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It’s time to pay our dues. Pull up a chair, dig out last year’s receipts, and bust out the reading glasses. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

SHOOTY McGUNPANTS

At Unwinnable, Brendan Keogh sits down with the Konrad to his Walker and has a long conversation with Walt Williams, lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line. Over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Nathan Grayson puts the finishing touches on a three part series of interviews with Walt Williams and Far Cry 3 lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem.

SIMCITY BLUES

You might recall when Mike Rose modeled his town in the new SimCity to diagnose its traffic problem. Observing the bugs in the new SimCity’s traffic modeling, he went back to SimCity 2000 to see how it handled the same problem.

On Quarter to Three, the eternally engaging Tom Chick presents us with a pretty unsettling depiction of how SimCity’s systems (inadvertently?) model contemporary malaise.

BIOSHOCK INFINITY AND BEYOND

(A general content warning, once again, for spoilers in most of the following links.)

On Gamer Theories, Ben Meakin has written a bit on how we can look at BioShock Infinite through the lens of auteur theory. Elsewhere on Terminally Incoherent, Luke Maciak walks us through the first in a series of thorough dissections of BSI’s art direction.

On critical mainstay Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott deems the game the beginning of the end for the FPS genre. Meanwhile, Amnesia developer Thomas Grip praises the game for what it attempted to do but concludes “it feels like an attempt to tell a serious story through a theme park ride.”

On Gamasutra, Andreas Ahlborn delivers an exceptional analysis of BioShock Infinite as musical composition. Posting on his personal site, Kevin Wong views the game’s conclusion as “a metacommentary” on the multiplicity of emergent narrative. And on Critical Missive, Eric Schwarz dispenses with discussion of the setting and story and focuses squarely on a fine assessment of its combat mechanics.

On Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez peels away the layers of how the game’s design puts the player at odds with behaving like a real person. And on How Not to Suck at Game Design, Anjin Anhut criticizes the game’s “straw man racism” as a device by which to alleviate white guilt:

A thing that many movies do, most comics and Bioshock Infinite, is depict the faction in the story representing racism as unequivocally evil. Cartoonishly evil actually. This pretends like racism is some sort of thing mentally deranged people do, something sociopaths and psychopaths are drawn to or something you become when you are indoctrinated into some sort of cult.

While this of course serves to condemn racism as a concept, it mainly serves as a way out of dealing with your own internalized racism and serves as a way to absolve yourself by comparison. It also serves – and that is actually the truly ugly effect of that treatment – to push what we are allowed to label as racism into an extremist corner and it sabotages any healthy debate about racism in our society.

On Design is Law, Jeff Kunzler rails against other critics’ suggestion that the game is excessively violent, and instead poses that Columbia is a place we SHOULD be interested in destroying:

Bioshock: Infinite’s failings aren’t in its heavy use of violence, or the fact it’s a first person shooter. It’s the perversion of oppression, the creation of a world white people want to get lost and “immersed” in, instead of tearing down, the total lack of decency in regards to the views of people who have and still are the victims of racist oppression in America, and really just a general lack of empathy for the sake of entertainment.

Dan Golding decries the game as going out of its way to be inoffensive to the status quo, concluding “despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art.”

Writing for her own blog, editorial heavy-hitter Leigh Alexander weighs in as well, saying the game is flawed but engagingly so:

This is not a game about American exceptionalism and the choice between obedient prison and chaotic freedom. This is a game where you have to chase a ghost among parallel realities. This is a game that lives in its own alternate universe, is in love with its own cleverness, instead of being genuinely clever. There are tears everywhere. And in the game.

The Levine-led Irrational team has birthed a universe, now, of games about a dominant ideologue enforcing a slavish devotion to fearful systems, even after those systems have become irrelevant. It gives us worlds plunged into the stress of compartmentalized factions where teams don’t communicate, where promises are grand and lovely, but terrible on execution.

I think to some extent every game must be a reflection of its creative environment, its studio culture. Infinite strains its framework so fiercely you can see through to the flickering reality behind it. I would love to do an interview: Not a grand portrait of Levine, but with his soldiers.

And on Drop Out, Hang Out, Space Out, Daniel Joseph cautions against the cultural gatekeeping implicit in the process of artistically evaluating a game like BioShock Infinite, which segues neatly into our next section of links.

BUT IS FORMALISM GAMES

Writing on his personal/professional site, Raph Koster opens up a debate/can of worms when he responds to remarks made by Leigh Alexander over Twitter, and calls for dialogue on a number of subjects, including the role of definitions, games as rhetorical devices, and formalism.

Leigh Alexander responds in kind, reposting her comment from Koster’s blog and adding: “We have much more to learn and gain, at least for now, by eschewing definitions than we do by prescribing them.”

Writing on his Radiator blog, Robert Yang continued the discussion, responding to Koster’s letter with one of his own in which he lays out the reasons for some of the original post’s negative reception. “[With personal games], game design is not physics, engineering, or science — rather, it’s political science, it’s history. Maybe we could approach our criticism of these games more like those fields?”

The comment thread on Yang’s post, starting with some thoughtful remarks by Jesper Juul, are also very much worth reading.

Reacting to all the dust-up caused by these posts, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman appeared on Polygon, opining that mutual respect and openness to feedback is called for.

Tadhg Kelly soon chimed in as well, erecting a (some would say unnecessary) dichotomy between formalists (as he self-identifies) and “zinesters,” borrowing a term from anna anthropy to describe the outsider artists taking umbrage with his and Koster’s statements.

Andrew Vanden Bossche quickly called for a decoupling of the idea that systems are the unique territory of formalists:

“Formalist” vs “zinester” is not a binary that exists … Everyone gets to talk about mechanics. The game/notgame binary is not an immediate conclusion of a frame of analysis that focuses on mechanics. I believe instead that it is a very strict and limited definition that carries its own political agenda, consciously or not.

Zoe Quinn, developer of Depression Quest concurred, noting that limiting the number of systems in a game can be a justifiable design choice, adding: “I feel like there’s almost this attitude among the people that decry this sort of thing as a notgame that creators of interactive fiction and twine games especially somehow just don’t know how to make real systems.”

It wouldn’t be a debate about terminology without someone getting Storified, and this time around it’s John Brindle, in a curated set of tweets dismantling some of Tadhg Kelly’s positions.

Craig Bamford is briefer but just as energetic: “Tadhg Kelly, please stop trying to tell me ’what games are’. To be extremely blunt, judging by both your site and your CV, I don’t think you’ve earned the right.”

Consciously adopting the role of old man with kids on his lawn, Daniel Cook relates a history of game development establishment and rebellion, as he sees it anyway. Back on Gamasutra, Devin Wilson invites us to think of the discussion over definitions of the word “game” as, itself, a game.

Rounding us off, Mattie Brice reminds us why, in the midst of all this bandying about of labels, labels matter, and they are always charged.

I RATE THIS FORMALISM 8.5 OUT OF 10

Switching gears a little (or a lot), on Kotaku Jason Schreier writes on how Metacritic harms games.

DREAMIN’ OF GDC

If you missed this year’s Game Developers Conference, you cannot afford to miss Dan Pearson’s writeup of the GDC Hothead Rants.

On Unwinnable, Sam Machkovech sits down for an interview with Cart Life developer Richard Hofmeier.

Keeping the German-language ludodecahedron strong, Dennis Kogel follows up this week with a GDC game roundup auf Deutsch. On the English side, he has an interview with Hotline Miami luminaries Devolver Digital.

DESIGN NOTES

On Game Manifesto, Joel Jordon explores the ludodiegesis of Corrypt and Portal. Over on PopMatters Moving Pixels, Nick Dinicola looks into how the opening of the Tomb Raider reboot evokes the horror genre.

