the fictional worlds of video games.

Eric Schwarz at the Critical Missive blog wrote about unreliable narrators and the application of such in Dragon Age II this week. He feels that, while “BioWare’s take on the unreliable narrator is rather unique…and BioWare deserve a lot of credit for attempting to tread new ground in this fashion” he’s unconvinced it’s a trend for the better:

The more I see games attempting to integrate unreliable narrators into their stories, the more I see games trying to be something they aren’t.

And while we’re talking Dragon Age II, Geraldo Sciemento writes a lengthy discursion on Dragon Age II.

And inspired by Dragon Age II, Radek Koncewicz at Significant Bits looks at Planescape Torment and the system of conversations that game pioneered.

At Futurismic, Jonathan McCalmont talks about two games, SPENT and American Dream, and the differing approaches they take to presenting critiques of the madness in our current systems of capital:

…while both games are ultimately concerned with critiquing capitalism, they set about their task in very different manners as SPENT attempts to model the real injustices and difficulties of life in America while American Dream presents American capitalism as a grotesque fantasy in which people throw money at celebrities, take a load of drugs, buy ,000 kettles and somehow get rich in the process.

Ben Chapman, aka AwesomeExMachina, who you’ll remember from earlier instalments of the excellent ‘No Clip’ series in which he restricts his gameplay abilities in some way or another, is back with a new instalment targeting Red Dead Redemption. It is, in a word, revelatory. Playing as the most horrible, mean, nasty and evil Marston he could possibly manage,

… there was a strange disconnect between the light-hearted but gruff John Marston from the cutscenes and the one I controlled. As I left a wake of dead sheriffs on my trail from each crime, it felt strange returning to making innocent quips with Bonnie and quietly tending to a ranch. After breaking into Armadillo’s bank in the dead of night, robbing the vault, and shooting my way to freedom, I felt remarkably two-faced the next morning when Bonnie sarcastically asked “Have you needlessly risked your life since we last spoke, Mr. Marston?”

At the Discount Thoughts blog, Michael Clarkson has ‘Trouble with Tripitaka’. This is the kind of analysis I like to see – sometimes I just want to say, “No videogames, I’m not going to suspend my disbelief and let you do whatever you want I’m going to take you seriously”. Here’s Clarkson doing something similar, looking at whether Trip really is as productively feminist character as she’s sometimes made out:

Although she holds the power in her relationship with Monkey, she gets in that position by doing something that’s openly evil. In her use of that power she is selfish, dishonest and irresponsible, often in ways that adhere to patriarchal tropes about overly emotional women making rash decisions. I won’t deny that there are some aspects to Trip’s story and character that are interesting. From the opening moments of the game, however, Trip comes across as a tremendously awful person, and at no point does she really do anything to redeem herself. If she represents one of the better female characters to appear in games in recent years, the situation is more dire than anyone has acknowledged.

At the Infinite Lag blog, JP Grant writes about the intro to Dead Space, and openings in general:

When I taught high school English in a former life, I used to tell my students that if a book didn’t grab them in the first 15 pages, it was probably the book’s fault, not theirs. Unless it was one of the books I assigned in class, in which case it was definitely their fault.

Eric Snodgrass at Experiments in the Foam has a piece called ‘Level-headed’ which describes itself as being about “Inception, Saint Teresa’s El Castillo Interior and gamification”. Not having had the time to read it all yet, I’ll direct you to where the parallels between the film and the book meet up with videogames:

There are several similarities between the mental architectures that both Inception and St Teresa lay out in their respective fashions. The most obvious parallel being the way that both the text and the film present an idea of interior castle-like structures of the mind that must be, in a way, breached in order to achieve certain goals. Both also share a notion that these mental interiors consist of progressively more difficult to access levels (Dante’s Divine Comedy, scientology and videogames being other examples of such a strong focus on progressive levelling in their structures).

At the Gamamoto blo Pietro Polsinelli looks at the ubiquitous iPhone game Angry Birds’ ‘narrative logic’, focussing on the appearance of the enemy pigs:

The pigs are there to defy you skill, to test you, to examine you: and all the fears of tests and examinations from “enemies” from bureaucratic structures (quite universal…) act as motivators in playing this simple game, enhanced by the intelligent use of symbols. The game’ authors may of course be unaware of the symbolic choice of the pigs – but it makes no difference.

At Paste Magazine this week, Michael Thomsen assembles threads of connection between Kirby’s Epic Yarn, Burt Bacharach (among others) and Alcoholism. It’s a mighty feat.

It reminds me of the jazz schmaltz of the 1970’s, when Burt Bacharach, Harry Nilson, and Randy Newman composed childishly playful tunes with a ragged tear of adult disillusion. In many cases, there was a direct connection between alcoholism and whimsy. InArthur, Steve Gordon’s cinematic fable of binge-drinking as a way for the boy to put off the difficulties of becoming a man, Bacharach’s theme song plucked out a wish—a wish no less deluded than Kirby’s happy land of cotton ball fluff—that romantic love is the only thing a person really needs. In discovering it, you can find yourself elevated, between skyline and moonshine, all of the sooty adult details dismissed to the diorama world below.

