CHRISZAMANILLO.COM

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

AROUND THE WORLD

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

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

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

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

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

WARFIGHTING

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

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

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

COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT

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

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

DON’T YOU DIE ON ME

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

WOULD YOU KINDLY

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

BUT CAN ART BE GAMES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

88MPH

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

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

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

GO AND MAKE A FREAKING GAME

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

MATURITY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PROJECTS

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

ROBIN KRIS AND HER MERRY BAND

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

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

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

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

Critical Distance

It’s Sunday! Let’s jam with some This Week in Videogame Blogging!

IT’S THE ECONOMY

On Tech Crunch, Tadhg Kelly has an interesting article on the inward-facing practices of “casual” games, and how their approach –focusing on metrics– is actually very familiar to us:

Obsessed with measuring everything and therefore defining all of their problems in numerical terms, social game makers have come to believe that those numbers are all there is, and this is why they cannot permit themselves to invent. Like TV people, they are effectively in search of that one number that will explain fun to them. There must, they reason, be some combination of LTV and ARPU and DAU and so on that captures fun, like hunting for the Higgs boson. It must be out there somewhere.

Independent developer Jake Birkett showed up on Gamasutra’s Expert Blogs this week with this provocatively titled article, in which he datamines the revenue of some of his recent games and draws some conclusions about the state of mobile gaming.

On Tap Repeatedly, AJ Lange asks what the real market pressures are for something like Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII.

Tangentially on the subject of economics, you know that game Monopoly? Of course you do. But do you know about Onopo, a version of the game which asks: what happens when you take Monopoly’s gameplay and strip out all its themes and representationalism?

TALK TO HIM

Gamasutra’s Mike Rose sits down for an interview with Richard Hofmeier, developer of 2011 indie sleeper hit Cart Life.

On Rock, Paper, Shotgun, resident American Nathan Grayson interviews Jake Elliott, Cardboard Computer co-founder and half the driving force behind Kentucky Route Zero.

Also on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, David Valjalo tracks down the musical talents behind 2012 indie game sensations Hotline Miami and FTL.

ANALYSES

On Gamasutra, Jordane Thiboust takes aim at the tall task of nailing down the various subgenres within the Role Playing Game.

On PopMatters Moving Pixels, G. Christopher Williams observes how Assassin’s Creed III protagonist Connor isn’t just flat as a character, he doesn’t even seem to be from this planet:

This assassin is on a years long mission for vengeance (and I realize that that might take up a lot of your time), but for God’s sake, he does have to think about something else once in a while. Again, this seems like what the Homestead missions are intended to do, yet, Connor’s basic inability to grasp any kind of common emotional response or behavior in the sorts of people that might allow us to see that he is more than a slow talking, stoic killer distances him further as a character rather than provides the player with any insight about him or any reason to give a damn about him.

On his personal blog, Tom Jubert draws some parallels between Little Inferno and Plato’s allegory of the Cave. Likewise, Ontological Geek’s Jackson Wagner has a few words about the game on the theme of entropy.

And Leigh Alexander and Quintin Smith turned up on Polygon this week for a good old fashioned letter series, this time on the subject of the hotly-debated Far Cry 3.

MEMORY LANE

At Nintendo World Report, Nate Andrews tells the fascinating tale of three game dev brothers: Tim, Geoff and Mike Follin.

And a new article online at Edge takes us along for the ride on the trail of Japan’s first RPG.

USE AS DIRECTED

This is great: on using Proteus in the classroom.

Elsewhere, Beefjack’s Michael Johnson discusses falling into the subculture of Persistent World Roleplaying through Neverwinter Nights’ DM Client:

Roleplaying is kind of the ugly step-child of acting, something that is routinely mocked and locked in the basement of disdain. From the outsider perspective, it’s seen as a way for people to live out their fantasies – you get to be Conan the Barbarian cleaving heads with a gigantic sword, or Elvina the sexy sorceress, handy with a spell and rocking that skimpy robe.

The thing is, when you spend over 4 hours a day roleplaying the same character in a world filled with other sentient entities, you need to be more than that.

[…]

I spoke with Troy, admin and creator of the Persistent World ‘Legacy: Dark Age of Britain’, and he puts it like this: “My goal as a player is to, as much as possible, play and understand the ‘role’ of the character, and understand what it must be like to live in the world he’s living. How his motivations, morality, fears, faith, etc. are different from my own given the circumstances he’s in and what actions should he take and what goals would he have based on those factors.”

DESIGN MATTERS

On his Radiator blog, Robert Yang asks how we might approach game narrative algorithmically: “We have physics engines or texture libraries, so why don’t we think of narrative as a modular “asset” or “engine” or “library” to be swapped around as well? Why can’t narrative be more “mechanical.” Where’s all the narrative middleware?”

Back on Gamasutra, Keith Burgun encourages his fellow developers to consider alternatives to Achievements: “What’s so bad about achievements? The mother-problem with any “achievement” system can be stated like this: at their best, they do nothing at all. At their worst, they influence player behavior.”

Meanwhile, at Critical Gaming, Richard Terrell has posted the first and second parts of a three-part series containing some well-rounded advice on design space.

MAKE A GAME

This week Gamespot’s Carolyn Petit brought her readers a very nice introduction on the widespread appeal of accessible game design software Twine. Meanwhile, to put words into practice, Ontological Geek’s Bill Coberly has written up a fantastic review of Porpentine’s Twine game howling dogs, itself written in Twine.

SWING LOW SWEET CHARIOT

This week saw the demise of veteran games publisher THQ. Richard Moss takes us through a history of its logos and branding.

GAMES AND ACTIVISM

Here’s an interesting game of political vandalism you can play at your own risk: Camover.

#OBJECTIFY

This week also saw the announcement Objectify a Man in Tech Day, set for February 1st. Event founder Leigh Alexander offers an overview on New Statesman, as well as an FAQ on her personal blog and these helpful tips for keeping the event positive and non-phobic.

Elsewhere, Stephen Beirne lays down in pretty direct language the purpose of the event:

Gendered compliments are of that type of benevolent sexism that generally flies under the social radar. Getting praise is lovely, right? Surely it raises self-esteem and spreads good will to all the boys and girls.

The problem is that benevolent sexism goes hand-in-hand with the more obvious hostile kind (your torsos and your booth babes) and reinforces the subconscious values hidden therein. In essence, it’s the friendly face to those overtly harmful practices and behaviours, making it far more insidious in nature. Unwelcomed and irrelevant compliments on a woman’s appearance can also elicit emotions of self-objectification and shame. By subtly endorsing appearance as a top priority for women, they boost socially ingrained values of superficiality and unrealistic beauty standards.