As part of Ontological Geek’s Religion Month, Hannah DuVoix muses on the extent to which Skyrim has you desecrating holy places. And reacting to the formalism debates highlighted above, Naomi Clark performs a taut formalist reading of Porpentine’s Howling Dogs.

Back on Gamasutra, Taekwan Kim has finished up his Mechanical Narratives series.

Over on Videogame Tourism, our German-language colleagues have stayed busy: Reinhard Zierhofer speculates on a game adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; our own Johannes Köller unpacks how Far Cry 3 failed not only as a satire, but as a critique of violence and millennial zeitgeist; and Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten are engaged in a letter series discussing Year Walk.

KYRIARCHY

Sidney Fussell turned up on Medium Difficulty last week, exploring the notion of closeted homosexuality in games. Fussell also popped up on VentureBeat, posing that game violence appears to disproportionately be brought up as a motivator for white spree killers.

Back with Kill Screen, Jordan Mammo takes a gander back toward Katamari Damacy as a game in which the artifacts of consumerism add up to “a snowballing addiction that literally uproots the earth itself.”

On Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alex Layne lays out an infographic breakdown of EA’s employee code of conduct. And at Kleiner Drei, Lucie Höhler recaps the major sexism-related issues of the last month, from GDC to RPS, for German-language readers.

JAM ON!

Two successful international game jams took place last weekend. Kill Screen’s Jason Johnson provides us with an overview of one of them, the QUILTBAG Jam hosted at MIT. And at Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander profiles the weekend’s other big jam, the Pulse-Pounding Heart-Stopping Dating Sim Game Jam.

TWINE TWINE REVOLUTION

Cara Ellison is just gonzoing it up all over the place lately. She popped up at PC Gamer with a feature on and interview with Porpentine, and a scant few days later appeared on The Guardian, interviewing anna anthropy.

HEY! LISTEN!

It’s strange to think we may be heading into a leg of critical discourse for games where academic mainstays like book reviews become common again, but that’s just where things seem to be going. Shaun of Arcadian Rhythms recently reviewed Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless and First Person Scholar’s Danielle Stock reviewed Ivan Leslie Beale’s Video Games for Health.

First Person Scholar is turning into a hot new pub, now that we think of it. This article by Rob Parker on voluntary player constraints –featuring Mattie Brice’s Pokemon Unchained, among others– is a good read.

On the topic of new blogs, Shut Up and Sit Down is gearing up to be a great new blog for fans of board games. Here’s Matt Thrower with a primer on wargaming.

At some curious intersection of academia and devlog is Michael Cook’s Games By Angelina, Cook’s PhD project and game-making AI.

ALL THE REST

Thanks again for setting part of your Sunday aside for Critical Distance! As always we’re indebted to our readers for all your wonderful submissions by tweet or email. Keep them coming!

And if you haven’t yet checked out this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt, this is a prime time to get involved!

Lastly, we will be performing a server migration in the coming days. Readers should not experience any lapse in access to the site, but we are going to try to update the layout at the same time so… keep your fingers crossed for us.

Lastly, for my fellow USians. Bitter about tax season like I am? There’s a game for that now.

Critical Distance

It happens sometimes. With Mattie Brice, Katie Williams and yours truly all tied up at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and with Eric Swain busy working on those podcasts, things just fall through the cracks.

In honor of Critical Distance’s terribly exhausted contributors, we are taking this post-GDC Sunday off. Tune in next week for a right proper This Week in Videogame Blogging. Probably with animated gifs and such, even.

Until then, here’s Analogue: A Hate Story developer Christine Love in her exclusive Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Ground Pain Zeroes cosplay.

Have a good week, C-D readers.

Critical Distance

Oh my glob, you guys. This is only going to be, like, the biggest This Week in Videogame Blogging ever. Aren’t you so totally floored?

BIOSHOCK INFINITE

(General content warning: most of these involve some manner of spoilers.)

This game came out recently, you might have heard about it. Something to do with shocking infinity and women in too-tight corsets. Our very own Cameron Kunzelman has drafted a preliminary critical compilation for some of the early critical response.

That’s not to say we’re off the hook, though. Here are some extra articles not included in Cammy’s roundup.

On Edge, Adrien Chmielarz takes issue with the design of the game’s opening as a gamey mess. On io9, guest poster Kyle Hill asks: if the city of Columbia really ran on helium (not that it does), could it?

Kieron Gillen, whose description of Infinite’s floating city as “the 1893 Chicago world fair takes off and becomes an American Exceptionalism Death Star” will hopefully live forever into posterity, posts some “assorted thoughts” on the game including what it could possibly be saying about parenthood.

Rab Florence, reacting to other journalists’ criticisms of Infinite’s violence, invokes the term “gaming cringe” to describe a sort of hyper self-criticism:

If there is any game that can justify its violence, it is Bioshock Infinite. It is a story about a violent man, and about the violence within society. It’s a story about extreme beauty, and extreme ugliness. It’s also saying a lot about videogames, and as it delivers its story and themes, it does it through patterns and behavioural codes that we all understand. The violence isn’t only justified by character, story or themes. It’s justified by the language of game mechanics that the game is using.

What games can’t justify their use of extreme violence? Almost everything else. And yet I haven’t seen commentators call all those other games out. Why wasn’t Gears of War widely taken to task for gruesome violence? Why wasn’t Modern Warfare 2? Was it because those games didn’t aspire to be anything other than silly old videogames? Was it because those games knew their place?

On PopMatters Moving Pixels, Scott Juster praises the “Strong Pictures and Subtle Themes” of the game. Meanwhile, SnakeLinkSonic is more critical, saying, “There’s Subtlety, Then There’s Cowardice.”

Not so much a critical article, but Andy Kelly offers up a good explication of some of the funkier bits of the game’s plot. Elsewhere, on Kill Screen, Yannick LeJacq interviews a terribly exhausted Ken Levine.

Lastly, an article auf Deutsch via our German-language correspondent Johannes Köller, Marcus Dittmar of 99leben describes how his on-and-off relationship with motion sickness prevents him from playing the game.

AFTER –SHOCK

But wait! There’s more. On Eurogamer, Richard Cobbett paints a fond retrospective look at that other BioShock sequel, BioShock 2. Elsewhere, Daniel Weissenberger digs even deeper into some thematic roots and cousins with a retro review of System Shock 2.

TOMB RAIDER

The other AAA name on everyone’s fingertips these last few weeks remains Crystal Dynamics’ and Rhianna Pratchett’s Tomb Raider reboot.

Back on Moving Pixels, Nick Dinicola comments on the “desperate” feeling of Tomb Raider’s combat. Meanwhile, on The Border House, ACLU worker Daniel Bullard-Bates explores its treatment of bravery.

On Groping the Elephant, Justin Keverne discusses Tomb Raider’s “identity bubble.” And on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the shamelessly female Cara Ellison sits down for a memorable interview with lead writer Rhianna Pratchett, surely undermining the entire internet in the process.

DESIGN MATTERS

Straddling the two games above, Paul Tassi of Forbes wonders if we aren’t oversaturating games with ultraviolence: “I have nothing against killing in games. It’s just that as video games continue to evolve as storytelling vehicles, this idea that the main protagonist has to kill HUNDREDS of people per game is starting to seem a bit odd.”

On Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander hosts a roundtable with Andrew Plotkin, anna anthropy, Emily Short and others on the building renaissance of interactive fiction.

Leigh Alexander also popped up this week on Polygon with Quintin Smith, bringing us a new letter series on Persona 4.

