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Wake me up when September ends… Oh! Wait, that’s today! Well then, it must be time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

We’re starting out the gate with a couple tales on the theme of growing up gaming, and I warn you in advance, they are both heavy hitters. The first comes to us from Unwinnable’s Jenn Frank, on grappling with the loss of a parent, and the games of spaceflight she grew up with. The second from The Rumpus’s Molly McArdle relates to us what it’s like growing up in and out of hospitals, and inside the world of Baldur’s Gate:

Even in this alternate world, one shaped by desire, I was not the hardiest of characters. Strength was frequently my lowest ability score, my constitution not much better. (I poured all my points into intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.) I was able to make do because there, in that world, I had magic, and when you have magic, you barely need a body.

Over on Culture Ramp, Luke Rhodes wraps up his Ludorenaissance series by recapitulating the themes of his interviews and suggesting an emerging methodology for games criticism. In case you missed his previous interviews, here they are again: Jamin Warren, the Editor, Jenn Frank, the Critic, and Kris Ligman, the Curator. (I hope that’s also my superhero name.)

On the subject of curation, this week also featured a number of valuable history lessons. First is Edge’s very readable feature on the making of PlayDead’s Limbo. Next, the Gameological Society’s Anthony John Agnello sketches out some ruminations on control, and asks where lies the fine edge between standardization and freedom of expression in control setups.

Meanwhile, Kevin Impellizeri has begun a two-part series hearkening back to some earlier hardware startups, as a little reminder that the much-discussed OUYA console is hardly the first of its kind.

Yannick LeJacq turned up on the Wall Street Journal again this week to offer a second opinion on Borderlands 2. It’s a not-so-subtle pointed rebuke of the review by Adam Najberg the Journal ran last week, but it’s also a valuable bit of FPS retrospective. Have a taste:

To reconcile the discrepancy between its androcentric cultural aesthetic as a manshooter and its “nerdy” internal mechanisms as an RPG, Borderlands 2 bridges the gap the same way it does everything: in the loudest, most blatant way possible. Whenever you shoot an enemy, numbers pop out of their bleeding carcass instead of fluid and organs. It stops just short of having the Gunzerker get down on all fours and eat the same numbers with his bare hands to become stronger.

Is this a sign of manshooter’s inevitable decline, or the maturation of an industry and art form that’s finally learned to embrace irony? “In some ways we know that we’re reaching a level of sophistication with games because we are able to play them ironically,” Ian Bogost, a Professor of Interactive Computing and Distinguished Chair at the Georgia Institute of Technology, tells me in a phone interview.

Most importantly, Bogost explains, this is nothing new to video games themselves. “I mean, we’ve been through this kind of post-modern, self-referential experiment with different art forms many decades ago—with writing, with film, with art. When you see creators and viewers able to rise above the experience to understand the form to then comment upon it, then you realize that that requires a kind of literacy.”

Speaking of Yannick LeJacq, he’s been quite busy as usual. Here, courtesy of LeJacq, is the weirdest interview you’re likely to read all week, with Gamer Grub inventor Keith Mullin.

Over on GameChurch, Drew Dixon has been playing DayZ. I wouldn’t presume to reach as far as to suggest it gave him a crisis of faith, but it certainly didn’t place his fellow man in the best possible light for him. In a similar tone but from the opposite side of the play spectrum, Matthew Kim reflects on just how lonely Dark Souls feels. And AWESOMEoutof10’s David Chandler (who wins best blog name for the week) has a few thoughts on how Deus Ex: Human Revolution fails to deliver on its themes of modification in part because we’re already cyborgs.

PopMatters’ Nick Dinicola has a new column up on how Asura’s Wrath disrupts (and then, I would argue, reasserts) Judeo-Christian theological assumptions. And Bomb the Stacks’ Daniel Korn draws some interesting parallels between Mass Effect 3 and Botanicula– including a provocative claim about which one is darker than the other.

I have a couple more for you here on the subject of writing and, especially, the eye of the beholder. Firstly, writing for Unwinnable, Brendan Keogh discusses the strength of subjectivity in Spec Ops: The Line and Mark of the Ninja. Meanwhile, Bit Creature’s Aaron Matteson proposes that a Bad Dude by any other name might well come from the quill of the Bard. This comes filed under “humor,” but the central point it makes is worthy of some discussion, I think: stripped of its verse, are Shakespeare’s plays the same potboiler fiction as that found in many videogames?

That’s all the games criticism, commentary, analysis and rumination that’s fit to print for this week! Remember to submit your recommendations –including your own work, now, don’t be shy– via email or Twitter. Otherwise it will just lie there, depressed and un-CD’d, forever. That doesn’t sound too pleasant, does it?

Oh, and– you probably have at least a few more hours till Alan Williamson closes up shop on this month’s Blogs of the Round Table! Quick like a fox, now, get!

Critical Distance

Great. Who let the Ericbot out? Do you have any idea the kind of damage he does to the carpet?

Ahem… Well, now that your TWIVGB overlord is again in the captain’s chair, let’s set off for parts unknown with the best and brightest of games criticism, commentary and investigation. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Let’s start off with a world view. Jordan Magnuson has put together a downloadable omnibus wrapping up the series of games inspired by his world travels. Next, Simon Parkin delivers an investigative report on recent internet cafe gaming deaths.

(The next section bears a trigger warning for discussion of rape, sexual assault and objectification.)

1UP’s Jeremy Parish takes aim at Western media’s coverage of “weird Japan” and a so-called fixation adult games:

Make no mistake, the fact that Rapelay entered the American conscious right around the time that gaming blogs began to supplement their 24-hour news cycle with “scandalous” content is no coincidence. What might have been a minor blip a few years prior became a widely reported new story as bloggers licked their lips at the prospect of the traffic a sex scandal could bring. In the fine tradition of the media, little effort was made to balance discussion of the game or promote a wider understanding of the context surrounding it.

And make no mistake: The context surrounding RapeLay was hardly accepting. Simply because the game was legal to sell in Japan doesn’t mean the Japanese public took delight in it. On the contrary, the otaku community is often regarded as an unfortunate blight on the Japanese culture by the Japanese themselves. Akihabara could be regarded less a promised land and more a quarantine zone.

(End trigger warning section.)

Dan Thurot takes us through a five part tour of the story and themes of Metro 2033. And on the subject of post-apocalypses, Unwinnable’s Stu Horvath muses on what makes it such an entertaining setting:

Our romance with the apocalypse is a celebration of misanthropy. The point of Last Stop, Apocalypse – and the apocalypse itself, for that matter – is to judge people.

Eschatology (the study of heaven and hell, death and judgment) used to be found only within the domain of theology – Judgment Day and Ragnarok and on and on through religions new and old – but now there is a whole branch of popular culture devoted to the end times. Mad Max, In the Mouth of Madness, Fallout, Mass Effect, I Am Legend, Dawn of the Dead; all our genre stories seem increasingly concerned with Armageddon.

[After the apocalypse] it will be quiet. A man, his dog and his shotgun, living off the land. It may not be safe and it may not be easy, but at least I saw you all burn first, right? I survived. The math of everyday living is easier without you. Now it’s my world to mess up or save, as I want.

Other bloggers this week were more concerned with a current, more persistent kind of doomsday. Scripted Sequence’s Spencer treats us to the devolution of Super Mario Bros’ currency into worthlessness:

Playing New Super Mario Bros. 2 over the last week, a few things struck me. Is Nintendo, a once mighty company brought to its knees in the last year by the 3DS omnishambles, making some kind of sick joke at its own expense? Has it created a game-length meditation on the financial bubble and its aftermath? Or is it just a gaming dinosaur recycling old tricks in a desperate attempt to recapture past glories?

Meanwhile, Cameron Kunzelman looks back to Final Fantasy VII and how one of its worst design moments (the plate climbing scene) functions as a metaphor for class:

One of the ways that poverty is entrenched structurally is through information control. There are forms to be filled out. There are tax documents to wade through. There are services that are never communicated to the people who need them because realistically servicing an entire population is prohibitively expensive. Poverty exists in loops–you never see a way out because you’re too busy making ends meet, or no one shows you, or no one tells you that you need to apply for scholarships by a deadline. To not be homeless, you need a job; to get a job, you need a permanent address. Infinite loop.