Like individuals, videogames don’t exist in bubbles isolated away from society. The subconscious values of game makers manifest in industry practices and game design, such as the belief that men will foremost want to protect their female protagonist, or the idea that girlfriends are lovely and all but simply dreadful when it comes to the pew pew. I wonder how many developers have passed on the notion of having a female protagonist on the basis that girls are too dainty for all that running about. The effects of media representation on audiences is something we should always bear in mind.

While the proposed event has drawn criticism from several corners, I would definitely recommend reading the above links before drawing conclusions.

THIS IS AMAZING

You’ve seen that video of Hotline Miami’s ultra violent mask protagonist invading other games, right? No? Better fix that.

IT’S THAT TIME ONCE AGAIN

There are still a few days to squeeze in an entry for January’s Blogs of the Round Table topic!

And as always, we encourage our readers to submit your own recommendations for these roundups via our email contact form or by @ing us on Twitter. Your submissions make all the difference each week, so please keep sending them in!

Critical Distance

If I had to describe Critical Distance with the title of a game, it’d be Infinite Undiscovery. Except I heard that game wasn’t too good. Oh well. Moving on: its’ time once again for This Week in Videogame Blogging, the web’s premier weekly collection of the most interesting games writing, criticism and commentary!

DESIGN

We start at The Border House, where Michelle Ealey writes of the minimalist ambiguity of Kairo. Elsewhere on TBH, Prunescholar takes a look at three games’ fantastical treatment of capitalist greed and exploitation.

Martin of Oh No! Video Games! has some video and textual commentary on The Walking Dead’s representation of totalitarianism. Meanwhile at Push Select, Jeff Wheeldon criticizes what he perceives as a pervasive yet shallow oversaturation of religious and mythical iconography in games.

On Nightmare Mode, language scholar Oscar Strik takes a look at several gestural and symbolic forms of online communication which crop up in several games, including Tale of Tales’ latest, Bientot l’ete.

C-D alum David Carlton writes on his own blog Malvasia Bianca about guitar learning with Rock Band and Rocksmith.

Dyad lead Shawn McGrath showed up on Kotaku this week with some deep meditations on the source code of Doom 3.

On Unwinnable, Brendan Keogh has a few words on how exactly Far Cry 3 fails to discomfort the player:

It is exactly how the game fails to deliver the message that [lead writer Jeffrey] Yohalem thinks he delivers: the game gives me permission to not think about what I am doing. The game gives me a safe space to be comfortable and to just have fun. I don’t need to think about what Jason is doing or how he is evolving. I don’t even need to think about my own survival for the greater part of the game. Mostly, I don’t have to think at all.

Lastly on the topic of design, this isn’t an article really, but have you visited Wikipedia’s entry on games with hidden rules?

BUILDING UP THE GIRL

Back on The Border House, Kaitlin Tremblay writes of the construction of masculinity as machine in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

On The Phoenix, Maddy Myers shares her ambivalence toward the romance of Cortana and Master Chief:

After all, she “picked” him, she’s the smart one, the dominant one who tells him what to do. He may argue, but eventually, he’ll agree that Cortana is right. She’s always right.

But this subversion doesn’t make me feel good about Cortana and Master Chief’s relationship. If anything, it makes me question the logistical reality, let alone the romance, of a human dating a much smarter AI being. Cortana’s smarter than the Chief, and not even just a little bit smarter – she’s way more chock full of knowledge than the most brilliant human being could ever dream to be. In other words, she’s not human. So why would we want her to date a human, let alone this one?

The reason is obvious: because this human is Master Chief, and we are Master Chief. We want Cortana to love us, because we love her. We don’t see his face, ever, because his face is supposed to seem like it could be our face. We aren’t supposed to see Master Chief as an alienating Peter Pan manchild, like I do – we’re supposed to see him as us.

HUNT FOR THE GAY PLANET

This week saw the announcement of an expansion for BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic, which includes a much-promised update to allow players to pursue same-gender romances. However, by setting the content behind a paywall (in addition to some other problems with its execution), the announcement has drawn some ire from various outlets.

On Gameranx, Denis Farr decries SWTOR’s choice to sequester these same-sex relationships to a single location as too like the real discrimination faced by LGBTIQ people:

The first is to wonder if perhaps you’re trying to give everyone a history lesson. By putting these NPC same-gender romances on Makeb, a planet that is part of paid content and available to higher level characters only, you are systemically placing the same romance options others have already experienced and continue to have access to out of easy reach. Pay money for equal rights. Feel what it is like to have to confine yourself to a single area to express love for someone of the same gender, because no other community will have you.

[But] for those of us who’ve lived that history? Perhaps those of us who grew up wanting to learn about who we were and why we were ostracised, and read up on how neighborhoods formed, but bars were raided? Maybe it even mirrors the political fight right now, where queer people who want the expected life that they were promised, including marriage and children, but must fight for the systemic right to do so? It’s a bit too on the nose.

On The Escapist, Robert Rath reasons that BioWare are probably trying their hardest, but that doesn’t make the end product any easier to swallow:

In many ways, it’s understandable why BioWare Austin took this approach. A great deal of things have happened in the year since the game launched, including a massive fall off in subscriptions that forced the game into its free-to-play model. Staff layoffs after the game’s release no doubt compounded the difficulty of this changeover, meaning that Hickman’s claim that the team is swamped seems plausible in context. Moreover, we must remember that BioWare doesn’t own the IP for Star Wars, and I’m guessing that convincing LucasArts/Disney – both of whom are notoriously protective of their brands – to allow gay relationships in their ostensibly family-friendly galaxy was a lengthy process in itself. Given all this, plus BioWare’s history of designing SGRs into both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, I feel comfortable saying that the SWTOR team was making a sincere gesture with the SGR options in Makeb.

Unfortunately, that gesture is too little, too late for a player base that’s rapidly losing its patience. And that loss of patience is understandable when you consider that in the real world, waiting for recognition and settling for poor stopgap measures is practically a way of life for the LGBT community.