On GameCritics, I was really gratified to come upon Brad Gallaway’s meticulous breakdown of male- and heterosexual privilege in the newest Fire Emblem.

Since we’re on the subject of JRPGs, Mark Filipowich is putting together something of a series on the role of ensemble casts within the genre. He’s currently continuing the discussion with Breath of Fire 4 on his personal blog.

There seems to be a mini-trend lately on drawing connection points between game design and improv theatre. Following on that, Problem Machine has a few interesting thoughts on the improv precept of “if this is so, then what else is so?”

QUANTUM GAMING

This is pretty dire. Richard Morgan suggests the new SimCity actually collapses the quantum wave-form of multiple realities. Eat your heart out, Rosalind Lutece.

In some other place and in some other time, Jordan Rivas presents us with a touching, if rather unserious, interpretation of Mass Effect 3’s “Citadel” DLC as taking place in the afterlife.

And somewhere in there Kambyero’s Mix Villalon managed to sneak in a well-designed three-part series in defense of bad endings.

FAITH

Two excellent pieces showed up on Medium Difficulty this week, on the subject seeing one’s loss of faith mirrored in games. First, Samantha Allen likens her departure from the Mormon Church with the feeling of isolation experienced in Dead Space. As a companion piece to Allen’s, Kaitlin Tremblay shares her experiences leaving Catholicism for atheism, and seeing that transition paralleled in Starseed Pilgrim.

On Gamasutra, Rob Lockhart approaches the subject from the point of view of a developer, musing on how one might model the transition from theist to atheist through game mechanics.

BUT IS IT ART

John Brindle, busiest of the Brindle clan, has produced a fantastic essay on Pippin Barr’s Art Game.

On Unwinnable, Dan Crabtree returns to the island of Dear Esther with a rumination on the convergence point of ‘understanding’ and ‘salvation.’ Dear Esther is also on Line Hollis’s mind these days, as she compares it with The Stanley Parable and how the two games approach storytelling from opposite directions.

Gamertheories explores horror in tablet gaming with Year Walk. Our own Eric Swain poses an interesting thought experiment on the different visuality of first- and third-person “walker” games.

On VGRevolution, Marc Price calls for more “immersion criticism” in games, “exploring every nook and cranny until there’s no pixel left untouched.” Meanwhile at Uncanny Postcards, Sylvain Lavallée proposes that it can be productive to think of games as possibility spaces.

Touching on the recent ousting of Sweatshop from the Apple Games store, the latest in a series of serious games dropkicked from the outlet as ‘unsuitable,’ Jorge Albor wonders: where is the place for them?

And here’s another German article brought to our attention via Senior German Correspondent, who describes this piece by Magnus Hildebrandt as “the definitive guide to understanding Kentucky Route Zero and its cultural roots, references and relations.”

BUT IS IT WAR

Regulars of Critical Distance know well my fondness for essays on the intersection of military, industry and games. Here is a fabulous piece courtesy of Jeremy Antley on how nascent drone warfare and the recent sequestration has an impact on military war games.

ESPORTS

We don’t feature pieces on eSports near enough on Critical Distance. Here’s an interesting interview with Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime on the recently announced StarCraft 2 World Championship Series.

Commenting on the Museum of Modern Art’s recent acquisition of Dwarf Fortress, Bill Coberly muses how the game might function as spectator sport.

PEOPLE AND PEOPLE AND PEOPLE

I had the distinct pleasure of running into Simon Parkin at GDC, who shared with me some of his secrets to his fabulous life-changing interviews. I believe I called him brainful, to my and his horror. And no, you won’t hear his secrets from me! Here he is, however, profiling the one and only Notch, Markus Persson himself.

Back with Kill Screen, Clayton Purdom brings us a feature on the artists behind “cloud rap,” “the unlikely convergence of JRPGs and indie hip-hop.”

THE LONG VIEW

Courtesy of The Magazine’s Mohammed Taher an elucidating look at the contribution of the MSX to the 1980s Middle Eastern game scene, and where the industry stands now.

And on IndieGames, Robert Fearon reflects on the evolving coverage of indie games.

#1REASON

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker has posted a new mission statement on feminist allyship within games writing. “Many women are mistreated and misrepresented within the games industry,” he writes. “It’s not a matter of opinion, a political position, or claim made to reinforce previous bias. It’s the demonstrable, sad truth.”

On The Mary Sue, Jill Pantozzi addresses the recent sexual harassment incident at PAX East, and in doing so touches upon several incidents at other recent events and the endemic problem it represents.

Back on The Border House, guest poster Sarah Argodale challenges the “accepted wisdom” of game advertising’s narrow representation.

GDC CATCH-UP

What’s the big deal with this Game Developers Conference everyone and their dog went to in March, anyway? I couldn’t adequately convey everything which went down but here is a great sampling of posts on the conference (and GDC-adjacent events) which showed up in my feeds these last two weeks.

First, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Nathan Grayson has a great overview up in which he describes this year’s conference as “a worrisome, hopeful contradiction“:

RPS’s own wayward ronin word master Cara Ellison, during a post-convention victory dinner, put it best: “GDC is where we first hear about all the stuff everyone will be talking about next year.” Maybe it’s a trend-setter, or maybe it’s just a megaphone for gentle tickles of trends that are already in motion, but the point remains: GDC tends to be pretty indicative of where we’re at. People often view E3 in that light, but the fact is, it’s a dinosaur wreathed in fireworks, frilly undergarments, and little else. E3 is a projection. GDC has evolved into its opposite: introspection. We look inward, and then we discuss. And this year – thanks to things like the renewed prominence of PC gaming, a focus on indies, and the #1ReasonToBe talk – I came away quite optimistic.

David Rosen has posted the write-up of his rant from this year’s Indie Soapbox, encouraging independent developers to make not eschew technological advances because of their AAA stigma. The one and only anna anthropy also posted a write-up of her dys4ia post-partum and other talks given at GDC. Elsewhere, Dennis Kogel conducted an interview with anthropy for Superlevel.de.

Bit Creature’s Jason Johnson looks back at some of the indie titles he encountered during the conference. In a similar vein, Jenn Frank played That Dragon, Cancer at the Unwinnable Salon the closing night of GDC, and reflects powerfully on the game’s subject matter.

Responding to recent controversies about hired models at GDC parties, Jason Killingsworth invites us to look at it from a different angle: his sister, a professional model, has attended plenty of similar events, and “there was nothing shady about the practice.” Killingsworth adds, “The way I see it, a little demystification goes a long way.”

On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander, who spoke at this year’s conference, shares why GDC brought out so many emotions for her. Writing for the same, Kirk Hamilton describes this year’s conference as a wake-up call for the videogame industry: “Change is in the air. Change for the better.”

On the German side, Dennis Kogel delivers in spades, with splendid series of write-ups and interviews for Superlevel.de. Here he is interviewing Austrian games journalist Robert Glashüttner. Here, he covers the FTL postmortem, the #1ReasonToBe panel, and the Creatrilogy talk with Andy Hull, James Lantz and Davey Wreden. He also covered the IGF and Developer’s Choice Awards!

LOST LEVELS CATCH-UP (PART 1)

You may have also heard some murmurings on the Twitters about Lost Levels, a GDC “unconference” held across the street from the conference. George Weidman has an excellent write-up of the event. We should have a more thorough collection of video, photos and write-ups from the official site in a few days, in time for next week’s roundup.

And if you read German, Dennis Kogel has you covered there too.

OH MY GLOB WHAT IS IT

Have you heard of Alpaca Niisan? It’s about to give you nightmares. Thanks, Anne Lee. I think.

THE USUAL, PLEASE

The new Blogs of the Round Table topic is up! Go have a gander, for your health.