[…]

So this section of Final Fantasy 7 is a translation of that real-world issue into the mechanics of the game. Instead of navigating structural or informational architecture, the player is literally forced to navigate a space that is mysterious and unclear. This gets achieved in a couple ways, all of which are really interesting. The game chooses this moment to begin navigation vertically rather than horizontally–so far, the player has been navigating horizontal planes and entering them from the left and the right. The move to pure verticality is a subtle way to suggest the difficulty of the actual movement (we’re climbing up a tiny pipe) and the difficulty of the mission at hand (invading the heart of power in the world; going into the lion’s den). Additionally, the player moves in and out of different z-planes. It is literally impossible to navigate in a purely visual manner. Instead, the player has to exhaust all of her potential spatial movement to even get the barest hint of the pathway that she is supposed to take.

Sean Sands laments the pains of parenting a second-generation gamer while Chris Bateman outlines the four regimes of play.

Over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Robert Yang offers up a three part counter-history arguing for a more holistic look at the influences which shaped the first person genre: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 are all highly recommended reads.

Responding to Richard Clark’s “Exegesis” piece, GameChurch colleague Jordan Ekeroth takes the position that human subjectivity will always prevent us from perfectly interpreting a game’s meaning:

If Super Hexagon is an outworking of Nietzsche’s ideals, then it is also a demonstration of his shortcomings. He spoke of man as improving and as you play Super Hexagon, you will eventually improve. But he also spoke of man as becoming something more than man, transcending the weakness of man’s nature by force of will, and this is a more tenuous proposition. This is a proposition that has led to holocaust and genocide. As mankind evolves and improves, we do not become something other than man, we merely increase the boundaries of man. Harsh lines of demarcation may be drawn to segregate people across all sorts of social levels, but they cannot divide us from a common heritage.

Super Hexagon illustrates this perfectly. You can go from level to level. Line. Triangle. Square. You can strive to last longer and longer. But you cannot beat this game. It is like approaching light speed, where the closer you get to the barrier, the more difficult acceleration becomes, and yet even more impossible than this feasibly breakable barrier, because there literally is no point at which the walls stop coming.

Exegesis creates the same difficulty. We should make every effort to determine a creator’s intentions. But we should not make the mistake of ever thinking that we can know them perfectly.

Luke Rhodes is continuing his series of interviews with some big figures of the ludodecahedron (and me, for some odd reason). The latest in the interview chair is industry vet, current Unwinnable regular contributor Jenn Frank, and it’s definitely a must-read.

Next, a couple pieces that defy easy categorization. First, Richard Cobbett has kicked off his series of articles on what is, as far as I’m concerned, the only right way to play Skyrim. And did you know thecatemites has a new website? It’s glorious. “If you see something that looks like a videogame but isn’t, you should notify the Police.”

Lastly, some signal boosting. Kim has rebooted the Boycott Atlus blog as an all-purpose tumblr calling out sexism, homophobia, transphobia and other gross behaviors in games and their adjacent marketing. I give you Fuck No Videogames. (Naturally, a trigger warning figures for all of the above.)

That’s it for this week. If you’re up for some more Sunday reading material, dear Jim Rossignol has you covered. And, please, if the Ericbot gets out again, just pull his plug, will you?

Remember that you can (and definitely should) send us your recommendations for great acts of videogame blogging via Twitter or email. We can’t stress enough the importance of this! Also be sure to check out Alan Williamson’s Blogs of the Round Table while there is still time for his end-of-September roundup. Stay safe and write on!

Critical Distance

Searching…searching…searching…file found. Accessing…now initiating TWIVGB #172.

Begin. If you liked last week’s interview with our own Kris Ligman, L. Rhodes of Culture Ramp continues his series of interviews on the coming-of-age of video game journalism (also known as the Ludorenaissance) with Kill Screen founder Jamin Warren.

Initializing – Vander Caballero’s Papo y Yo

First up, Yannick LeJacq’s review of the game on Kill Screen looking at the nature of addiction explored in the game. Then at Medium Difficulty, Kyle Carpenter sees Papo y Yo not as a function of escapism, but a game about escapism. And finally Denis Farr, writing for Gameranx, takes a different approach and looks beyond the personal story to see it as a post-colonial narrative.

Export – Discussion of Violence

Having been asked for a quote in a Kotaku piece Robert Yang realized he wrote too much in response to their question. As a result he felt his position was not accurately represented, so he posted his full response to “Do you think shooters take themselves too seriously?”

Marjorie Jenson at Unwinnable, find the lack of critical thinking towards violence rather than the violence itself keeping her and her students from becoming gamers.

My gamer-adjacent students could love games – even become gamers – if videogames taught them how to think critically about violence.

…

My students argue that excessive, realistic death and torture will desensitize gamers. While the link between desensitization and mimicry is tenuous at best, I do believe that media affects people. Well-crafted books, films and television shows change how people think and feel. The thoughts and feelings elicited by media alter how people treat one another.

Jeff Wheeldon writes about “The Myth of Redemptive Violence” at Push Select Magazine by looking at our need for heroes who solve their problems through violence, from the Babylonian creation myth to Christianity through modern video games.

Jordan Rivas explores growing up in a post-9/11 world and how the media embraced the narrative set by the politicians, in particular the Splinter Cell series. A stunning piece of New Games Journalism as he describes the connection the games had on his view of the real world of the war on terror.

Samuel Sattin, using a recent experience with a friend’s child and Uncharted 2, explores the possible necessity of violence in our make believe, saying:

I saw the glee in Charlie’s eyes that day.  He’d begun to detach himself from the discord surrounding him in his daily life, disappearing into a less concrete world. Sometimes I just worry that if children can’t decide on the boundaries between reality and fantasy for themselves once in a while, they’ll become convinced that dark urges are only fit for real life, where the realm of make-believe is rarely welcome. And that would be truly frightening in my opinion. A genuine cause for concern.

Then Jim Ralph invokes the Bard, at the Ontological Geek, in his description of a game he hasn’t yet played, but has read about (Spec Ops: The Line) and wonders if that isn’t the reaction that the developers wanted from their player base.

Finally, a Video Game Morality Play by Andrew Vanden Bossche in choose your own adventure style.

Trigger warnings in next section’s pieces for discussions of rape, sexism and harassment.

Marc Price calls the upcoming Feminist Frequency video series, “Anita Sarkessian’s Joan of Arc Moment.” Which may be a little myopic, but I fear is a bit too accurate.

Published in the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media this week is Anastasia Salter & Bridget Blodgett’s piece entitled “Hypermasculinity & Dickwolves: The Contentious Role of Women in the New Gaming Public.” It is a retread of last year’s debacle with a good dose of academic analysis thrown in.

Trigger warning end.

1010011010

Kyle Carpenter looks into why Cards Against Humanity works.

Essentially, CAH offers “offensive play,” a chance to indulge in exposing those aspects of Western culture which have been made hidden, taboo, offensive – and, consequently, made funny – without fear of damage. To play Cards Against Humanity is to enter an instant community based on ridicule, where everyone involved has agreed to participate and everyone is in on the joke. In a sense, these are racist and sexist jokes with the benefit of a safe word, the agreement that nothing on the cards is meant seriously and that no-one will carry the game forward into their day-to-day lives.

Jackson W. Ryan calls “Malaria the Invisible Wall of Far Cry 2,” lamenting that Ubisoft made up a disease with a ready treatment rather than gone full on with malaria.

Chris of Scripted Sequences asks, “Is a Scary Game Scarier If You Don’t Know How to Play?” He says that lacking experience with WASD controls only serves to make a game like Amnesia: The Dark Decent even scarier.

Emily Payton explores her inner Lynch in looking at the dream like qualities of Deadly Premonition.

Input Satire

Michael “brainy gamer” Abbott skewers general complaints about service from gamers by entering the rhetoric into real life shops.

Error Error

Stu Horvath at Unwinnable has “Sympathy for the Universe” where he writes about giving life to fictional characters, avatars, Adam and God himself.

C:/Miscellaneous

Damien McFerran’s Crippled by Nostalgia: The Fraud of Retro Gaming. He asks if it’s the gameplay that makes hardcore gamers go back to vintage games or something else? Hint: He posits it might be something else.

Carol Borden’s The Plague of the White Knight. After playing Max Payne 3, Bioshock 2 and Halo 3 she is tired of the trope of the “White Knight Savior” and the “Save The Cheerleader, Save The World” goal of storytelling so prevalent in games.