And lastly, I’ll just leave this here…

Perhaps you have heard about Suparna Galaxy…The answer to the question, “What is Suparna Galaxy?” is a bit like the Louis Armstrong’s response to the question, “What is jazz?”

“If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Now, that isn’t exactly fair. It is still possible to understand Suparna Galaxy even if you have arrived late to the party. Suparna Galaxy, essentially, is crowdsourced improv satire; it’s an imaginary “in-development” videogame that both mocks and pays weird tribute to many of the conventions of modern role-playing games.

Critical Distance

This Week in Videogame Blogging returns with a fresh showcase of the best writing and criticism about videogames the internet has to offer.

First on the list is a thoughtful article on the Brainy Gamer blog, where Michael Abbott writes about how games can provide meaningful narrative experiences through gameplay, rather than stories delivered through forced cutscenes. He does so by juxtaposing Etrian Odyssey III with Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, suggesting that the latter suffers from an impotent narrative.

EO3 doesn’t try to keep your attention by doling out backstory and plot twists. You’re glued to your characters because they’re your babies – evolving works-in-progress that you must wisely and patiently help along if they are to reach their full potentials. It’s not paint-by-numbers. Classes can be played differently depending on how you spend your skill points. It’s in your hands. There is no single right choice, but you can make plenty of wrong ones. Sort of like life.

True to form, Hellmode’s Ashelia penned an insightful piece to share her experiences of Final Fantasy XI and her impressions of Final Fantasy XIV in a piece entitled “The Final Fantasy MMORPGs: Roads Less Traveled“.

My overall conflicted experience with Final Fantasy XIV still didn’t stop my jaw from dropping the first time I saw a dust storm settle over the sky of Ul’dah at night.

But for better or worse, Ul’dah and its dust storms are something that many gamers will never see. Unfortunately, not many saw its distant cousin Bastok either. The roads to the cities of Bastok and Ul’dah, to the games of Final Fantasy XI and XIV, are one and the same. They’re all roads less traveled in a world covered by interstate. Still, I like to believe that the scenic route is worth taking time to time–if you aren’t afraid of getting lost.

In a new piece on Kotaku, Leigh Alexander takes a close look at her personal gaming habits and how they define her. In this intimate piece, she writes about how she’s never gamed alone and how she now misses the companionship.

On Gamasutra, Alexander has a report of Richard Bartle’s GDC Online talk on the creation of the first multi-user dungeon that definitely merits a read. In his presentation, Bartle discusses the immersion offered by text-based MUDs and explains how present day MMORPGs suffer from limitations imposed by graphical representations and inconsistent physics.

Bitmob returns to us this week with a new piece by Rob Savillo who tears into Front Mission Evolved and its failure as a mech game, arguing that it plays more like a standard third person shooter than anything else.

Pippin Barr has a short piece on his love of videogame glitches and how they can impact his experience of playing a game in a positive way by taking him to a place out of the ordinary.

At Popmatters, L.B. Jeffries talks about the fragmented perspectives of Fatal Frame 2 and how the game’s insistence on leaving the player in the dark to its secrets strengthens its narrative as a survival-horror title.

For this reason, a Japanese horror game is often unconcerned about resolving spiritual issues. Ghosts just exist. There is a unique advantage of not getting bogged down in explaining supernatural details in the narrative because the whole point is to play on the person’s worst fears. Leaving the dark unspeakable evil unexplained is better because the moment you reduce it to words or images the player’s imagination no longer feeds it. The abstraction loses traction.

Also on Popmatters, Nick Dinicola takes apart the ending of Mass Effect 2, calling it the least suicidal suicide mission he’s ever experienced — at least after his second playthrough. Nick examines the strengths and weaknesses of the endgame and postulates on how it could have been better executed. He writes:

Attacking the Collectors’ base in Mass Effect 2 is far from suicidal. If I have even a vague sense of what to do, it’s easy to keep everyone alive.

GamerMelodico’s Kirk Hamilton writes about his return to PC gaming and looks at how tweaking his system settings is a joy in itself.

Alex Raymond of the Border House has something to say about the “Dickwolves” issue on Penny Arcade and how the whole episode has left her feeling excluded by a gaming community she wanted to be a part of.

Rob Zacny writes on his blog about the difficult decisions he’s had to make while playing Valkyria Chronicles in a new piece about the game’s rescue mechanic.

Rounding up this compilation is a post by Clint Hocking on his personal blog discussing the problems that current fashion design games face in a post titled “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Hocking proposes a theoretical game that not only solves those issues but enables such a title to share its content across a wide variety of different games in a meaningful way.

Critical Distance