As always, we are dependent upon our readers for sending in your reading recommendations via Twitter and email. And yes, we welcome self-submissions! Don’t be shy.

Join us next week where we will hopefully have a slightly more manageable list of links for you to dig through. For now, we apologize if we just ruined your Sunday plans. But I think we can all agree it was surely worth it.

Critical Distance

I thought glasses only clinked in movies, but nothing made people get closer than Sangrias and a mural of a woman lying across a pool table. Yes, it is the eve of the Game Developers Conference, or as the game industry calls it, “Christmas”. But even with such tempting distractions in store, and Google Reader threatening the existence of our RSS feeds, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Being Women’s Herstory month, the gaming community still has gender issues on its mind, and this week showed many different perspectives on the evolving conversation. We would be remiss if we didn’t include this insightful conversation between Yannick LeJacq and Rhianna Pratchett about the videogame woman of the year so far. The interview refuses to take a strong, one-sided stance on the game, as does the personal disclosure about the game from Rhea Monique:

“Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. But it didn’t do it needlessly. It didn’t do it tactlessly. It didn’t do it for a cheap rise. It instead captured a real emotion and a real experience millions of women will encounter in their life. Some of them won’t be as lucky as I was. Some of them won’t be as lucky as Lara Croft was, either. Some of them won’t survive. Some of them will be silenced forever.

Some of them will die and some of their attackers will live.”

But for most, Lara Croft isn’t enough. Samantha Allen at The Border House outlines why enough is enough, there should be more women protagonists in videogames by now. In the same vein, Maggie Greene illustrates via her knowledge of the brave women in Chinese history, noting that the kinds of women we need in games aren’t necessarily the most obvious ones:

“I don’t mean to imply that it’s only these types of ‘quiet’ strength that are worthy of attention, just that perhaps we don’t give it as much attention as it deserves. It’s something that is harder to valorize than the more obviously ‘heroic’ qualities. Qiu Jin is a clear hero, and she hits some of those points we like: she shunned the expected female roles of her time (leaving her husband and children to head to Japan), she embraced the idea of revolutionary violence, she was photographed with weaponry. Delicate Chinese flower she was not, despite having bound feet. But there is heroism in Xu Zihua’s story: it is not bombastic, and it doesn’t involve assassination plots, but it speaks to a person who willingly bore a tremendous responsibility in a volatile time.”

Making an unexpected appearance at BuzzFeed, Courtney Stanton explains why she isn’t shocked about the reaction surrounding Adria Richards, and in fact, has come to expect it:

“One time I was afraid to leave my house because of the internet. My unforgivable sin was refusing to just be cool about rape jokes in a gamer comic and its associated fan convention’s merchandise. Sometimes the hill you find yourself dying on is weird and unexpected; I feel a lot of empathy for Richards in this. But as final lines in the sand go, “I would like to attend a professional conference without multiple instances of men being juvenile, unprofessional, and just plain gross” doesn’t seem like an outrageous demand to me.”

In an interesting twist, Michael Thomsen makes a case against the irresponsible use of ‘dudebro,’ and how the community’s lack of rigor actually marginalizes certain experiences key to understanding the typically overgeneralized demographic of shooter fans.

Tell Me a Story I’ve Never Heard Before

The blogosphere is often grappling with the way videogames deal with narrative, and this week is no different. Over at PopMatters, Mark Filipowich extrapolates how homes are underused in games as narrative contrast and our own Eric Swain teases out similarities between cinematic time jumping and that of Thirty Flights of Loving. Line Hollis talks about how Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable work as interrogations of typical narrative structures in games and the determinism therein:

“While both games are about storytelling, they approach the theme from opposite directions. A story, traditionally, is a sequence of events that follows a chain of cause and effect. The Stanley Parable is about how story structures mock the idea of free will. Dear Esther is about how people force incomplete and untrustworthy information into story structures. One features a protagonist trapped in a deterministic world, and the other a protagonist trapped in a non-deterministic one. One of these turns out to unsettle players much more than the other.”

Worth mentioning also, back in June of last year an unnamed author over at Still Eating Oranges talked about how not all narrative structures rely on conflict, and the assumptions we have are very much ethnocentric.

It Hurts So Good

The strange relationship between pain and pleasure that games give to players has been a focus of interest with gaming thinkers lately. Kyle Carpenter at Medium Difficulty talks about the satisfying play in Trials Evolution and how it relates to J.G. Ballad’s Crash. On his blog, Robert Yang muses about how The Elder Scrolls games deal with murder and how the games set up an interesting system to communicate gravity to their murder. And thought notoriously painful, Brendan Keogh also reflects on his isolated nature in games and how Dark Souls complicates his single-player experience with multiplayer influence.

The Bonds Between Us

Relationships and intimacy is a long standing fascination of game critics, and writers continue to push our thinking on how relating can happen in games. Jordan Rivas speaks to the Citadel DLC of Mass Effect 3 and how it created a feeling homecoming, of friendship that essentially fulfilled your needs for some bonding. This time on Medium Difficulty, Mark Filipowich renews the conversation about intimacy in games through the Prince of Persia games, and how they explored the Prince’s lack of emotional bonding. Over at his personal blog, Brad Galloway shows the subtle ways sexuality politics works against diversity in the newest Fire Emblem while Matt Marrone exercises his relationship anxieties through playing Spaceteam with his girlfriend and friends at Unwinnable:

“Is your former college roommate’s wife overseeing the V-pod? She’s furthest away from you at the table. Maybe you’re not saying it loud enough. Maybe she’s never really liked you.

Or perhaps it’s your girlfriend who’s ignoring you. You’ve been training her to do it in your spare time, anyway, with your incessant rambling, and now you’ve doomed yourself to an eternity floating through the empty vacuum of space.”

Utter Miscellany

Sometimes game bloggers don’t like to be easily categorized, much like the confusing experiement that is presenting Dwarf Fortress as a museum exhibit, as highlighted here by Bill Coberly. Megan Patterson speaks to Actual Sunlight’s Will O’Neill about the nebulously personal, but inspiring direction game development is headed. Going in a different direction, Mohammed Taher gives a detailed run-down on the influences and progress of game development in the Middle East.

And if all that was too heavy for you, perhaps instead of the top 40 lists of attractive women in tech, why don’t you try out Darius Kazemi’s ClickBait, created in response to the piece?

In San Francisco this week? Make sure to say hello to your favorite Critical Distance contributors, and come see my panel with the very timely theme of women in the games industry. If you cannot join in the wonderful festivities that is GDC, fear not, as we will be back here, same time and same place, with even more juicy videogame blogging. You can still reach us by email and Twitter for recommending good reads, which is always immensely helpful! And don’t forget about this month’s Blogs of the Round Table.

Until next time!

Critical Distance

Welcome to another sunny Sunday filled with top-tier criticism and commentary from the world of gaming! Contrary to previous reports, I, your senior editor, will be taking the reins again this week, while Mattie Brice rounds off the last two weekends of March. Consider me the necessary middle-woman.

But enough talk. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

ANALYSIS

We start things off with this compelling and quite thorough analysis of what author Line Hollis dubs the “minigame montage” format, in which different sets of mechanics are introduced to the player.

Elsewhere, GA Tech instructor Celia Pearce has updated her course blog, Game Design as Cultural Practice, with a host of this semester’s student work. This essay by Mary Macheski Preston in particular stands out as a lucid analysis of Pokemon Black/White’s treatment of race, gender and sexuality.

CHARACTERS

The AppleCiderMage notes an interesting quest line in a recent World of WarCraft patch in which female warriors take center stage.