PCGamesN’s Steve Hogarty contends that it should not have been an “expansion” to begin with:

Adding gay NPCs to Makeb is a bizarre half-measure then, a jarring stop-gap that only serves as testament to an existing in-game sexual inequality. At worst, it suggests that BioWare don’t understand the concerns of those fans who want to play the game according to their own identities, that they see “SGR” [same gender romance] as additional or surplus to the regular game rather than something that should sit quietly and seamlessly alongside heterosexual dialogue options from the outset. SGR shouldn’t be a feature. It shouldn’t be a dirty fling on a remote planet. It shouldn’t be an acronym. It should just be.

Meanwhile at the International Business Times, Edward Smith posts worriedly that the choice to focus “SGR” at a single in-game location will provide an opening for in-game bullying and other harassment.

One other thing to come out of this whole debacle, however, was this charmingly camp Twine game by anna anthropy: “Hunt for the Gay Planet“.

TORSO WEEK

Warning: Most of this section’s articles feature graphic images.

“Oh, Torso Week,” Experience Points writer Jorge Albor wrote to me over Twitter. “It’s like Shark Week – just as bloody but way less entertaining.”

A matter of days ago, Deep Silver announced a UK and Australia exclusive Dead Island statuette titled “Zombie Bait,” which features a dismembered female torso presented to prospective buyers as a “conversation piece” for one’s desk. Many writers and outlets took issue with the design, especially in light of Dead Island’s troubled history.

On Gameranx, Jenn “Tweets About Torsos” Frank reminds readers that the statuette follows on the heels of a long history of depersonalizing the sexualization of women’s bodies:

Stop right there. Stop in your tracks. No. Wrong. No, we would never do this to a male torso. Maybe some of us would like George Clooney to shut up and be pretty, but that is no mainstream fantasy. The rest of us actually do like him with a head and arms. We expect him to be heroic and masterly in movies, and we pay him for it.

Meanwhile, we define femininity by quiet neediness.

On Culture Ramp, friend of the blog Luke Rhodes looks at a number of ways to look at the statuette’s unveiling, none of them terribly optimistic:

This year, it’s a woman’s torso. Last year, it was Medal of Honor-branded assault rifles. In 2009, it was a contest promoting Dante’s Inferno by offering what sounded suspiciously like a night with two call girls in a limousine.

Those are just the missteps, though—drops, really, in an ocean of swag. Very few triple-A games are released without some sort of branded, collectable promotion. Publishers commission those pieces because they know the game industry is serviced by an enthusiast press that can be relied upon to report on swag.

[…] They make it because swag in general works, and we’re not usually so discerning. The only way to discourage bad swag is to remove the source of temptation by swearing off swag altogether, the good along with the bad.

Game Church’s Richard Clark concurs, arguing that all gamers are in some way culpable for creating and sustaining the culture that fosters something like the Dead Island torso:

We, all of us, are the ones who sustained an industry whose product is made up primarily of different creative ways of killing. We are the ones who told ourselves it was good clean fun, while simultaneously upping the violent ante in every way possible. We are the one who paused Mortal Kombat to look up the fatalities, who try and come up with all the different ways to kill people in Bulletstorm, who praise Call of Duty for the ways it makes killing feel exciting and rewarding. We are the ones who bought, and clamored for, games in which women are sexy nuns that we are then able to systematically eliminated.

It was us – all of us. It was me. We are all, every one of us, totally depraved. None is righteous. No, not one. It’s a system we are invested and take part in.

I’ll give the final word to the matter to the Gameological Society’s John Teti, who suggests the statuette belongs in a museum as a reminder to us all: “You’ve heard of outsider art? This is insider art, crafted by forces deep within the beast.”

SEXISM IN THE INDUSTRY? NAWWWW

On Forbes, Gabrielle Toledano suggests that sexism is not the big issue affecting games- it’s that too few women are entering games development.

On her own blog, Foz Meadows offers up a critique of Toledano’s conclusions:

[What] Toledano fails to comprehend is that gaming, like everything else, is an ecosystem – and right now, at every single level of participation, women are feeling the effects of sexism. Female gamers are sexualised, demeaned and assumed to be fakes by their male counterparts; those who go into STEM fields despite this abuse frequently find themselves stifled by the sexist assumptions of professors and fellow students alike; they must then enter an industry whose creative output is overwhelmingly populated with hypersexualised depictions of women and male-dominant narratives, and where the entrenched popularity of these tropes means their own efforts to counteract the prevailing culture will likely put them at odds with not only their colleagues, but also the business models of the companies and projects for which they work; as the #1reasonwhy discussion showed, many will experience sexism in the workplace – hardly surprising, given the academic correlation between the acceptance of misogyny in humour and culture and real-world tolerance for sexism and rape culture – while others will be excluded from it completely. All this being so, therefore, if a single progressive HR manager at a comparatively progressive company looks around and finds, despite her very best intentions that, there are few or no women to hire for a particular position, then the problem is not with women for failing to take advantage of a single company’s benevolent practices, but with the industry as a whole for failing to create a culture in which women are welcome, and where they might therefore be reasonably expected to abound.

Elsewhere, on Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alex Layne reaches a similar conclusion: by blaming sexism in the industry on a few unsavory elements, it ignores the larger institutions that facilitate it in the first place.

And I can’t but return to anna anthropy for this one, with her very timely illustrated version of Cara Ellison’s and Jenn Frank’s poem Romero’s Wives“. (Trigger warning for images of assault and misogynistic violence.)

CORRELATION AND CAUSATION

Kotaku’s Jason Schreier, reacting to the Obama administration’s recent move to finance a study on gaming’s influence on violence, looks to past studies on the subject and what conclusion(s) they’ve drawn.

On Cracked (is this the first time we’ve featured them here?), Robert Brockway argues that citing studies isn’t going to help our case:

[We] as gamers have only one recourse: We stop denying our role in the larger problem of gun violence altogether. Nobody’s buying it anyway. You can spout studies and statistics all you want, and your debate partner will turn around and see a 10-year-old in his living room mowing down a village full of Arabs with a technically accurate machine gun, proudly rattling off the virtues of its fire rate and reload times. Gamers look ridiculous when we flail about, trying to deny that a fourth grader who understands the benefits of burst fire and knows to hold his breath while sniping is a bit disconcerting. Just like movie-goers look ridiculous if they say James Bond movies portray a pistol as anything other than an excellent solution to the problem of people who are in James Bond’s fucking way. Just like music fans look ridiculous when they insist that all the gang violence glorified in giant, flashy colors in every other rap video has no effect on the children watching them.

Our collective response, as gamers, to the accusation that video games have some connection to real violence should not be: “Nuh uh!”