Zolani Stewart’s An Exploration of “Whore of The Orient.” “Context is everything,” he begins as he goes on to weigh the good and bad of the title and surmises that it will fall to the final product. Here’s hoping.

Access – “And now for something completely different”

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal had a rather disturbing reading of Pac-Man this week. Saying, “It’s like Kafka wrote a Lovecraft story.” Visuals are included.

Initiate self-destruct. 5…4…

Please send any and all recommendations of links you have written or stumbled across to our Twitter or our email. Also, September isn’t over yet and there is still time to write for Blogs of the Round Table. Thank you for…

Critical Distance

It’s a quiet Sunday morning here at Critical Distance HQ. Ian is snoring on the couch. Ben is hooking up another espresso machine. Katie is having a bowl of muesli. And Eric is… probably off playing Driver: San Francisco again, if I know him.

As for me? I have some delicious new links for you, fresh from the oven. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

First up, one of the big news stories for the week came from Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker, who brought us an exclusive interview with Ubisoft reps about the publisher’s decision to back away from always-on DRM. The interview is a worthy read all on its own, of course, but I would further recommend Walker’s post-interview reflections on the interview and why Ubisoft have gone the route they have.

On the subject of design I have a great twofer here for you from TWIVGB regulars Josh Bycer and Eric Schwarz. Bycer this week traces the practice of “negative game mechanics” –”mechanics whose purpose is to stop [...] play”– from the arcades to the current social game boom. Meanwhile, Eric Schwarz traces the history of regenerating health in the first person shooter genre, and in doing so weighs the mechanic’s pros and cons:

I don’t think regenerating health is enough to “ruin” any game, and I don’t think that using it in the manner that is currently popular is a bad thing in every single instance, especially when your goal in designing a game is to create something for as wide an audience as possible. At the same time, health management is one of the most fundamental components of videogame design, and casting away the long-term component of it also saps a lot of interesting gameplay potential, not to mention also tends to sap the brand identity behind gameplay.

Max Lieberman talks about theology as system and game system as theology on the subject of The Binding of Isaac. On a more secular (and musical) note, Joshua Dennison writes about why he likens Proteus to free jazz.

More personally: Scott Juster, touching upon Michael Abbott’s “Why We JRPG“, reflects on his own return to the genre:

When faced with the slick AI director in Left 4 Dead, the accessible upgrade system in Diablo 3, or the emergent chaos in Far Cry 2, it’s easy to start to think about games as black boxes that export outcomes through a quasi-mystical process. The beauty of a good JRPG lies in its ability illustrate the direct consequences of your actions. Ambiguities are exchanged for clear statistics, dexterity traded for tactical thinking. Of course, it helps that Abbott uses Xenoblade: Chronicles as an example when praising the JRPG. As he and a growing number of writers argue, the game’s world and the characters in it are an extended metaphor for the central conflict. The once strong division between story and gameplay in JRPGs has become porous.

But if you really want to get personal, I cannot recommend highly enough this most recent piece by the wonderful Patricia Hernandez, who writes this week for Bit Creature on games and desire: “More and more, games embody eros, for they never let you arrive. They count on you wanting having to go farther and farther, on wanting to push yourself harder. Desire then easily becomes addiction.”

Also writing for Bit Creature, Drew Dixon criticizes the failure of game reviewers to look beyond the rubric:

It seems like game critics have been claiming for a long time now that games are not the best medium to tell stories and yet developers keep telling stories in their games and game critics keep pointing out when game narratives contradict their mechanics. And now with Papo & Yo, we have a game whose systems coincide with and add depth to its narrative structure and we can’t stop complaining about how it’s too easy.

Along those lines, we hear a lot about how to “fix” games journalism and criticism but VG Revolution’s Marc Price does us one better. He offers up some specifics which go beyond simply the journalists themselves:

The change starts with you [readers]. If you want to “fix” the games press, demand more. Promote the articles, people, and sites you like, and work hard to engage members of the press in a way that is constructive and rewarding for both parties. If you disagree with a review score, say why in a mature way. The process of reviewing a game doesn’t end when the review comes out and there is an opportunity for all of us to learn from each other. Don’t engage in “all-or-nothing” or “us versus them” arguments, and don’t give your time to articles that pander to you in an obvious attempt to get your eyes on them. If the audience moves, the incentive will, too.

Grayson Davis puts the brakes on to remind us that despite our aspirations, most games are not as smart or mature as we might wish they were (warning for ableist language):

Here we must be honest with ourselves. We must dispense with our kneejerk reactions and practiced arguments. There is no doubt that many smart and talented people make video games, and there is no doubt that many smart and talented people play video games. But there is a great deal of doubt in video games as a creative medium, even among great lovers of that medium. We can be diplomatic and say that video games have yet to reach their potential, whatever that might be. […] But we can also be more straightforward, and say that video games are often dumb, or at least juvenile, clutching awkwardly at some higher form.

Another subject of which we hear a great deal is sexism in gaming, both industrially and among players. Now Emily Matthew gives us sexism in gaming by the numbers, because I don’t know about you, but stats make me very happy. Or, well, depressed in this case, but moving on.

Unfortunately, the issue of sexism and the lived experience on the receiving end of it is not simply a topic to be swept under the rug, even if we might want to. Lana Polansky shares her thoughts on getting tired of holding her breath waiting for things to improve: “That may seem like an attack. This whole post might be seen as a passive-aggressive dig. But it’s not; it’s simply an account of my overgrown impatience.”

Meanwhile, writing lucidly for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Cara Ellison relates a tale of playing Heroes of Newerth and getting buried under its own terrible community:

It’s a shame: S2 built this super-nice, really economical war machine [...] just to have people come on and shout abuse at each other, hate on each other, and kick people until they never load up the game again and go and cry in the bath and tell themselves they are fat and unloveable and will never get a boyfriend because her skills are just not good enough in HoN. Pass the wine. I must have the wine! My life from now on will be a failure!

[...] [In] the history of the world, I have never heard a developer say that they want to make a gamer disconnect from the game as part of the experience, perhaps unless it was a horror game, but I think possibly 90% of the people who start this game actually disconnect fairly quickly and go and watch Morecambe and Wise for an hour to grow back their sense of humanity. I lie back and think of Scotland whilst people are lobbing around insults, but there are getting to be more and more people who are migrating to an online space that is heavily community moderated [...] if you want to expand your player base, you make them feel comfortable, rewarded, and like you belong.

Scott Madin goes even bigger, addressing not simply games or incidents of sexual assaults at game devs’ parties but reminding us that sexism does not occur in a vacuum, nor does it end there, at PAX or anywhere else:

Ky’s assailant is the only case from that party, that we know of, where someone decided he was entitled not only to sexual gratification but to enforce his claim to that gratification with violence — and make no mistake, all sexual assault is violence — and that makes him a relatively egregious example. But that doesn’t make him an isolated, unconnected, free-floating Bad Person whose worldview, impulses, and actions come from nowhere and cannot be interrogated. His attitudes came from somewhere, and for every person like him who physically sexually assaults someone, there are dozens or hundreds who hold basically the same views, absorbed from basically the same sources, who “only” harass and intimidate and make gamer culture hostile to everyone who isn’t heterosexual, cisgender, white, able-bodied, and male.

Finally, here’s the kicker. If past incidents in gamer culture are any indicator [...] there will be no lasting consequences. A few more people will be alienated from gamer culture, but the majority of gamers will brush it off, and continue to support the institutions that promote these attitudes. The gaming press — even the smart, progressive gaming press — will write about Penny Arcade and PAX and Gearbox and Mojang to talk about their press releases and upcoming games, and will not mention the kinds of things that happen under their various auspices. No lasting opprobrium will attach to any of their names, and the culture will not change. People, even smart, thoughtful, progressive people who understand rape culture and how it works, and work tirelessly to break down race, gender, and sexuality barriers in gamer culture, will keep attending PAX and buying games produced by developers with toxic, misogynist studio cultures. The overwhelming sense will be that yeah, that stuff was bad, but that’s all in the past.

On the subject of PAX Prime (and I apologize for the weak transition), I have just come across Robert Rath’s recommended reading roster for his recent Beyond Borders: Global Game Controversies panel held at the convention. There are some great reads in there.