Meanwhile, at The Border House, Samantha Allen puts her foot down regarding the scarcity of female protagonists in games: “We pride ourselves on being a young but fast-moving medium. Let’s kick it into high gear and give Lara Croft some company.”

And speaking of the leading lady herself…

PROTAGONISTS

Reacting to a recent news story about a suicidal teen finding solace in the new Tomb Raider, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers suggests that we need more vulnerable heroes:

I won’t deny that playing an over-the-top hero can be an awful lot of fun, but for a story to really grab me by the heartstrings, it’s got to appeal to my humanity. The typical heroic message of “don’t be scared” can bolster my resolve for a little while, but “be scared and do stuff anyway” is far more resonant.

On Play Like a Girl, Cary shares of her complicated relationship with the Tomb Raider franchise and observes that the inclusion of sexual assault in the recent series reboot isn’t “realistic” (CONTENT WARNING: discussion of rape):

I know what you may be thinking. They’re trying to make it more realistic and, sadly, rape often used as method of terror against women.

True.

But until I can get shot numerous times, hide behind a barrel, and after a few moments emerge back into fray at full health, video games will not be reality and while Tomb Raider is more realistic is it not realism. Still, the developers felt in necessary to include this scene. Why couldn’t the man have simply threatened to kill her? Pull a knife to her neck? Put a gun to her head? Why did he have to objectify and sexualize her? Bring to life a very real fear for millions of women all over the world?

[…] If you think I’m being a little too sensitive about this, I’ll ask you to picture one of the games I mentioned above – Uncharted, Far Cry, or Dishonored – and image one of those male leads being threatened with rape. Seems silly and out of place, doesn’t it?

Over on Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez has a conversation with fellow columnist Kirk Hamilton (yeah, he co-wrote it, BUT) on a certain inevitable compare-and-contrast: Tomb Raider vs Uncharted.

LIFE AND SUCH

Writing in her own blog, Leigh Alexander meditates on what really attracts us to simulation games:

What’s interesting is the way games that simulate life slot into our real lives. They give us a sense of control over the uncontrollable, they flex the part of our brain that make us feel like skilled managers of growth. Within the context of a system, elements feel manageable.

They call some large-scale simulations “god games” because you play god – but maybe they take a role in our lives like religion, a repetitive ritual that makes us feel less afraid, like success is always attainable because the system is fair.

Back on Kotaku, Tina Amini shares some even-handed tips on balancing a gaming hobby with adult life.

FEATURES

Kill Screen’s Michelle Young offers up an interesting essay on the new SimCity as modernist artifact.

On Not Enough Shaders, Emily Rogers relates the immense (and occasionally, difficult to believe) history of Howard Lincoln, former attack dog lawyer for Nintendo of America.

And the shining star of Polygon, Tracey Lien, has a new feature up on the birth and success of FTL.

DEVELOPMENT

Critical Distance doesn’t feature only critics– we’re also interested in the experiences and observations of designers from all aspects of development.

On her personal blog, interactive fiction legend Emily Short has posted some valuable design notes on why her new IF engine, Versu, is designed around Jane Austen’s world of “precisely defined manners.”

Meanwhile, free-to-play and social game veteran Laralyn McWilliams delivers a swift gutpunch in this recent Gamasutra feature, which connects her personal experience with the ethics of monetization:

Social and social/mobile companies are trapped. Faced with an aggressive marketplace and skyrocketing costs, jobs and even whole companies are at stake. It’s hard to justify turning your back on a proven model. To do that, you have to take risks. You have to look beyond data and understand its emotional context. You have to be in the game for the long haul and not for whatever increases tomorrow’s profit. You have to see players as your allies instead of test subjects.

You have to stop thinking like GLaDOS and start thinking more like Stephen Jay Gould.

On Gaming as Women, #1reason founder Filamena holds an interview with Gillian Fraser, lead developer of Wicked Fantasy. And on her studio’s Rat King blog, German indie developer Jana Reinhardt wonders why the local indie scene isn’t more prominent.

GET OUT THERE AND PLAY SOME GAMES

Never been to SXSW and wonder what it’s like? Leigh Alexander has a Twine game for you.

And everyone has by now heard about the dad who hacked Donkey Kong to let his daughter play as Pauline, but have you heard about the female animator who hacked Zelda to play as the titular princess? File under: awesome.

AND THE REST

There is still time to submit for this month’s Blogs of the Round Table theme on the subject of female role models!

As always, Critical Distance relies on your submissions to make This Week in Videogame Blogging the best that it can possibly be. Remember that we are always accepting your links by email and Twitter.

Finally, this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is fast on the approach, and I am pleased to announce that no less than three of Critical Distance’s editors –Katie Williams, Mattie Brice and yours truly, Kris Ligman– will be in attendance at the conference. Drop by and say hello! Or at the very least pay a visit to Mattie’s panel on March 27th along with Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke and more!

Critical Distance

In the year 2148, commenters on Brainy Gamer discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed startling new blog topics, enabling travel to new critical heights. The basis for this incredible technology was a force that controlled the very fabric of space, time and the ludodecahedron.

They called it the greatest discovery in game critic history.

The civilizations of the blogosphere call it…

In this adventure you play Commander Kris Ligman, the galaxy’s most desk-bound human Spectre. Press [Spacebar] to skip this narrative flavor text we worked so hard on at any time. Go on, just try it, see if we care.

EPISODE 1: MORE THAN A NUMBERS PROBLEM

Commander Ligman’s first encounter starts in the humble human colony of Gamespot, where Alliance Navy Chief Petty Officer Carolyn Petit aggressively criticizes game development’s unwillingness to include women characters:

Right now, the fear that big-budget games about women won’t sell is self-fulfilling. Developers are afraid to make and properly market big games with female protagonists out of a fear that they don’t sell, but if developers don’t make and properly market those games, they don’t have a chance to sell. It’s time for industry leaders to abandon the antiquated notions and tired excuses they sometimes trot out when talk turns to female protagonists.

Elsewhere, on the planet Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez reveals that the lack of women presenters at the Playstation 4 presser goes much deeper than a numbers game– it reflects a larger, system problem of erasing women role models from tech fields. Or Reapers. Possibly it’s Reapers. Shh.

Also on Kotaku, we overhear Evan Narcisse in conversation with David Brothers on how to increase racial representation both within games and in the development industry. Press [Left-Click] to join conversation.

EPISODE 2: IT’S A GREAT BIG WORLD OUT THERE

Critical biotic commando John Brindle of The New Statesman suggests that while the predicted epoch of top-down political games as propaganda appears to have failed to materialize, grassroots, bottom-up political games like September 12 and Cart Life represent a growing genre.

Captain Terrence Jarrad of the PC Powerplay battalion has released the complete interview with the directors of IRL Shooter a “real life” FPS (don’t they call those LARPs?).

Existing in a world where air cars do not, Gamasutra’s Mike Rose presents a fascinating experiment using SimCity to model, and diagnose, his town’s traffic congestion problem.

EPISODE 3: IT’S THE MATRIX, NEO

Joker, quit using your out-of-date sci-fi movie references, no one thinks you’re funny. (Except EDI.)

Anyway– while it’s no doubt a familiar approach to some of her readers out there, Commander Ligman still appreciated this analysis by Push Select’s Mark Jensen using Final Fantasy VII to illustrate several philosophical tenets of existentialism.

EPISODE 4: A NEW HOPE

Seriously, Joker. Stop.