In a similar vein, Michael “Brainy Gamer” Abbott argues that we need to take responsibility for our public image and be better advocates for games:

[This] isn’t just about kids and parenting. It’s also about civility and stewardship of a society. It’s about fostering a culture that values peace. And it’s about a real and growing concern that a bellicose nation, numb to the consequences of violence, breeds ever more fear, hostility, and hate. These concerns extend far beyond games and guns. But both are implicated, regardless of the rhetoric or data thrown at them.

That’s why we who love games need to talk to anyone willing to listen. We need to tell our stories. The defining qualities of games – beautiful systems that engage us like no other medium – are not self-evident, especially when they’re buried inside iterative formulations of shooters, RPGs and other well-worn genres. […] It’s a moment for us to bring forward our best stories about games – not as a collective “God, I love this game,” or “This game made me cry,” but as careful observers of the deep and vivid experiences games can provide. We must put our faces and reputations behind the games we admire and explain to a skeptical public why violent games like Bioshock, Metro 2033, and The Walking Dead really are about more than plugging baddies with bullets and ray-guns.

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE VIDEOGAMES

On Nightmare Mode, Mattie Brice writes about how many AAA games, for instance Spec Ops: The Line, seem a world away from the kinds of violence she faces every day.

Posting on his home site, indie developer Jonas Kyratzes writes a lengthy critique of his interpretation of Brice’s article, on the value of war narratives in games and a kind of criticism not based in identity politics.

On his Electron Dance, Joel Goodwin also remarks on what he terms “confessional writing,” or journalism and criticism that relates a personal experience of the writer. In doing so, Goodwin shares a certain amount of ambivalence toward the practice and what he perceives as its predominance over games blogging.

Liz Ryerson also responds to Goodwin (and, though not by name, Kyratzes), arguing in defense of games blogging through a personal lens:

i cannot and will not devalue the emotional experiences other people have with videogames, or try to say it’s not genuine or valid to write about them, because that misses the point entirely. it’s increasingly impossible to ignore the culture that games have arisen from, and the sort of stranglehold that culture has on all the discourse that occurs. […] videogames represent spaces and experiences separate from our bodies that we can form our own associations with, free from pressures of social identity, while still participating in an activity deemed “socially acceptable” for those categorized as males. games are rife for emotional projection of whatever kind of role you wish to occupy onto them.

And as a case in point, here Samantha Allen shares her experience using games to help her explore gender identity and transition.

HOW WE GAME

Writing for The Verge, Laura June offers up an excellent long-form feature on the rise and decline of the American arcade.

Elsewhere on VG Revolution, Marc Price speculates on five reasons Valve’s recently announced Steam Box console might fail.

SIGNAL BOOSTING

As like with other gamer-oriented support resources like the Take This Project, we at Critical Distance are proud to signal-boosting what we believe are worthy online support networks for those struggling with depression or harassment. This week, we’re pleased to link to Beyond the Final Boss, a blog for and by game developers on overcoming childhood bullying and abuse.

THE USUAL SUSPECTS

First up and as always, please submit your recommendations for This Week in Videogame Blogging to us via our email submissions form or by @ing us on Twitter. Remember, we welcome and encourage submitting your own work as well as that of others.

Secondly, there is still a bit of time to participate in this month’s Blogs of the Round Table! Get on that, bloggers.

Thirdly, I try to keep personal appeals to a minimum here on Critical Distance but as in previous years where we addressed the Critical Distance readership about sending a member of the critical community to GDC, this year, I have a funding drive of my own. Though we’ve already made the initial goals toward funding the trip, additional money raised from here on goes toward better participation at the conference as well as setting money aside for Critical Distance itself. If you’ve enjoyed our roundups here, consider visiting my GoFundMe page and kicking a few dollars CD’s way. There are cat pictures involved, just FYI.

That’s it for this week! Join us next Sunday where, if we’re lucky, all torsos will remain intact and unharmed. Until then, cheers.

Critical Distance

Hello C-D readers, this is your Captain speaking. I am back in the chair as is right and proper with the universe and we are ready to engage. Let’s get This Week in Videogame Blogging going!

#1Reason

Kim Swift, a developer who should require no introduction, has a new blog up and running with a few inspiring words and reflections on the #1reasonwhy trend:

If you want diversity in gaming subjects:

If you want a more fair, unbiased workplace:

If you want the industry to just plain grow up:

Then we need to change the makeup of our industry, because games are a reflection of their creators.

So I see the solution to this problem coming not a year from now, not five years from now, but twenty. When this current generation of kids sees the good example that we should be setting now. And though we may not be able to tell it completely like it is just yet, there’s still plenty we can do to help future generations of game developers.

Addressing the hashtag phenomenon with a different approach, Emily Gera has this brilliant little text game you should definitely try on: “Congratulations, You Are Now a Kotaku Commenter“.

HERE COMES EVERYONE

Media studies big-fish (and former professor of this humble editor yours) Henry Jenkins handed over blog space this week to USC PhD student Micha Cardenas, on the subject on indie games LIM and dys4ia.

Also in that vein, dys4ia creatrix anna anthropy has finally posted the the full text and slides of her IndieCade panel from this past October, titled “Now We Have Voices: Queering Games.”

Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez calls for an end to the bald space marine default character. Meanwhile, though it’s not specific to games, trellism offers up this salient critique of the tokenism behind the “strong female character.”

Speaking of tokens, Kate Cox turned up on her personal blog again this week reflecting on how board games (namely Monopoly) seem to treat the idea of the avatar, as opposed to videogames:

Everyone seems to understand, instinctively, that it’s okay to have strong feelings about your Monopoly piece. From a young age, we got passionate about the dog, or the car, or the shoe (but never the iron), and that was all right. So why does similar passion about digital avatars create such a hue and cry? If you say you are tired of the slate of straight white men, you are a whiner. You do not understand that “sex sells.” You are a troublemaker. You are a “feminist bitch” and worse.

YES, EVERYONE

Problem Machine lays down the issue of the sorts of physical proficiency that games privilege, to such a degree that they become impenetrable for a great number of prospective users:

Basically, by pseudo-Darwinistic processes, we’ve created a development culture that a) has, as common perspective/capability, above average dexterity, and b) has come to expect that games, almost by definition, will challenge that ability.

[…]

I think it’s important to frame this discourse in terms of diversity, I think it’s important to recognize some of the same understandings that underpin that discussion also apply here. Primarily, I want it to be understood that I’m not claiming that the games that exist are bad, or even necessarily worse than they could be, because of this: I’m just stating that the total scope they encompass, that our understanding of what a game can be, is smaller because of it.