I would be neglectful in my role as Senior TWIVGBer to fail to mention one of the other big news pieces of the week, which is Valve’s decision to implement a 0 application fee for their Steam Greenlight service. To say that this has led to some outcry among independent game developers would be a hell of an understatement. I refer you first and foremost to Jonas Kyratzes’s blog where he registers his outrage, not at Valve, but at the discussion among developers and bloggers which he says falls explicitly along class lines:

Some of us are poor. Poor isn’t like when you spent 0 at a bar last night and you decide to only spend next time you go drinking. Poor isn’t when you can only afford to go to one convention this year instead of three. Poor isn’t when you can’t afford to get the newest iPad because you’ve been investing in your business. Poor is when you don’t know how you’ll pay the rent. Poor is when you stand in the supermarket trying not to have a nervous breakdown because all you can afford is the same shitty pasta you had yesterday and the day before. Poor is when you’ve got crushing debt because your parents never had the money to help you, because they worked their whole lives and got nothing for it.

Poor is when every cent you earn goes to buying you another day under a roof, not to a gamble disguised as an investment. Why don’t we have a hundred dollars from selling ten games? Because we need to live.

It is particularly offensive when this is seen as some kind of insufficient desire to struggle – or even as entitlement. We struggle more than you can imagine just to be here. That we have, despite our poverty, managed to make these games, is a fucking miracle. We started with less than nothing, and we have the entire system sitting on our backs. “Oh, do you think I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth?” comes the response. Yes. Yes you were. Compared to some of us, to many of us in fact. And it’s OK, everyone should live like you do, or even better. I don’t want you to feel guilty. But at least be aware of it.

This, meanwhile, is an even rawer, but still very worthwhile personal story I would also highly recommend.

Aiming for a middle ground, Ben of Ebony Fortress offers up a pretty even-handed assessment of the 0 fee and what some alternatives might be. Valve has stated that the Greenlight service is still being improved, so we’ll see what the future brings.

Before I send you on your way this week, a bit of worthy signal-boosting is in order.

First, the Game Accessibility Guidelines website: it’s great to see a subject like accessibility gaining the amount of traction that it has as of late, and while this website positions itself as a resource for developers, it’s also a very welcomed tool for talking about ability in the context of game design and discourse.

Next, lead narrative designer and writer at Lionhead Studios, Mark Llabres Hill, whose credits include the Fable series, helpfully wrote in letting us know he has a blog writing on the fields of his expertise. Which is a really, really cool thing to suddenly get in one’s inbox, I have to say. Do follow it.

Lastly and most egocentrically, Luke Rhodes of the up-and-coming Culture Ramp blog interviewed yours truly this week on the subject of game criticism, curation, and, of course, Critical Distance. For those of you who are interested in some insight into how these roundups get written each week, or just want to see me spew more than my regular weekly quota of words, this is the interview for you!

Ah, but the sun is getting high in the sky now, so I’ll send you all on your way till next week. Remember, we welcome any and all link recommendations by Twitter and email, and yes, we love shameless self promotion. As I’ve noted before, we rely profoundly on the submissions sent into us each week. So don’t wait to get discovered; contact us!

And remember that there is still time to participate in Alan Williamson’s Blogs of the Round Table as well!

Critical Distance

I made you an elaborate intro, but the cat ate it. So, let’s just get right into it. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

On Gamasutra, Douglas Lynn draws a line between the “game” and the “game experience,” citing the latter as a more all-encompassing, multisensory interaction. Over on Video Game Tourism, Eron Rauch delineates the four major types of In-Game Photography.

Meanwhile, Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez boldly (and many would say, correctly) asserts that there is no such thing as a game without politics:

Think, for instance, of player creation in any game. Look at the options. Are there women? What race or gender does the creation screen default to? How many options are there for people of color—be it skin tone, or hair type? What kind of dialects are available in the voicing options? Do the choices have race-specific abilities that make some characters innately better than others at certain things?

Depending on what’s included or shown, we can glean the developer’s stances about race and gender, amongst other things. Maybe they don’t feel a race or gender is important enough to include, for example—typically, there will be excuses surrounding time and tech, but these are flimsy when you take a look at the superfluous things a developer does decide to include instead. Or maybe there’s the uncomfortable implication that Caucasians are, as far as the game is concerned, actually more important than other races—and that’s why there’s more options for them.

On the subject of games and agendas, here’s a piece on Spec Ops: The Line straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were: a feature from narrative designer Richard Pearsey on the narrative objectives and process of the game.

Over on my old stomping grounds of PopMatters Moving Pixels, Jorge Albor offers us a profile on Molleindustria’s Unmanned, in which players take on the role of a remote combat drone pilot:

Unmanned also takes the opportunity to chastise the mainstream games industry as a whole. In his blog on Gamasutra, Grek Costikyan is right to point out the game is boring and for a reason. Molleindustria divides Unmanned from games that beautify warfare through game design. Boredom serves a dual purpose of conveying the actual tedium of modern warfare (artfully portrayed in Sam Mendes’s Jarhead) and expressing how “fun” can become a tool by which we again divide ourselves from the world around us.

Over at the Gameological Society, Steve Heisler takes us through the latest installment of his “Decadent” column with two examples of the escort adventure, ICO and Amy, noting the difference in player affect between the two. In a similar vein, Gamers With Jobs’ Julian Murdoch wonders why more games don’t address their older audiences:

I’m not a tabula rasa any more. I’m a grown-ass man. I have baggage. I’ve changed the diapers and sat through the meetings. I’ve made the grown-up choices to not buy the electric guitar, not upset the boss, not take off on a vacation I can’t afford. I’ve made the all-too-adult choices to pay the mortgage, do the job, console the snot-nosed, feverish child and roll the garbage can down the driveway in the darkness of a frozen February morning.

These choices may not be noble, but they’re at least, I hope, the quiet, subtle choices that separate me from the true assholes of the world. And they are, always, my starting point for any character I’m going to explore.

How can they not be?

I’m not suggesting that I long to actually play as Charles Bukowski or Tom Waits or Walter Mitty in a game. I don’t want to play at being bitter and angry, grizzled by the world and its realities. What I want is a path. What I’m asking for is an actual answer. Where are the characters that take who I am today toward something more righteous? For every 12 year old inspired by Luke Skywalker to be better than they think they can be, there’s a 45 year old middle-class father of two wondering where it all goes from here, wondering if there was more than a little nobility in Lando’s loyalty to Cloud City, in Walt’s descent into the dark.

As though in answer, Unwinnable’s Steve Haske looked into the abyss of Animal Crossing and found a lot about consumer culture malaise there. That or he’s wound up in a Todd Haynes film; it’s difficult to tell.

Socks Make People Sexy (which is in the running for best blog title featured this week) offers up a long and rewarding essay on What makes Super Mother– errr, Mother 2 so super. And over at one of my favorite little blogs, Persona Matters, Johannes Koski takes us through the streets of Shibuya while extrapolating on concepts from Isaac Lenhart, and what it all has to do with The World Ends With You.

As a matter of fact, this was a good week for JRPG commentary all around, as Pixels or Death’s Adam Harshberger reveals that he liked Xenoblade Chronicles enough to confide a few dark secrets in us. And GameInformer’s Kimberley Wallace explores several design lessons we can still learn the grand old genre.

Josh Bycer writes of the plot holes of Diablo 3. Meanwhile, Unwinnable’s Sam Machkovech swaps out plot holes for manholes (see that seamless transition there?) in lamenting poor Seattle’s lot as a center of the game industry with surprisingly few game locations to its name:

Upon booting [Deadlight], the developer’s name flashes: Tequila Works. Who is that, who is that, who is that… oh. A video game developer in Spain. Spain? Microsoft works down the block, yet they couldn’t even bother to pitch this Seattle-zombie game to a local.

[...]

What a blown opportunity for cool game design–Seattle actually has an underground city, destroyed in a massive fire over a century ago. Modern downtown Seattle is built on top of it; look down in sewer grates while walking around town, and you’ll see little red lights that light the underground way for paid tours and enterprising junkies.

Instead of capitalizing on a weird bit of Seattle history, Tequila Works copy+pastes a bunch of pipes and figuratively shouts, “Hey, low-rent Ninja Turtles!”

A couple of Kickstarter pieces to end off this roundup (ohoho! I’m on a roll!). The first is an interview with GaymerCon founder Matt Conn on his successful fundraising. The second is this unmissable feature on Gamasutra on a Kickstarter which didn’t succeed:

Crawford hoped to raise money to create Balance of the Planet, a serious environmental simulator that would teach players about sustainable energy, pollution, and other world issues. With his funding, he planned to make the game available for free on the web, and Crawford suspects that’s one of the main reasons why his campaign went down in flames. After all, why would backers pledge money for a product that’ll eventually be free?