Elsewhere, back with the plot, Commander Ligman discovers a mighty entity that must be destroyed before it consumes another race of synthetics: the Bit Creature! It’s already claimed Gavin Craig, who this week turns his gaze on a particular scene in Heavy Rain which not only misdirects the player but breaks the rules of the gameplay (and possibly space-time) entirely:

We’re used to and know how to read unreliable narrators in books and film. We’re even familiar with unreliable characters in games. The “would you kindly” revelation in BioShock is jarring, but it’s also frequently discussed as a high point in game narrative and not as evidence of a broken game. With some very rare (and usually clearly signaled — think of the Scarecrow sequences in Batman: Arkham Asylum) exceptions, what the player sees is treated as objectively reliable. It becomes difficult to imagine functioning in most games if what you see isn’t what, for the game’s purposes, is really there. In Heavy Rain, however, just for a moment, the camera itself becomes an unreliable narrator.

Admiral Robert Yang of the SSV Radiator muses on how we might think of game narrative as improvisational theater, and not just on a “yes, and” level:

[L]ongform improv comedy involves actors cooperating to “find the game” — to find the core of a joke. Each actor makes “offers” to expand upon a premise and move action forward, hopefully toward a funny destination, and usually, actors err on always accepting offers (”saying yes”) and building upon it since “blocking” offers frustrates your scene partners. However, it’s very possible to “say yes” to a premise while still “blocking” the “game.”

Finding himself lost in a non-Euclidean alternate universe not of his own design, Corporal Zolani Stewart transmits a few notes on nature soundscapes as narrative design in Antichamber.

Back with Gamasutra, specialist Sebastian Alvarado presents the latest installment of his series on nanotechnology, this time focusing on the Nanosuit from Crysis.

Writing for his own blog, known rogue agent Jay Barnson (call sign: “Rampant Coyote”) categorizes some recurring post-apocalyptic game setting variants.

Citadel publication Games That Exist sees Alex Pieschel presenting us with a long-form look at the oeuvre of designer Michael Brough.

Elsewhere, Fabien Sanglard has been found disseminating a four-part deep-read of the source code of Duke Nukem 3D.

Not to be outdone, special agent Liz “ellaguro” Ryerson takes us through a close analysis of John Romero’s and Tom Hall’s level design in Wolfenstein 3D Episode 3.

Shane Liesegang (wanted by the Council on suspicion of working for Bethesda) suggests we should look at Skyrim not as a necessarily representational work but as impressionist gameplay:

[The] realism exists in this kind of ever-shifting bubble around the player. The area you see looks and feels as real as we can make it, but the relationships between things dilate and compress to accommodate a good gameplay experience. That mountain in the distance would likely be 10-20 miles away based on the amount of atmospheric color shifting going on, but in the game you could be there in a matter of minutes without even hitting the sprint button.

It all kind of hangs together because our brains aren’t great at processing long-term experiences at that same immediate level – realizing that it didn’t take you nearly long enough to reach the peak requires active reflection, and the game doesn’t really give you any reason to reflect on that particular experience.

EPISODE 5: (OMNI)DEVTOOLS

Captain Sophie Houlden of the Unity task force calls for further tolerance of the Twine Revolution and other code-light development tools:

back before I learnt how to make games, I was really passionate about my 3D art (it was originally my intention to never program at all, I was all about the visual art) I hung out on deviantArt and shared my work and it was cool. but then tools appeared that made certain things easier; poser, terragen and similar software let people make 3D models without even requiring an understanding of the 3D building blocks; faces, vertices etc.

I was seriously miffed, I had worked crazy hard to make character models, and these people had the nerve to submit poser models alongside mine as though they were equal? it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. I had worked hard and these people had barely worked at all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you find yourself thinking like this you are an asshole, and you are in the middle of a tantrum.

EPISODE 6: RUN AWAY! RUN AWAAAAY!

Great. Who drove the Mako right into a Thresher Maw nest?

Known Rampant Coyote associate Lars Doucet was spotted writing this guest post with a thoughtful look at the mechanic of escaping battles. Just like we’re doing, right now. Reverse, reverse!

Elsewhere, C-Sec lieutenant Jill Scharr warns Citadel residents of the real Red Menace: Tetris!

By 1988, Tetris was the highest-selling computer game in the U.S., available for purchase on the Commodore 64, Super Famicom, and Apple II and IBM personal computers. The question of who owned the rights – and on which devices – was still hotly contested, particularly between Atari, who acquired it from Microsoft, and Nintendo, who acquired it through Spectrum Holobyte and began distributing it through a publisher named – if you can believe it – Bullet Proof Software. Coincidence? Perhaps. In any case, Bullet Proof worked hard to secure the rights to Tetris across multiple devices. They were hoping to prepackage the insidious little game with their upcoming portable handheld console, called a Game Boy. Facilitated by this little machine, Tetris would grow even further, spreading beyond the arcades, living rooms and office cubicles where it was once constrained. The great big Tetris board called Earth was starting to get dangerously full. And all of the pieces were red.

President Reagan sought to fight Communism with his “Star Wars” initiative, but the Soviet Union countered with a gambit out of Star Trek, a Kobayashi Maru that we were never meant to solve. An unbeatable scenario whose purpose was not to teach us, but to leach us, to drain us dry of enterprise and rational thought, to strand us in a wasteland of wasted hours.

Carl Sagan help us all.

EPISODE 7: TAKE A BREAK

Fresh back from those damned Thresher Maw ambushes, Commander Ligman investigates a report on Gamasutra by Ben Serviss on a few different possible models for what he dubs “meditative games.”

EPISODE 8: YOU, ME AND KENJI ENO

Elsewhere along the cutting edge of Gamasutra blogs, Christian Nutt pay tribute to the work of the recently deceased Kenji Eno.

EPISODE 9: I RATE THIS NAVEL 8.5/10

Reacting to the infamous blog spat between New York Times car critic John Broder and Tesla’s Elon Musk, probable Citadel dissident Sam Machkovech speculates on a future where game companies similarly refer to play data to contest bad reviews.

Kambyero’s earthborn Job Duanan confesses that he finds Earthbound difficult to write about. Press [Left Click] to engage.

No, you pressed [ESC]. Stop. No, don’t go to the language menu. Hey!

FOLGE 10: AUF DEUTSCH

Our new “foreign correspondent” Johannes Köller sends word of recent activity in some of the German colonies.

We start with Videogame Tourism’s Rainer Sigl, whose English-language articles have reached Kommandantin Ligman’s desk several times in the past. Here, Sigl discusses Dead Space 3, and in our correspondent’s words:

Sigl [...] wonders what it might have taken to make it truly terrifying: Vulnerability, Pruning (of locations and NPCs) and Unreliable Perception, something to turn it into a subjective body horror experience a la Cronenberg, with constant doubts as to your own health and sanity.

On superlevel.de, Dominik Johann pens a love letter to the Twine Revolution, and in particular Christine Love’s Even Cowgirls Bleed. Quote Johann (in translation): “Twine and its users don’t give a shit about norms and conventions. Punkrock!”

Okay, that’s enough, and Kommandantin Ligman’s German voice actress sounds weird. Let’s switch back over to English-language pieces for now.

EPISODE 11: SHUT IT DOWN

We must’ve missed some intervening DLC chapter which explained the transition here, but it seems that Commander Ligman’s subordinate Cameron Kunzelman has gone and made the actual Citizen Kane of games, so we can all go home early. Nevermind that Reaper thing, we guess.

EPISODE 12: SELECT ENDING COLOR

That’s it. That’s really it. Did you feel your decisions were meaningful?

If not, please use the email submission form or @ us on Twitter to send in your recommendations for next week. Or just pop on over to Alan Williamson’s Blogs of the Round Table to increase our Galactic Readiness Rating. No pressure.

Still here, huh? In that case, press [Shift+Spacebar] for New TWIVGB Plus. Enjoy the roundup again with all your EXP and equipment! Just try to romance someone other than Garrus this time, okay? We’re getting concerned.