Dylan Holmes, whose first book on games, A Mind Forever Voyaging, is alas still sitting by my desk awaiting review (sorry, Dylan!), relates how he uses Dear Esther to help get some of his fellow academics into games.

Meanwhile, in light of Endgame: Syria’s rejection from the Apple App Store, Jorge Albor criticizes the ability for a small, private, governing body to censor political games.

CLOSE READS

As always some of the week’s best pieces come in the form of taking a magnifying glass to a particular game or franchise. Let’s dig in.

Zach Alexander outlines for us the strata of realities in the Assassin’s Creed series of systems.

On Unwinnable, Joseph Leray takes a retrospective look at Machinarium’s depictions of class and slavery.

Also on the subject of class, Robert Rath proposes that it may be worthwhile to view Dishonored in the context of what ‘honor’ meant to the 18th and 19th century British culture which inspired its setting. Meanwhile, Rob Zacny takes to using Dishonored’s Heart mechanic to guide moral actions in the game.

On the subject of Far Cry 3, Michael Clarkson has a particular beef with its treatment of the “rape revenge” trope. (Clarkson’s article indeed contains its own trigger warning on exactly this subject, so read with care.)

HISTORY!

We catch back up with Robert Rath for another memorable column, this time on how we can tap into historical games not just for their visually interesting settings, but also their zeitgeist.

Elsewhere, Cabel Maxfield Sasser performs a different kind history lesson: a wonderful little time capsule of Easter Eggs in early videogames.

MR. BOGOST GOES TO WASHINGTON (NOT REALLY)

On The Atlantic, Ian Bogost has some coolly-delivered words about US Vice President Joe Biden’s task force on gun violence landing the games industry in a Catch-22:

The truth is, the games industry lost as soon as a meeting was conceived about stopping gun violence with games as a participating voice. It was a trap, and the only possible response to it is to expose it as such. Unfortunately, the result is already done: Once more, public opinion has been infected with the idea that video games have some predominant and necessary relationship to gun violence, rather than being a diverse and robust mass medium that is used for many different purposes, from leisure to exercise to business to education.

Game industry responses to this latest political affront have again worsened matters by accepting the opposition’s terms.

On another tack over on Gamasutra, Jared Lorince suggests that games offer accessible ways to tackle complex problems of probability, which obviously has far-reaching implications of the register Bogost has written about as well.

ACCORDING TO DESIGN

Much has been written in favor of surprise hit Crusader Kings II. Rowan Kaiser shows up on Gamasutra this week with a new feature on its design schema and an interview with its project lead Henrik Fåhraeus.

On the topic of excellent Gamasutra features, Christian Nutt has a great one up as well on Virtue’s Last Reward and its director, Kotaro Uchikoshi.

Touching off on a 2011 piece by Kirk Battle about content degradation, Joseph Leray suggests RPGs’ narratives have a unique staying power because, rather than being completely dissonant from their mechanics, their story universes are meaningfully interwoven with them.

Most of [the Final Fantasy franchise’s] systems are diagetic: the Materia system of Final Fantasy VII occurs in a world in which materia is a real, physical item. Common townspeople have a few pieces of it, and it can be bought and sold in shops. It’s not relegated or written off as a game-y necessity. The game takes its own systems seriously.

Junctioning a Guardian Force in Final Fantasy VIII; summoning a sky-dragon in IX and X; buying a license from a government-approved vendor in XII’s Ivalice — all of these complex, Byzantine systems are pinned into their respective game’s plots, taken as literal parts of their worlds. These mechanics are only possible in the context created by each game’s narrative foundation. The content — the story, the characters, the setpieces — serve as the foundation on which the systems are built.

In other words, the content in, say, most Final Fantasy games doesn’t degrade quickly. Even in the midst of a boss fight, when the game is almost purely mechanical, players are dealing with tiny pieces of the plot and gameworld. When content is inescapable, it remains relevant.

Writing for Digital Spirit Guide, Saul Alexander reminds us that the most seamless systems aren’t always the most memorable. And on Electron Dance, the ever-meditative Joel Goodwin suggests that the author is dead, but context (often) (sometimes) matters.

And over on his Critical Missive blog, Eric Schwarz snaps on a pair of rubber gloves to start rescusitating broken in-game economies.

TAPPING THE FISHBOWL

Returning from an Internet sabbatical where he mostly interacted with people who played, you know, those other games, Michael Abbott broaches a few interesting topics on the state of gaming we seem unwilling to address.

DUDE… WHAT?

I don’t know what Cara Ellison is high on, but despite Stephen Lavelle’s newest game being titled Slave of God, I don’t think it’s Jesus.

Craig Wilson thinks his bold new approach to games criticism is too hot for Critical Distance, does he? We’ll show him! We’re edgy, damn it! We’re cool with the kids! And I did tell him slideshow criticism was a pretty interesting new schtick.

And one last one for you, but it’s a twofer. I’m more into house music so I have no idea what’s going on in here but I bet these two pieces by Gus Mastrapa will be the best XCOM fanfiction you read all week.

THE REGULAR BUSINESS

If you’re craving a bit more, pop on over to Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Sunday Papers for a spot of tea.

That’s all the links that’s fit to print for this week! Join us again next Sunday for more of blogging’s best writing about games. In the meantime, be sure to send us your recommendations by email or by @ing us on Twitter, and drop by this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt as well!

Critical Distance

You’re reading this week’s edition of This Week in Videogame Blogging, which is kind of the whole purpose of Critical Distance. I’ll be taking over curation duties from Kris Ligman this week to bring you another fresh pile of good reads for you to peruse during your commute or from the comfort of wherever it is you like to read profound, and well-written articles about videogames.

Firing off the edition is an article by Jonathan McCalmont on Arcadian Rhythms, who writes about the stylistic differences between the original UFO: Enemy Unknown by Microprose and XCOM: Enemy Unknown from Firaxis.

Next up is an article by John Brindle on Gameranx who probes the sexual politics of the Hitman franchise and its latest execution, Hitman Absolution. The article “reveals the secret sexual urges of the bald penis-head assassin,” said Brindle in his e-mail to us.

Also on Gameranx is Phil Owen, who takes a closer look at the narrative structure and storytelling of Treyarch’s latest foray into the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 2.

Concluding the trio of entries from Gameranx this week is an article by Declan Skews, who tried to get his mother into gaming with Journey.