“As it turns out, my model was only right for what Kickstarter used to be,” said Crawford. “That is, Kickstarter used to be a semi-charitable operation in which people could assist worthy creative projects that might not make it commercially, but still ought to be done. But in the area of games and comics, this is no longer the case.”

I think I better wrap this TWIVGB up before the catbeast chews through any more wires. Have a pleasant week, all of you out there in Readerland, and be sure to tweet and email us your submissions. Oh, and if you haven’t yet, check out Alan Williamson’s revival of the Blogs of the Round Table! And yes, you can submit the same article for BoRT and TWIVGB, so you have no excuses, really.

Critical Distance

Welcome one and all. It is my pleasure to be your guide today around the Gallery of Vidogame Blogging and Criticism from this week.  We have a bevy of word-pieces for you, so if you’ll just follow me through the gallery…

We start our tour at that weekly goldmine that is the PopMatters Moving Pixels blog. From last week we have Sean Brady who goes back to take a look at Chrono Trigger, explaining the importance of historical context when looking at a work. And from this week we have Kris Ligman looking at the concept of virtual patience in video games and Scott Juster’s look at Catherine’s characters and messages, finding they hit a little too close to home.

Meanwhile on your right you’ll see Juster’s partner in crime Jorge Albor at the Experience Points blog  looking at the discussion coming out of Games for Change (G4C) and their “focus on “serious” and social impact games.” The discussion at present is around ‘What kind of change are we talking about here?‘

Now if you will look over here in the next room, we can see the great work that came out of Kill Screen this past week. James Dilks looks at the names of video games and what they convey about what is within, particularly the unusual case of VVVVVV. Brendan Keogh is behind a barrier of his own making as he realizes that, like Red from The Shawshank Redemption, he too has been institutionalized.  And Lana Polansky reviews indie game Rock of Ages and its tumultuous journey through time and Western art history.

In the ‘contemporary art corner’ over here are the submissions from the Bitmob writers collective. Sumo Attuqayefio has a short, but heartfelt piece on how Shadow of the Colossus helped him emotionally deal with his daughter’s cancer; Kate Cox asks ‘Why does the fear of death continue to be gaming’s greatest motivator?‘; and Rus McLaughlin says, ‘Games don’t have to be fun.’ It has, to my mind, a conclusion that perfectly sums up the argument:

Even if you didn’t exactly enjoy yourself at the time, you’ll probably look back and consider it a fun experience. Not because you enjoyed playing it…but because you enjoyed the result.

On the feature wall to your left we are proud to present two new pieces from our very own David Carlton at the Malvasia Bianca blog. Continuing on from last week’s puzzle talks, he focuses on Catherine here in ‘Rearranging mental blocks‘, and addresses the game more holistically in the aptly titled ‘Catherine.’

We are also most happy to present to you a brand new work in three parts from The Artist Formerly Known as L.B. Jeffries - Mr. Kirk Battle Esq. himself. The creator of these workds calls them the ‘MMO Judiciary‘ cycle, focusing on the upcoming legal complications as real money enters the MMO sphere and what companies can do going into the future.

If you will follow me into the next antechamber you can see two pieces of worthwhile news. To your left, Tracey Lien has a real piece of investigative journalism at Kotaku Australia, exploring the consequences  of ‘What Happens To Developers When A Studio Closes‘, counterpointed nicely by the challenging political overtones of GamePolitics’ ‘How a 14 Year-Old Girl Changed NHL 12.’ I believe this title speaks for itself.

Keep up, everyone, please keep up. We are now entering the Hall of Theory.

Here you will see Kate Cox’s piece ‘Win, Lost, or Fail,’ from the Your Critic is in Another Castle blog, about what video games are and what winning or losing has to do with it. Alongside the aforementioned work is a piece by a new artist on the scene - one ‘hellfire’, from the You Must Register blog, in which is discussed the general lacuna the author feels is present in the work of Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost w/r/t more complex games like Planescape: Torment. On the wall opposing is Mike Birkhead writing for Gamasutra, and going into detail of the particulars of ‘What makes combat fun.’ Adjacent to Birkenhead is Critical Missive’s Eric Swartz talking about the annoying trope survival horror games use, which is that their poor controls are actually a feature. As you can see, our gallery is well and truly overflowing with works and the trustees of the gallery are having a fundraising drive to expand the Hall of Theory wing. You kind donations are generously appreciated.

Through this renaissance era archway is a little transitional alcove, installed within which is a piece by Brendan Keogh at his personal blog Critical Damage. He talks about the contemporary treatment and perception of scientists within two iOS games that seem to encapsulate the sentiment:

Personally, I find it all incredibly infuriating when I watch television and see creationism and evolution debated as equal ‘theories’, or when the secret agendas of a climate scientist’s peer-reviewed findings are questioned by an oil company, but that is not an area I’m an expert in or tend to write on. What I find interesting, however, is how this general attitude to the sciences permeates and is reflected in our cultural texts. In particularly, two videogames I’ve played and loved in recent months I think could be seen as emerging from this culture that has become obsessed with discrediting and deriding the sciences.

Now if you will follow me into The Room of Games, where we have a number of interesting pieces on individual games.

Here before us is another piece that was rescued from the archives by a diligent graduate student doing research for us. This week we are proud to present the work of Tom Bissell and his thoughts on Dead Island for Grantland. We are very fortunate indeed this piece has been spared the indignity of languishing undisplayed in the basement.

On the left wall are Randy Smith and Theoron Jacobs getting into a dialogue on what makes Sword & Sworcery so ‘awesomely cool‘, and it is brought to us by a generous grant from the Edge Foundation.

Tom Chick on the Quarter-to-Three wall describes what is off about Gears of War 3.

Late in Gears of War 3, someone will say, “Bloody hell, they found the UIR! It’s a Gorasni ship!” The line is delivered as if it’s something that matters, but Gears of War 3 hasn’t told me what a UIR is or who the Gorasni are. The line might as well have been “Bloody hell, they found the Boop-i-dee-bop! It’s a Whamble-di-dee ship!” It’s an example of how Gears 3 cares about itself far too much to be arsed to care about me.

Masterful.

Much has been said about the boss fights of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, but in an impeccable display of creativity Nick Rudzicz at Newton64 decides to go a step further and fill in the blanks left behind by the developers.

On the far wall behind you, you will find the Erik Hanson Equality Scholarship winner Denis Farr’s roleplaying account of Pokemon: Fire Red as drag diva, made possible by the Gamers With Jobs.

And the centerpiece of the room – by emerging artist Nathan Grayson (so hot right now) – is a piece exploring Bastion’s multitextuality and how it succeeds where many others fail. Grayson sees Bastion as a game about moving forward while simultaneously looking backwards, but curiously not at the same time.

This concludes the tour… but what? Oh yes. That…piece in the center of the room. Yes, it was a controversial inclusion by the museum director himself: some post-modernish rambling by Tim Robbins or whatever his name is from Action Button on The Sims Social. I really can’t engage with it, but certainly it is here for you if you like that sort of thing.

Now please feel free to browse around, I hope you have enjoyed the tour and we thank you for stopping by the Gallery of Vidogame Blogging and Criticism. Please feel free to direct your comments, suggests and recommendations to the Board of Trustees via twitter or email.

Critical Distance

Welcome to another instalment of This Week In Videogame Blogging, and what a week it’s been. I can’t remember the last time we’ve had so many great pieces all crammed into the one week. Where do we begin?

Our last entry went out before September 11 really kicked off the remembrance of that fateful day, so perhaps we’ll start with Mitch Krpata’s contribution for Joystick Division in which he explains ‘Why Gears of War is the Quintessential 9/11 Game’:

I’m sure Cliff Bleszinski and company would be the first to argue that Gears has nothing to do with September 11, and that’s their right as creators. But it’s our right as the audience to find our own meaning in the work. Ever since I first played Gears of War almost five years ago, it has struck me as a game that could not have existed without 9/11. Something like it, maybe, but not this game, with its unusual and potent mix of fear, uncertainty, and powerlessness.

Krpata also wrote this week for his own blog Insult Swordfighting about the conditions behind much videogame writing (which is going to affect the kind of writing produced) in a piece titled ‘Working in the sweatshop’.