Critical Distance

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

It’s a party in here! We here at Critical Distance are filling the halls with cheerily-coloured, but still very meaningful balloons in celebration of Women’s History Month. I am Katie, here to deliver the first of March’s This Week in Videogame Blogging round-ups curated by CD’s women editors. Lots of tasty stuff here this week, friends, so let’s toss a few streamers and get the funtimes started.

It’s very good that games can give us feels and all that fun stuff, but besides the ability to make us cry, you know what else videogames explore? MONEY! And, okay, the possible feels associated with it. That’s what Chris Dahlen’s looking at over at Unwinnable, with his analysis of Cart Life both as a retail simulator and a sadface-inducing story of people down on their luck:

While Cart Life has been tagged a “political game,” it doesn’t deliver a simple critique. After all, you’re not just a struggling member of the underclass; you’re also a budding capitalist. The crushing anxiety of the first half of the game turns into relief, satisfaction and even pride once you finally get your stand going and start to bring in some money.

Also at Unwinnable, Stu Horvath once again exercises that muscle of his that endlessly impresses me with its application of non-videogame knowledge to, well, videogames, with a comparison of Dunsany’s asymmetrical variant of chess to the way today’s gamers still can’t fight that urge to tinker with the ruleset here and there. “When children play amongst themselves, the rules of play are malleable,” says Horvath. “Changing the rules – seeing just how much one can get away with before exhausting the patience of the group – becomes the game more than the game itself.”

At Kotaku, Evan Narcisse and David Brothers ping-pong to each other a series of letters that explores “why we need more black people making games.” I mean, we know this already; hell, even the devs know it, if the developer quotes that Narcisse reveals are anything to go by. “One day someone’ll realize that there’s an opportunity here,” Narcisse says, “just like they did with hip-hop, hood movies, blaxploitation, and more besides, and then it’s gonna be on and popping.”

Over at Pop Matters’ Moving Pixels blog, my brother in the art of Williamsing, G. Christopher Williams, has a really cool take on those people who are all, “Dude, relax, it’s just a game.”

But I do worry about you guys, sometimes. You do know that all those pixels on a screen mean something, represent something, communicate something, right? You do know that the flickering images on a screen make you feel something, make you laugh, make you cry because, you know, they’re familiar, not real, but they remind you of real circumstances, real moments of joy, real moments of tragedy?

Meanwhile, Williams’ brother in the art of pixel-moving, Nick Dinicola, also has something weighty to say. About doors. Never let it be said again that the doors of Dead Space 3 are not a big deal, because they’re significant constructs in the building of the entire world, man.

Timely right now, especially with BioShock: Infinite’s ever-nearing release, is Kaitlin Tremblay’s thoughts on the use of nostalgia in the BioShock series:

When talking about BioShock, Levine stated that the game acted as a Rorscarch for people (one that usually ended up in negativity, infuriating gamers who chose to engage with it on that level), and this is exactly how nostalgia is operating: it’s letting us, as players and as an audience, look at the game (the mechanics, the setting) and project our own political discourse onto it.

And while we’re on the topic of BioShock Infinite (as well as in the midst of Women’s History Month!), our German-language correspondent this month suggests Marcus Dittmar’s article on the representation of women in videogames for 99 Leben, starting with what I feel is a rather problematic developer quote on the visual design of the character Elizabeth:

“Originally we had a very different outfit for her, and it was a little bit more true to the period. And I thought, ‘a user is going to look at this and be like, why the hell would I want to hang around with her?’ She wasn’t attractive at all. Revisiting that to keep it true to the time, but also so it has a little bit of appeal to the modern eye.”

Ugh. Chilling.

At Gamasutra, Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail has a thoughtful, well-constructed piece on the place of academia and games studies in games development, as well as the press’ misconception’s about his stance on the subject. As a former games student who once felt like she was “doing it wrong” in both the academic and the technical side of things, like a helpless spider whose legs are pulled in opposite directions… Rami, I know that feel, bro.

Also at Gamasutra, Mike Rose wonders if we can address the free-to-play model’s problems via a game jam: “An avenue by which inspirational and creative individuals can attempt to tackle the free-to-play space, and hopefully show the average gamer how free-to-play can universally be done in a respectful and entertaining way.”

And, finally, we end with some of the nerdy videogame-to-real-world comparison stuff I just can’t get enough of: trained geologist Jane Robb, writing for Gamespot, investigates the accuracy of Skyrim’s geology, and whether it’s up to a standard that might allow for its use in educational training.

And now it’s time for me to kick y’all out so I can get to work on the cleaning the place up. Sigh. But don’t take this to mean the party’s over: Women’s History Month has only just begun, and as usual, we’ll be fielding all your recommendations on Twitter or via email. And while you’re at it, check out Alan’s excellent new BoRT topic, too. See you next week!

Critical Distance

The sun over the Critical Distance virtual offices was blotted by clouds and naked branches scratched at the windows. I was alone in the room, listening to the howling wind that matched my intentions, full access to the site at my fingertips. When Kris Ligman is away, Mattie Brice gets to play. LiveJournal open, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging.

05:28 PM February 8th, 2013

It’s the first day of the Mattie take-over, and I’m not quite sure what my first move should be to dethrone the powers that be and make Critical Distance mine. Reading Robert Yang’s meditation on Cardboard Computer’s Limits & Demonstrations, how some more conceptual games resist being played, and players’ relationship with cheating. Maybe I should make a post that defies being read?

09:34 AM February 11th, 2013

Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with my journal, I had to initiate my first phase in weakening games criticism for my eventual rule:

Herein lies the problem- when you leave out the personal, all that’s left is the status quo. Because that ‘standard’ consists of the values of a particular type of culture associated with the hegemonic, privileged class, there is actually something personal and subjective going on all the time. Thus, by leaving out the particular experiences of the silenced and marginalized, it bars anyone from revealing the bias that exists within this supposed stoically neutral discourse. It takes away the vocal chords of a person in a room full of shouting.

But enough of such grand schemes. Today, Gus Mustrapa spun a legend of eternal struggle, an overlooked opera I felt represented the toiling emotions in my heart. The last time that happened was when I was 8 years old on my first art museum visit, when I, much like Richard Terrell, questioned whether I was fully capable of understanding the full experience of a piece. With a swing of a paddle, I bounced back to reality when Andrew Vanden Bossche sharply criticized the zeitgeist of mainstream reviews, in this case Arthur Gies’s Dead Space 3 review, much like my 5th grade teacher scolding me for calling out answers in class.

2:53 PM February 12th, 2013

I have a lot of feels swirling around today, mostly about how Anthony John Agnello’s observations on voice and silence affecting the game experience reminded me of the correlation between my habit to talk to myself in empty rooms and the commodification of pink haired girls in visual novels.

The rest of my day was gloomy, having to consider David Cage might be right about something, or so says Brad Gallaway when it comes to the non-gamers’ perception of videogames. To make matters worse, Simon Parkin over at New Statesman further complicates the violence in games issue more than my paradigm can handle.

10:15 PM February 13th, 2013

Did you know videogames made me an atheist? It totally makes sense now that Tom Dawson explained how games exercises our relationship with religion and how gods can be parasites:

I wonder, did anyone sit down to consider their own understanding of God before making these games? After all, these two examples can be viewed as commentaries on the nature and necessity of religion: in From Dust the Breath is created by the Men to aid them in their quest for survival amidst an incredibly hostile world, and Black & White’s opening sequence shows the god of that game being called into being by the fervent prayers of humans in need. In neither case is the god pre-existing, never claimed to be a creator – they are invented by societies which feel the need for them. The obvious insinuation is that is that people create gods, rather than the other way around, to benefit themselves. From these parallel beginnings the two games part ways and the nature of the human/deity relationship branches.