Communicating the passion, the beauty; the romance of games to non-gamers is a task that can oftentimes seem impossible. How do you explain the draw of sneaking down a corridor, slowly losing your sanity, in Amnesia? What’s so appealing about repeatedly dying and becoming frustrated with Dark Souls? Why bother to learn new and confusing button configurations to play Uncharted, when you could just pop Indiana Jones into the DVD player? How do you explain to someone why it’s fun to massacre wave upon wave of seemingly helpless bad guys?

Elsewhere on the blogosphere, Brett Douville reflects upon his fifteenth anniversary of the day he joined the games industry and made programming his livelihood. It’s an insightful read from one of the minds behind Skyrim and Fallout 3.

Claire Hosking shares her thoughts on Halo 4’s Cortana, who in contrast with other bloggers, believes that it’s unfair to judge the character based on the size of her breasts. She writes about the ‘fun/worthiness’ dichotomy that’s often invoked against women characters with certain body types, as if attractiveness is an indicator of downmarket design.

The ever prolific Maddy Myers writes about harassment in nerd spaces, and how she wants to encourage more people to talk seriously about their experiences in the gaming community and other male-dominated spaces.

On First Person Scholar, Steve Wilcox in his essay titled “Ludic Topology” criticizes the linearity of videogames, in relation to Far Cry 3—a game, which in itself, is an attempt to criticize the very mechanics of linear gameplay.

At the Radiator Design Blog, Robert Yang writes about the queer feminist agenda for games in 2013. He lays out the problems faced by the new progressive movement with some suggestions on how apathy—even from those who face constant persecution—needs to be overcome.

And last but not least is an article by Hamish Todd, who delves deep into a modern classic and praises the brilliance of Half-Life’s barnacles.

The barnacle can do horror, action, and even comedy. It can assist you and puzzle you. To do all that, an object needs to have some pretty fundamental stuff in its design.

That’s it for this week. Remember to send in your submissions via our email contact form or by @ing us on Twitter.

Critical Distance

We’re approaching the end of 2012 and, alas, our intro gimmicks are running thin. Thanks to all our readers for another great year. We’ll be back next week with our year-end roundup, but for now, please join me in ringing in the final This Week in Videogame Blogging of 2012.

DO YOU HEAR WHAT I HEAR

This week sees Culture Ramp wrapping up their excellent four-part series on writing about games for non-gamers.

I SAW THREE SHIPS COME SAILING IN

On Gamasutra, developer Lars Doucet caps us off with a great post-mortem on the design process of Tourette Quest, a game in which the player can “explore what it’s like to have Tourette’s Syndrome through the lens of game mechanics.”

Meanwhile at Polygon, Patrick Stafford takes a peek inside the world of faith-based gaming.

And at VG Revolution, Clayton launches into an essay on the importance of characterization in game narratives, with particular attention paid to characters in the .hack franchise.

S/HE WORE GREENSLEEVES

On Medium Difficulty, Kaitlin Tremblay poses the interesting argument that the first-person perspective can have a way of sidestepping the male gaze.

On the flip side, as part of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Gaming Made Me series, Cara Ellison discusses Tomb Raider and being embodied as Lara Croft:

When I played I was Lara, experiencing everything through her character. My male friends sat there identifying with the camera – with the looking, the controlling, with the interfaces. They were outside her body. I was her body.

Writing in reference to Persona 4’s Naoto for Nightmare Mode, Mattie Brice hones in on how we enforce our gender perceptions on others:

What is Naoto’s identity? It’s possible he doesn’t know yet. And with the absence of genderqueer characters in media, we don’t have a cultural reference point for what to make of him.

There is a concept in postmodernism of a fact versus an event. We see facts as undeniable, objective information that we all can perceive and agree is reality. Events explode the idea of facts into an intersection truths from different perspectives, even if they are, and often so, contradictory. Take the film, Rashomon. Several witnesses to a murder all say different things, and they aren’t lying, just relaying what happened from their own perspective. What has happened to us in life, the philosophies we relate to, change the angle we see information at. When it comes to identity, facts are pretty much useless.

Naoto is an event. To me, he is a product of my experience as a transgender woman exposed to how society treats queer people. I see the anxiety of choosing a label, of having to change my body in order for people to treat me the way I wanted to be treated. Naoto doesn’t actually have a factual identity; he is an apparition of numbers. What we all decide he is, ultimately, isn’t important. Rather, the why’s and how’s reveal our cultural perspective of people who don’t fit into cisgender norms.

In a similar vein, Zoya Street of The Border House responds to recent calls to ‘out’ League of Legends champion Taric as gay, challenging the assumptions taken in assigning Taric’s gender and sexual identity:

[M]aybe Taric is not gay. Maybe he loves women almost as much as he loves gems. Maybe he doesn’t identify as a guy. Maybe he just doesn’t know yet. Maybe he doesn’t need to explain his gender expression in terms that fit your worldview.

Or maybe he is gay, and he doesn’t feel the need to navigate the complex network of social connections between the League and the LGBT community through the rather culturally-specific rite of passage of coming out. Maybe Taric belongs to a culture where coming out isn’t the best option for him or for his family. Perhaps his privacy is very important to maintaining his connection with the community he grew up in. It doesn’t necessarily mean he isn’t doing his bit to break down homophobia in that community, but the challenges might not be navigable by the same means that they are in your culture.

UPDATE: Also recommended is Todd Harper’s response post.

WALKING IN A WHITE MAN’S WONDERLAND

Back at Rock, Paper, Shotgun, John Walker sits down for a rather strange interview with Far Cry 3 writer Jeffrey Yohalem, who calls the game’s narrative a “satire” and claims critics have misunderstood. Writing in response at Gameranx, Holly Green offers up this succinct response: “Sorry Jeffrey Yohalem, We Understand Far Cry 3 Perfectly.”

Ultimately if your intent is to “expose” a trope, then you have to challenge it. Presenting a string of accepted video game status quos with a couple of Alice in Wonderland references isn’t enough. While good satire can–and should–fool at least some of the public (that is in fact the point), it shouldn’t fool everybody. When your audience has no reason to take your material at anything less than face value, a little more effort must be made. If Jason is supposed to be an “unreliable narrator”, then his narration has to actually be challenged.

WHILE SHEPHERDS WATCHED THEIR FLOCKS

(NOTE: Most of this section deals in some way with the events at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14th, as well as with cultures of violence in general.)

Writing in his regular Critical Intel column for The Escapist, Robert Rath performs a close look at three games’ treatment of unmanned military drones.