You’ve heard by now about the phenomenon that is the ‘Horse_ebooks’ twitter account, right? Well using it as an example of cult online communities, Leigh Alexander writing for Gamasutra examines a game-related spin-off of that account in ‘‘Persona_Ebooks’ And Game Community In The Web 2.0 Era’.

Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer says ‘Games Aren’t Clocks’, and argues for a more holistic approach to videogames that can account for the affects of their design beyond simply the rules and mechanics.

Brady Nash at the How Curious blog takes some time to respond to G. Christopher Williams’ essay of a few weeks ago, applying reader response theory to videogames.

At the ‘Powered by Hate’ tumblr blog, Jeff Gunzler writes about why Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine is a ‘Most Surprisingly Feminist Game of the Year Contender’

In last week’s TWIVGB Kris wrote about Eric Lockaby’s review of Deliverance for 3DS; in her overworked and delirious state (I’m a bad boss), she didn’t realise that, while fiction, the review was meant to be confused as fact. When she found out, she was understandably upset at finding out she’s been fooled, but wondered about what it said about game reviews in general or the nature of games themselves:

That’s the balance to be struck with writing any sort of humor piece–what the hell is too high- or low-profile to be funny anymore? In a TWIVGB full of articles on post-9/11 war games and fetishization, the tone of the game Lockaby was writing about didn’t even seem out of place. Maybe that’s the full scope of the joke David’s getting at: are we so jaded to turning anything–high art, low art, macabre, political, social, psychosexual–into a videogame that parodic descriptions of using a game stylus as a phallus to symbolically molest women seem a bit disgusting but at the end of the day, par for the course?

Chris Johnson at RobotGeek writes about “Why The Deus Ex Narrative Ultimately Fails: A Political Critique”. It’s good stuff, and something I think I was picking up on as I played, but wasn’t able to articulate:

This dystopian future, especially in Human Revolution, may be aesthetically similar to Blade Runner, but it’s obvious a corollary is present day global politics (especially in the United States). Unfortunately, the cause (and thereby the solution) to this web-like problem is never pointed at the source. Rather, in a move that feels very co-opted by the media-power at large, fingers are pointed at shadowy conspiracy theories like the Illuminati rather than at actual, present day, corporate CEOs. It’s almost as if corporate power was enough to buy off the game developers, who went as far as to hint at the problems – enough so that reasonable people could draw a logical conclusion bearing to life – and then deflected and effaced the issues by creating a supernatural god-like cause to explain these events; in other words, pure fiction.

This week Simon Parkin wrote about his experiences with the Call of Duty convention for Eurogamer. It’s top stuff and conveys the very real ‘out of place’ feeling that Parkin had at the conference. Do go read ‘COD XP: The Bug and the Windscreen’:

There are other fan events based around single games, of course; both QuakeCon and BlizzCon command significant attendance. But COD: XP is not an event requested by the fans. Rather, it’s an endlessly lavish production put on for their benefit by a company eager to… to give something back? Eager to humanise themselves? Eager to soften core gamer perception of a company best known for its dead-eyed annual franchise updates, high-price DLC, and the stewardship of arch non-gamer Bobby Kotick, effortlessly the most disliked CEO by gamers thanks to his apparent disdain toward them? COD: XP is, let’s say, a smart way to both give back to the community that makes it wealthy and to counter a series of setbacks and unpopular decisions made in and around Modern Warfare.

And speaking of military-themed shooters, at Slate Michael Thomsen asks ‘Why aren’t there any civilians in military video games?’ (Thanks to Kill Screen for the tip-off):

By removing civilians from the picture, developers like Bach are trying to reap the benefits of a real-life setting without grappling with the reality of collateral damage. In sparing themselves the challenge of making their games deeper and more involving, they’re the ones holding back the medium. While video games have come a long way since Mega Man, Battlefield 3’s sanitized environment suggests that players are still limited to the same two basic actions: running around and shooting.

Scott Juster at Experience Points analyses Soulja Boy’s experience with Braid, and like a good anthropologist takes his Soulja Boy’s experiences quite seriously, uncovering some real insight into how people play

Michelle Young at Kill Screen has a great piece on the videogame representations of the walled city of Kowloon this week.  Being a real place, the depictions of Kowloon varied from reasonable likeness to unrealistic depiction. In this week’s entry to his regular column for the Futurismic blog, Jonathan McCalmont talks about discussions of videogame “realism” and just how much of a specific standard, and absurdly skewed one at that, realism actually is:

The fact that people can meaningfully talk about Crysis being both more authentic than other games and a completely fantastical action romp featuring magical powers suggests that realism is not exactly an unproblematic concept. In fact, this is a column about why we should just stop using that word entirely when other words are far more useful.

The Second Person Shooter blog is one we’ve known and loved for a while here at Critical Distance, so it’s pleasing to see that the crew are back at it – this week Kent Sutherland talks about ‘Playing God’ and the limits of what he was allowed to pick-up-and-play as a child:

When I grew up, some games were off-limits. Diablo was a no, because Satan was right there in the title. Grand Theft Auto was also disallowed when my parents caught me mowing down police officers and lines of Elvis impersonators with a machine gun. Mortal Kombat was banned for obvious reasons—you can rip out a man’s ribs and them stab them through his eyes—but even Golden Eye was mysteriously “lost” one day after a particularly hilarious match of only shooting each other in the knee caps. I can understand the logic behind all of these decisions, but I’ve always been confused about why I wasn’t allowed to play The Sims.

And similarly, blog-mate Laura Michet looks at Portal 2 and ‘The Power of Pettiness’, drawing parallels between the two entries in that series and the first two Alien films:

To me, Portal 1 was very much like these films. Two female characters dueling to the deadly death on terms unlimited by the fact that they are ladyfolk? The antagonist is an inhuman freak? The protagonist strengthened by her humanity (in this case, by the fact that the player identifies very, very closely with her)? Sounds an awful lot like Alien to me.

…

Portal 2 changes the tone of its central relationship by stripping some of that dignity away. Glados insults Chell constantly in ways intended to be understood as cattily “female”: calling Chell overweight, insulting her appearance, and so on. She seems to believe that gendered insults will be the most effective against this mute, implacable enemy, and tries a variety of them. And even though these jokes are, cheap and awful, they’re fantastic.

Andrew VandenBossche at Mammon Machine entreats us with,‘Spoil Me Rotten’ – making an important point about the difference between the spoiler itself and the thing being spoilt:

To read a spoiler is a nasty experience. It feel like being cheated. Yet spoilers are also a lie—they’re a wikipedia summary at best. And seriously, who would compare the experience of reading something they liked to the experience of reading the summation on the Internet? To have any sense of the value of writing or any artistic craft we’ve got to believe that the way a story is told is infinitely more important that the paragraph that restates the major plot points.

And last, but certainly not least, for this week is Mattie Brice at the Alternate Ending blog making an ‘Apology for RPGs’ in the form of a long meditation on the nature of the genre.

What is and isn’t an RPG is beside the point, it’s how a game appropriates the cultural understanding of what an RPG is. Video games have been using character progression through stats and experience points, a strong sense of story, and tactical strategy to draw what they can from the genre, but the heart isn’t there. What we really have are action games, interactive fiction, and shooters that use the tropes developed from tabletop RPGs. There is very little role-playing to be had; rather, you are given an extremely limited amount of ‘roles’ to ‘choose’ from.

As always, we rely on the charitable donations of good and interesting games writing, blogging, and criticism via twitter and email.

Critical Distance

When the night sky turns to glamor, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging! Good evening– I am your hostess for the week, Kris Ligman, and if you are a member of a certain recent, notorious Freeplay panel then neither this nor last week’s roundup by Katie Williams actually exist. Whoops! For the rest of our readers, welcome and enjoy: this week’s offerings are sure to satisfy.

Let’s begin with Michael Clarkson and the recent relaunch of his blog, now named Ludonarratology. He kicked it off with a post on critical approaches to games, addressing the rival (some would say defunct) schools of game studies referred to in the blog’s name:

To approach videogames solely through the lenses evolved for the criticism of preceding narrative media is to embrace their evolution into content-delivery systems glossed with meaningless interactivity. Yet, to insist that all criticism focus on the cold whirr-click of code and mechanics is to accept — even encourage — the final triumph of commoditization and cultural irrelevance. Neither approach fully appreciates the medium’s unique capacity for creating meaningful individual and group experiences. The comforting warmth of a preferred orthodoxy is, perhaps, sufficient salve for those shortcomings. So be it; these viewpoints are still of great value.