It also looks like many in the critical community are thinking of relationships the day for Valentine’s. I see Liz Ryerson’s questioning Duke Nukem 3D’s design and her intrigue as an allegory for the post-feminist Marxist’s plight with receiving chocolate on February 14th. Or take Lana Polansky’s experience with belonging and labels as the descent of neo-Derrida horsemen onto the videogame landscape.

8:29 PM February 14th, 2013

Dear internet, I had a wonderful Valentine’s Day! Let me tell you all about it:

At first, I woke up with a sense of panic, much like the vulnerability Jorge Albor speaks to in the tension between horror and co-op modes in games. Even worse, when I arrived to surprise my boyfriend at work with gifts, he wouldn’t answer his phone! But I remembered Keith Stuart working through the nuances of difficulty, and knew I had to be patient to win my prize:

So frustration is not a universal commodity. It’s okay in some games, let’s say, but it’s not necessarily okay in all of them. Indeed, some studios have developed clever ways to sidestep frustration. The Easy mode is the obvious one, and it has become prevalent now that games are a mass entertainment medium. Most narrative adventures will offer an option for players, ‘who just want to experience the story’. However, I can’t help but wonder if this is a dereliction of duty on their part – if you have produced a game with a win state, there should be a way of challenging inexperienced players without spoon-feeding them narrative sequences in between one-hit kills and dozens of lobotomised enemies.

Soon enough, I found him lying in the park where we whispered words only lovers should hear, much like Jason Rice’s memory of Talana from Star Control II and their intimate scene together. If there was ever a clearer metaphor for the last hours of Valentine’s day, is it Sean Sands’s confession on his personal relationship with violence and protecting his daughter’s innocence.

6:01 AM February 15th, 2013

My heart wants to sing like how critics want games to tell stories. Nick Dinicola at good ol’ PopMatters explains storytelling decisions in action games, akin to past lovers who ignore me at Starbucks but are friendly over a cheap bottle of wine:

[Binary Domain’s] Dan is a very plain [person] when you think about it. There’s not much to him beyond the white, rugged male soldier cliché, but because the game encourages us to forge multiple personas for him depending on the group, he comes out in the end feeling like a well rounded, fully realized person. Not an archetype.

Throughout my life, I’ve wanted to be in a game or live as a musical, and now I know that combination isn’t as absurd as it might sound, according to Aaron Matteson. And it seems like things have been getting too personal for some peoples’ tastes, so Andrew comes to task again to interrogate the lack of conversation surrounding the craft of personal writing. He will be a great number one for my eventual rule. So would Sam Machkovech, who’s frankness about the impossible position game critics are in is, like, so meta. To make up for it, Ian Bogost writes three reviews for Proteus, which spoke to my experience of being in a bar with a game critic, performance artist, and a synesthete on an acid trip.

11:59 PM February 16th, 2013

My first wave of subversion is almost complete. All I need left is L. Rhodes’ plunge into the murky waters of narrative and puzzles in games, an obvious analogy to my anxieties of post-feminism and choosing which shoes to wear:

Puzzles, as it happens, are one of the things that distinguishes games from many forms of narrative art. Not that those narrative arts don’t contain puzzles. It is, rather, a difference in kind. Both Agatha Christie and Professor Layton present crime and punishment as a kind of puzzle, but it’s doubtful that a novelization of a game like Antichamber will ever be able to achieve more than an awkward approximation. That’s something to celebrate, if you ask me; in the Venn diagram of games and art, it’s the critically ignored spaces that don’t overlap which interest me most.

12:00 AM February 17th, 2013

This might be over for now, but I will be back again. Send me leads of subversive content through the site’s email submission form or mention a piece to Critical Distance’s Twitter. Make sure to use code words, so Kris doesn’t catch on to my plan.

And check out this month’s Blogs of the Round Table too.

Until next time!

Critical Distance

I am not Kris Ligman. I am Cameron Kunzelman, and because of events both dangerous and deceitful far and wide, I am running This Week In Videogame Blogging this week. I don’t have any notes up top beyond the notes that I just wrote.

Oh, actually, I do: Kris does a great job of organizing posts thematically. I don’t. So–

Mark Rowlands doesn’t write about video games at all, but his “Tennis With Plato” is some amazing writing about games in general and their maybe-intrinsic value to someone who is growing older.

Sarah Wanenchak writes for Cyborgology on the concept of winstates and how the necessity of winstates in games means that they have fundamental limitations as a medium. As she says,

Our actions are naturally constrained by what we perceive as not only appropriate but possible. We can’t do certain things with certain technologically mediated forms of storytelling because there are limits to what users can imagine within the context of those media. What I want to emphasize here is that this is a very real problem for anyone trying to do anything innovative with design; too innovative, too unfamiliar, and the user won’t possess the baseline assumptions, imaginings, and understandings necessary to experience the medium in the way the designer intended.

Keeping with the same theme, this past week saw the formal release of Proteus and a general storm of whinyness about its gameness/notgameness. Mike Jones lets everyone know that it was okay to not like anti-games. Rob Parker lived the game for a little while. Ed Key, one of the developers of Proteus, responded with an exasperated post, generally confused about why we are still having debates about “game.” And Oscar Strik does some etymology and provides some Wittgenstein to round out the debate.

Trigger warning for sexual violence: Mat Jones takes a bullet for us all and does a short oral history of the Reddit game forum and how it feels about Sarkeesian’s Tropes Against Women.

Michelle Ealey writes for The Border House and explains that blaming entertainment for X thing isn’t the way to go about it. At the same time, Simon Parkin writes that the military industrial complex has many tentacles and that manshooter games are intimately linked to the actual gun industry. Mitch Krpata responds to the debate at large by writing that we should actually figure out if video games are harmful and, more importantly, that we should be open to the data that comes from studies.

Enough of that.

David Valjalo works through Thirty Flights of Loving with creator Brendon Chung and gets twenty seven references out of him.

Angela Washko teaches people about feminism in World of Warcraft. Not feminism as embodied in World of Warcraft, but actually inside the game.

Zoe Quinn explains how the guy who made a game about his job ended up getting fired.

Roger Travis continues his series about the “life” of Bioshockand how it operates in the critical and academic assemblages.

Self promotion station: I think that video game writers could learn a lot about their own critical community by looking at early cinema criticism.

Sparky Clarkson wrote a review of Hotline Miami in Twine.

Aaron Gotzon writes about reading Super Mario Bros. as a surrealist, psychoanalytic event that processes the self.

Jill Scharr writes on The Legend of Zelda and how it gave her a sense of wonder as a kid. Brendan Keogh hones that feeling down to a fine edge, tracing the development of his own “gaming grammar” at a similar age.

Maddy Myers writes about why she has always played at violence in games. A teaser:

But what about my guilt over enjoying violent power fantasies, given how judgmental the media and politicians and Americans everywhere have been about violent media lately? What is it that I love about holding an imaginary gun and shooting hundreds of avatars in the face? Am I just acting out some Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy on the daily micro-aggressions that I feel from strangers, and even friends, who talk down to me because I’m a wee little baby-looking girl who must need help, who can’t do anything on her own?

Ian Bogost writes about Hundreds.

And that’s all I have for this week.

In case you missed it, January’s Blogs of the Round Table has wrapped and the results are tremendous. Stay tuned for February’s theme.

And please be sure to submit your recommendations for This Week in Videogame Blogging via our email submissions form or by @ing us on Twitter!

Critical Distance