On Buzzfeed, John Herrman posits that we need to be talking more about violence and games, not less:

[W]hile uninformed anti-game sensationalism may be unproductive, gamers’ reflexive defensiveness is worse. It’s prevented us from having a meaningful conversation about an industry that is emotionally and morally stunted, where per-title revenue can dwarf even the most successful films of all time but which seems immune from discussions of taste and artistic merit. […] young men’s most influential entertainment products, the cultural touchstones they do and will reminisce about in adulthood, are built around the premise of empathizing with a man with a gun in his hand, who kills not in the crudely symmetrical and grim manner of war but gleefully commits mass slaughter.

Writing in his personal blog, developer Shane Liesegang shares his own reflections and addresses his fellow developers in regards to defending the prevalence of violence in games:

As developers, we like to point out the violence in films, TV, books, Shakespeare, the Bible, etc, hoping that deflection will absolve games. But even the most hopeful among us has to acknowledge the stark disparity in Percentage of Time Devoted to Violent Acts among the different kinds of media. Even in a summer action flick, the amount of time spent punching and shooting things is substantially lower than it is in the video game tie-in for that same summer action flick.

Also writing in her own blog, Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander also calls for a little self-reflection:

Any games writing that questions that right to bear virtual arms with joyful impunity is often accused of having some irrelevant political agenda, of ruining the fun, of refusing to accept the all-important fact it’s just a game. Like disassociating ourselves from any intellectual consideration of the content we consume or any emotional response to it is a basic requirement for participation in this community.

I can’t accept that.

The top-grossing games of all time are about marching in a straight line and shooting people. I’ve felt confused and sad about that for a few years now and I feel moreso this week. Our recent Hollywood gold-encrusted televised awards ceremony cheered the boyish joy in “shooting people in the face.” Nobody would say that if the VGAs aired tonight. Because they’d have the good sense to have a fucking think about what that means.

Lastly, writing for The Phoenix, Maddy Myers touches upon Hotline Miami and asks us to question the hyper-masculinization of violence.

As a shooter fan who happens to also be a woman, I often find myself feeling alienated by the masculine-centric narrative on display in all of these games. But that alienation allows me to see this particular form of social brainwashing from an outsider’s angle.

The brainwashing goes deep, here. It happens in real life, not just in these fictions. To what extent have we internalized the narrative? We need not look far to see this view of masculinity in American society – as an unstoppable, uncontrollable force of power and violence. Why do we agree with this supposition in so many of our stories? Why do we accept violence as the “natural” way that men behave?

AND ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE…

This is kind of a down note to end on, but the same could be said for recent events in general. However, the world didn’t end, so there is that, yes?

We hope you enjoy the seasonal tidings of your preference in the week(s) ahead. Keep your ears open for a brand new Critical Distance Confab podcast later in the week, as well as next Sunday when we release 2012’s This Year in Videogame Blogging. As a reminder, it’s not too late to send in your submissions for the Year-End roundup!

And for that matter, time is running out to submit entries to the Games Journalism Prize as well! Winners will be decided in early 2013, and there is a cash prize involved, last we checked. Enticing, no?

Critical Distance

Do you hear that sound? It’s the sound of only three Sundays left to 2012. Let’s start your morning off right with This Week in Videogame Blogging, shall we?

AMERICA, F*CK YEAH

Capping off his recent feature on text-based war games, John Brindle shares a roundup of his extended interviews with high-profile interactive fiction authors including Emily Short, Porpentine and Paolo Pedercini.

On Eurogamer, Wesley Yin-Poole shares a nice long retrospective on what went wrong in trying to bring the Xbox to the Japanese market.

Over on Nightmare Mode, Canadian Reid McCarter and American Jordan Rivas get together to discuss Canadian-produced Assassin’s Creed 3’s take on the American Revolution.

Meanwhile, on his own blog, Jordan Rivas relates how Call of Duty reminds him of a Katy Perry song.

KEEPING GATES

We catch up with John Brindle again back over on Nightmare Mode, where Brindle outlines a pretty compelling critique of gamer elitism:

[Jim Rossignol wrote that] we shouldn’t worry about what non-gamers think of games, because “in this instance,” he wrote, “we are the highly educated elite.”

It’s a good point. It arouses in me the instant desire to defend the fruits of the traditional education I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy (a word I choose advisedly) in both games and ‘real life’. Complexity of the kind impenetrable without years of copious and counter-intuitive study is valuable and beautiful for those who want to dance with it and I will defend it forever and always on those terms. Not everyone, however, gets invited to that party – and others are denigrated simply for not wanting to go.

This article is about how if the comparison of games to education is taken seriously and to its logical extent, it gives context and clarity to some of our loudest critical debates. But it’s also about how that comparison has cultural and political cultural dimensions we can’t avoid, because if gamers are an ‘educated elite’ they also act like one: valuing some kinds of game literacy over others, and restricting the provision of the higher forms.

DESIGN DOCS AND DIAGNOSTICIANS

Programmer Jean-Francois Levesque furnishes us with a wonderfully in-depth look at designing the fire propagation system in Far Cry 2.

Over on IGN, Rick Lane points out some noted shortcomings in games’ depictions of sword fighting, as well as design challenges the medium faces to portray it accurately.

Echoing some of the television studies work of Lynn Spigel, Crikey’s Daniel Golding shores up an interesting analysis of how the Wii’s marketing was in fact intended to render the console “invisible.”

THESE THINGS WE PLAY

Every week a good bulk of the criticism we see is devoted to particular games, from new releases to fond classics. Let’s tuck in.

Journey

On VGRevolution, Marc Price shares an emotional, personal account of grief, atheism, and finding ‘Heaven’ in Journey. Meanwhile, Bit Creature’s Patricia Hernandez provides us with a striking narrative of finding herself largely venturing alone in a game known for its imparted sense of companionship.

Bientôt l’été

This new project from Tale of Tales released mere days ago to positive response from many corners. Chris Bateman offers a substantial review including some worthwhile comment on the game’s imperfections. Moving Pixels’ G. Christopher Williams draws upon its chess game element to discuss the dialogue system.

Meanwhile, over on Video Game Tourism, Rainer Sigl criticizes the developers’ adoption of the term “notgames,” suggesting it rejects such works’ position as avant-garde. The comments below the article are worthwhile as well.