Also recommended from Clarkson’s blog are two relaunch companion pieces: ‘A Tale of Two Chesses‘ and ‘The crying game’.

Going from narrative and emotions within games to heightened emotions surrounding them, this past week has been a… volatile one, to say the least. First was the reveal of the new Mass Effect Liara figure, about which both Go Make Me a Sandwich and The Mary Sue have some strong words. The latter outlet sums up the sentiment quite well in its title: ‘Hey, Bioware: Stop Crowdsourcing Your Gender Politics!’

Then came Dead Island-gate (just for you, Rowan), in which players discovered a misogynist slur against the game’s heroine had been written into the code. Arin Dembo has a good overview over on Gamasutra, while Wundergeek’s commentary in Go Make Me a Sandwich, once more, knocks it out of the park:

If the sorts of “jokes” that happen in game studios can include employees wearing shirts that say ‘dead girls can’t say no’ and women being interrupted during meetings by male employees telling them to make them a sandwich, I don’t see why we should assume that this joke is benign. In an environment where jokes that trivialize sexual harassment, assault, and rape are considered funny, why should we assume that this anonymous coder is an anomaly?

Writing in his Pretension +1 column at Joystick Division, Gus Mastrapa describes games as fetishware:

Games encourage obsession. They draw it out of us or provide a vessel for us to pour it into. And so it makes sense that they’d also be filled with objects of our obsession. Weapons, riches, vehicles, clothing, other people — they’re all things we want because we fill them with our dreams and desires.

Speaking of games, objects and meaning systems, Kieron Gillen does a reading of Deus Ex: Human Revolution which contends the whole thing is about DRM.

Next, a pair of unconventional reviews to spice up your Sunday. The first arrives from Jon Irwin, in a reflection piece on playing Ocarina of Time for the first time on the 3DS. The latter comes to us by way of Eric Lockaby on Nightmare Mode, for the 3DS release Deliverance. Lockaby has cultivated a reputation for his “weird” reviews; but, as Ben Abraham puts it, “I like weird.”

it becomes apparent fairly early on that “stylus” in the case of Deliverance is actually to mean “phallus”…and when you finally realize it, earlier moments in the game—such as the player’s being asked to trace the contours of the young model—suddenly become more potent. A lot of games strive towards “replayability”…Deliverance finds its replayability in continued interpretation.

Roger Travis writes about “immersive learning,” gamification, and Bioshock. And Latoya Peterson at Racialicious comments on the recent Slavery: The Game hoax, remarking that a hoax is still worth discussing.

This week also brought us a point-counter point on the adventure game genre. PC Gamer UK’s Richard Cobbett reckons he knows ‘How to Save Adventure Games’. Tadhg Kelly, meanwhile, argues the genre is already dead and had it coming. The comments on Kelly’s post are also worthwhile.

Last but not least, we venture over to my home stomping ground of PopMatters where senior multimedia editor G. Christopher Williams positions that ‘In Some Games, It’s the Pattern, Not the Plot, That Makes Them Beautiful’. And how better to cap off this week’s roundup than with Scott Juster’s take on the “videogames and art” question: ‘Telling Hamlet What to Do’.

…notions of what constitute art have changed throughout history. Because of this, asking whether art will change to accommodate video games is just as valid as asking whether video games can be art. We would do well to remember that artistic strata are ultimately human constructions and are therefore malleable.

I can’t think of a better note to end on than that! Thanks for joining us, and as always, your contribution to Critical Distance is only a tweet or an email away.

Critical Distance

Hello, and welcome back to This Week in Videogame Blogging. My name’s Katie, and I’m new here – I’m very pleased to be able to bring you this week’s instalment. There’s some good stuff to get through this week!

First up, we have Joel Goodwin with the final entry in his ‘Where We Came From’ series over at Electron Dance, a moving piece about his gaming childhood. He writes:

I was obsessed with video games during the first decade of my life. I remember having many dreams that ended up at a video game arcade; it was a particular place that my dream-self knew well, although it did not exist in the waking world. I never really played much there, as I usually woke up pretty quickly after I grabbed the controls of one of the machines. It was more about the signature of the arcade than its function, a perfect amalgamation of every arcade I’d ever visited.

But, in time, this place eventually slipped out of my dreams and I forgot all about it.

Ben Kuchera, writing for Ars Technica, calls Gears of War 3′s trailer music an ‘emotional cheat’, arguing that its song evokes emotions that are not found in the game itself:

I wish we could have trailers that pull from the actual game in order to provoke an emotional reaction, instead of relying on juxtaposition to make the point. I wish there were moments in Gears of War that actually made me feel like these trailers do. It’s not that the games aren’t emotional—I can think of one or two moments off the top of my head that hit hard—but these trailers are painting the picture of a game that doesn’t really exist. It’s a ploy, a shortcut to an emotional connection, and it’s becoming a formula when it comes to sell action games.

And speaking of the Gears of War series, Tom Bissell provides an excerpt of his forthcoming book The Art and Design of Gears of War at Grantland, describing through personal anecdotes and developer commentary how Gears of War’s design had drawn him so deeply into the game.

Ryan Henson Creighton, blogging at Untold Entertainment Inc., asks, ‘Are We Headed for a Second Video Game Crash?‘

i’m no economist, but i have heard the phrase “supply and demand” bandied about. What we have now is an oversupply and an under-demand. There are too many people making games, and not enough people to play them – and more importantly, not enough people willing to pay fair market value for them. When the president of Nintendo takes to the stage at GDC 2011 and implores people not to sell their games for a buck, something alarming is happening. And when you get a trend of people reducing the cost of their games from to FREE because was too expensive, it’s time to consider jumping ship. And then setting that ship on fire.

Taylor Cocke at Scoreless is working on some more short vignettes of games (remember his Far Cry 2 stuff?). Now he’s doing Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Line Hollis at Robot Geek discusses what she terms ‘Leaning Games‘. Their choices, as she describes, are also employed in choose-your-own-adventures and AAA titles, to varying effect:

What this style really resembles is the story structure found in mainstream games with a “moral choice system,” like Bioshock, Infamous, or Mass Effect. The dead simplicity of the system in Bioshock is a particularly close match. Each Little Sister offers a chance to lean in one direction or the other. Your decisions to save or harvest the Little Sisters only barely affect the storyline, but they do affect which ending you get.

In a three-part series, Matt Barton of Youtube gaming-focused series Matt Chat conducts a video interview with independent game designer Jonas Kyratzes: parts one, two, and three.

Over at the blog Insult Swordfighting, as an addendum to his recent article at Joystick Division, Mitch Krpata asks a handful of games writers: ‘Are game reviewers bad at games?‘ He says, “I’ve always found it interesting that game reviewers tend to be modest about their own abilities. They might claim to know a lot about games. They are confident that they can write about games better than the average player. But, when it comes to skillz, it seems to me that most critics are happy to accept their limitations.”

Johannes Koski, blogging for Persona Matters, takes a look at the difference between ‘The Leading Man‘ and what he terms ‘The Second Man’, looking especially at the kinship between Final Fantasy XII’s protagonist Vaan and secondary character Balthier:

All along while playing Final Fantasy XII, I had the feeling that Vaan was the one in whose place I inserted myself, the one through whom I operated in the game world, the interface if you will, and Balthier was the one I emotionally related to. Balthier, as a character, is a lot more resolved and stern than Vaan. Vaan has the drive and motivation to challenge the Empire, yet Balthier is the one I felt most strongly drawn to. In cut-scenes, Balthier seems to be the one who comments on things, whereas Vaan is used mostly when someone has to say something obvious or funny, or when the occasion clearly calls for the player character to participate in the action. In a sense, Balthier was what I expected from the protagonist of a Final Fantasy game, and Vaan was more of a… I don’t know, a viewpoint?

In the first of two contributions from Pop Matters this week, Jorge Albor examines the way puzzle-platformer The End handles the topic of mortality.

And next, in ‘Thematic Confusion in the Branching Narratives of Video Games‘, Nick Dinicola explores the branching plots of games such as Mass Effect 2, Dead Space: Ignition and Heavy Rain, the latter of which he says:

Maybe David Cage of Quantic Dreams had the right idea when he suggested people play through Heavy Rain one time only. After all, you can’t recognize the inconsistency of branching plots if you only see one of them.

Quinnae at The Border House blogs about the hyperreality of Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines and Dragon Age: Origins, in particular looking at their treatment of sex workers and transgendered characters:

Much work has already been done on the nature of ‘lenses’ as held and espied through by the powerful. That is what hyperreality is, fundamentally, a lens through which the lived reality of the less-powerful is warped and distorted. What makes this pernicious is that the distortion is then presented as the real. The ‘easter egg’ style gags with the trans sex workers at the Pearl were clearly meant as ‘mature’ jokes for a ‘mature’ audience that could handle this ‘reality.’

At the blog Your Critic, Kate Cox looks at Fable III in ‘Let’s Talk About Sex!‘, examining instances in games in which sex can be used as more than just a story arc:

Still, the real surprise for me with sex in Fable III is not that it exists; sex is implied in plenty of games.  The surprise is that its existence is announced independently.  By adding “sex” to the bed options, and indicating NPC sexual orientation (and flirtatiousness levels) in info boxes, the game is putting out there the idea that sex is a thing your PC might do for any combination of fun, profit, and love, depending on any number of whims, emotions, and circumstances.

Eric Heimburg over at Elder Game writes about the moment he realised that he wasn’t really a game designer, and became one:

That was an important day for me…because I realized I wasn’t a game designer, despite thinking I was. I’d played tons of games, I knew all the mechanics they used. But here I was, unable to defend the simplest concept. It was frustrating.

We’ve previously linked to a Kill Screen interview about the game Smuggle Truck, which Tanner Higgin describes at his personal blog as ‘failed satire’:

Smuggle Truck tries to be Colbert and ends up as South Park. The reason: it’s aim is off. Instead of effectively parodying the inefficient, extended, impossible, and downright racist U.S. immigration system, Smuggle Truck ends up making fun of the border crossing experience, which itself is equal parts harrowing and horrific.

And finally, Andrew of the site Andrew on Everything, discusses what  he calls ‘Overlearning the Game‘. While he doesn’t look at it strictly from a videogaming perspective, he describes a problem that certainly covers gaming ground. He says, “I think this problem, of overlearning the game to a point where you exploit the rules to achieve goals that are far removed, or even opposed, to the original intent of the game, is systemic in human society and permeates almost all aspects of our lives.”

As usual, if you have any good reads to check out, tweet us, or hit us up via email.

Critical Distance

Critical Distance is back for another installment of This Week in Videogame Blogging. I’ll be filling in for Ben with a fresh round-up of the latest and most interesting pieces of analysis and criticism from all across the gaming blogosphere.

Kate Simpson at Falling Awkwardly has started a new series of articles on the metaphysics of Morrowind to remedy the dearth of critical analysis about the RPG. While the first entry is simply a primer to the series, the second and latest piece takes an in-depth look at a piece of Morrowind’s fiction, dissecting it as an attempt by its writers to explain save games in the context of the title without breaking the fourth wall.

It would appear that this Dragon Break has not been an isolated occurence. To explain the real cause of the phenomenon we need to rewind a little, to the ending of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Or, should I say, endings. At the climax of Daggerfall, the player is faced with a choice: to whom to give the power to control Numidium (“Anumidium”, “Big Walker”), the giant, world-stomping magic robot previously used by legendary Emperor Tiber Septim to conquer Tamriel. There are seven possibilities, and seven endings. Obviously, this left the writers ofMorrowind with something of a quandry – which ending to call canon, and write into the history books of Tamriel? The answer, which came to be known as “the Warp in the West”, was: all of them.

At The Artful Gamer, Chris Lepine tries to figure out how mastering a game is its own enjoyment, written as a response to Jamie Madigan’s article at Psychology of Video Games on how gaming can be good for your mental health. Lepine writes:

I see the “poetic imagination” as one source for the joys of play. When I imagine through the world that a story, a poem, or a game  has to offer, part of me is “in the game” and part of the game “is in me”. I cannot distinguish very easily between myself and this imaginary world. In those moments, where I allow myself to imagine freely while respecting the world the place has to offer, I am at my most playful.

Jamie Madigan also writes a piece on Gamasutra comparing jam reviews to video game reviews.

Puny humans are pretty bad at combining an array of weighted factors so as to arrive at a rating or decision –it’s just not how our minds were designed. Jelly or game review guidelines that require us to over analyze our decisions or check them off against a standardized list of factors (graphics, sound, etc.) can exacerbate this limitation and lead us to consider what should be irrelevant information when making our ratings. This corrupts the rating process and takes us farther from our “true” feelings or evaluations.

Chris Dahlen of Save The Robot has a new installment of his on-going series where he covers game universes. In his latest article, “The World to End All Worlds”, he talks about World War II as a world unto itself, which has been a stage for countless works of fiction including many games.

At The Escapist, Ben Croshaw, best known for his Zero Punctuation series of video reviews, argues against the use of the term “gamer”, stating that while we have no reason to feel ashamed of playing video games, we shouldn’t be too proud of it either:

The point I’m trying to reach is that playing games, as entertaining and fascinating and beneficial as it might be, is just something people do, not something they should be defined by. People don’t call themselves moviegoers, or TV watchers, or book readers. That’s the job of marketing agencies.

Robert Yang discusses the illegibility of the free roaming city at radiator blog, calling player agency in “god games” a complete illusion. On the topic of SimCity, he writes:

We aren’t actually creating a city; we’re just optimizing some preset numbers and formulas about how Will Wright thinks a city should privilege high property values or high density housing or nuclear power.

“For as often as I died while playing N+, maybe the best compliment that I can pay it is that I didn’t mind a single time,” writes L.B. Jeffries on Popmatters. Jeffries argues that instead of frustrating the player with its difficulty, N+ encourages the player to master its challenges.

This is a really tough problem to fix in a game because you really can’t predict what weird crap people are going to do. N+ perfectly resolves the issue because you die too quickly to ever invest in a particular strategy. You know that you’re doing something right in a level if there aren’t little bits of ninja scattered everywhere. It’s what helps turn the game into something that you play repeatedly even if you die because you’re puzzling out the correct sequence of moves, making death an intrinsic part of play and also one that feels rewarding.

Steven O’Dell of Raptured Reality brings up some very interesting points on video games and the industry’s seemingly adolescent obsession with violent behavior in “Weapon Overload“. He argues that game developers can and should look beyond the norm, and attempt to do much more with the game space available.

Also on the topic of violence, Ferguson of Interactive Illuminatus has completed a series of articles covering the very subject. In part 5 of the series, Ferguson discusses the role of violence in art:

The reasons for questions about the moral implications of experiencing works made in new artistic medium all boil down to the same thing–that while the violence may be depicting something already depicted by an earlier medium, the new medium is much more successful in its depiction.  New artistic mediums are a double-edged sword in this regard.  The reason for their rapid embrace by the public is exactly the same reason concerns over graphic content arise: they are simply more graphic.  Graphic violence is considered a kind of pejorative in today’s litigation-addled world, but artistically it’s nothing but a compliment.  To depict something more graphically than what came before is the entire goal of art.

Spectacle Rock’s Joel Haddock covers the subject of licensed games, with a look at some of the industry’s best and worst moments with its use (and abuse) of licensed intellectual properties.

At GamerLimit, Kyle MacGregor analyzes Flower’s environments as narrative spaces, which tell a subtle story of two clashing worlds–of man’s relationship with nature.

When the sun sets during the second level of Flower, it provides an absolutely breathtaking landscape where the silhouettes of turbines line a crimson-gold skyline slowly fading into darkness. This addition of wind turbines may not seem like a particularly huge development for the location in terms of beauty or tranquility, especially considering the environmental connotations associated with the structures, but this marks a distinct turning point for the title’s setting. The world of man and that of nature has begun to intermix. That environment is forever changed, and because the will of man differs from that of nature – a conflict is born.

Rounding up this week’s compilation is Ashelia’s comparison of Final Fantasy XIII and Heavy Rain at Hellmode. She elaborates on their similarities, and expresses her disappointment on the wasted potential of the games. She sums up Heavy Rain’s problems as:

In Heavy Rain, it rains. It pours. A couple of boys are murdered. And then it rains some more. While it looks gorgeous–a collage of scenic cityscapes drenched in a torrential downpour–nothing else happens. It does very little and shows even less.

Critical Distance