Far Cry 3

Unwinnable’s Stu Hovarth casts Far Cry 3 as a delusional fantasy which uses its problematic tropes consciously. Meanwhile, Gameranx’s Rowan Kaiser poses that the game is about colonization–literally, the white colonization of a tropical island, its resources and native population.

Star Trek Online

On Gamers with Jobs, Alex Martinez finds what’s missing from Star Trek Online: the franchise’s trademark optimism.

Persona 4

Twinfinite’s Matthew Kim approaches how Persona 4’s villain embodies 21st century nihilism.

Max Payne

Andrew Lavigne tracks how the Max Payne series moves from Payne’s self-interest to a sense of social responsibility.

X-COM

Game Shelf’s Jason McIntosh describes how X-COM: Enemy Unknown games the player into constructing a narrative.

Back on Nightmare Mode, Tom Auxier touches on X-COM as well, in particular asking if strategy games and horror are incompatible. In the course of his essay, Auxier brings up some counter-examples, including a board game, which makes this a nice companion piece for our next section…

BOARD GAMES

On Kill Screen, Jason Johnson interviews Ralph Anspach, designer of Anti-Monopoly.

Meanwhile on Peasant Muse, Jeremy Antley wants to know why MoMA overlooked board games in the course of its recent game acquisitions.

MENTAL HEALTH

In this harrowing piece for Kill Screen, Mary Hamilton draws connections between her mental illness and her time spent gaming. (Trigger warning: frank discussion of self-harm behavior.)

#1REASONWHY

Filamena, Meguey and Brie Sheldon get together to share the story of inadvertently starting a movement.

IT’S THE MOST WONDERFUL TIME OF THE YEAR

Michael Abbott skips the conventional Game of the Year countdown list in favor of naming some of his favorite features, hardware, trends and special moments of the past year.

YOU BETTA VOTE!

Remember, remember! Submissions for 2012’s This Year in Videogame Blogging is open from now until midnight of December 28th. Read this post for more details, then head on over to our email submissions page to send in your recommendations for this year’s best in games blogging!

And as always, you can send in your weekly contributions by email or by @ing us on Twitter.

Until next week, stay frosty and/or toasty as your hemisphere and preferences dictate!

Critical Distance

It’s late and my tailbone smarts from sitting in this chair so long. I’d like to get to bed before sunrise at least once this December, so let’s cut the fluff and get to the stuff: it’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

WINTER WRAP-UP, WINTER WRAP-UP

Michael Abbott kicks off what is sure to be a month filled with 2012 retrospectives by suggesting that we’ve arrived at something approaching another watershed year in terms of game design:

This year, the very definition of “game” was thrown into question more often and by more designers than ever before.

If the signature of a vibrant art is artists pushing conventional boundaries, questioning formal assumptions, and producing provocative, wildly divergent work, this was a very good year for the art of games.

Abbott also highlight a selection of games from the year, many of which he feel falls into this category of challenging design conventions.

Awesome Out of 10’s David Chandler is on a similar wavelength, as he looks to the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, and posits that games, too, are at a turning point of being more critical and self-aware.

BUT HOW MANY FEELS PER SECOND DOES IT HAVE?

Over on Medium Difficulty, Dan Solberg muses on the marketing buzzword “authenticity.”

Meanwhile, over on The Guardian, Keith Stuart puts together a worthy reply to last week’s Jonathan Jones piece, and includes interviews with Matt Adams, Richard Lemarchard and Dan Pinchbeck. Here’s a choice bit from the latter:

To be honest, I don’t think ['are games art?' is] actually a very interesting question. I don’t think games need to aspire to being art, like art is an inherently more worthwhile form of cultural expression – people were playing games long before they were making art, so it’s certainly not an older one. A more interesting question is, why is it so important to some people that games are NOT art? Why do they feel so threatened by games being art?

John Maeda, whose work is included in MoMA’s permanent collection, speaks up on Wired in defense of the museum’s decision to include games, and in doing so raises, I think, a fairly interesting argument on how to view the selected games:

Videogames are indeed design: They’re sophisticated virtual machines that echo the mechanical systems inside cars. Would anyone question a Ferrari or Model T or even a VW bug being acquired by MoMA?

Like well-designed cars, well-designed videogames are ways of taking your mind to different places. (Of course, I’m not speaking about the literality of playing driving-specific games like Grand Theft Auto).

I would argue that in some cases, games edge past being design to being art as well. [...] As a genre, videogames take our minds on journeys, and we can control and experience them much more interactively than passively – especially when they are well designed. So the creators of a game haven’t “ceded the responsibility” of their personal visions; rather, they allow a space for users to construct their own personal experiences, or ask questions as art does.

No, this isn’t “overly serious and reverent praise” of games, it’s just what is.

GOOD TIMES WITH HACKING

Robert Louis McIntyre furnishes us with an engrossing video and how-to guide for reprogramming Pokemon Yellow from within, using a few simple machine tricks.

RISE OF THE ZINESTERS

Following on the heels of Porpentine’s Twine how-to from last week, here’s Jay Weston with a feature on Gamasutra on how to get started with code-free game design using Unity and Playmaker.

Meanwhile at Unwinnable, Nels Anderson offers up a sort-of post-mortem on Mark of the Ninja, which doubles as an eloquent reflection on indie development:

Making games, at least good ones, is an almost total act of faith. Faith in yourself, faith in your team, faith in the audience, faith in your collective ability to transform the barely-playable, wholly uninteresting mess you’re currently looking at into something that will engage people. (I don’t think many folks admit it, but during creation basically all games are really shitty for a really long time. It’s just that the good ones get better.) Frankly, it’s pretty fucking terrifying.

I hope this doesn’t sound dour and anxious, because that’s certainly not how I feel. In some ways, having to rely on faith this way is liberating. Knowing that you can’t be sure means you just have to do your damn best and hope.

GO WEST YOUNG MAN

On Videogame Tourism, Rainer Sigl suggests that the tendency toward exploration in games hearkens back to our ancestral roots as wanderers:

Games’ virtual spaces allow us to roam farther than reality does – especially now, that the tools made to free us from fixed office spaces and the need to be physically present also, paradoxically, take away the necessity to leave our screens. There is, after all, a reduction in our daily lives’ radius; we’re living in the age of the “Great Indoors”.

It shouldn’t surprise us that, in exchange, the virtual spaces around us are growing. Games let us decamp and set forth. And they take us to places that are as outlandish as our wildest fantasies: Great underwater cities, showcasing madness and art deco; twisted death zones exhibiting the ruins of once proud civilizations; megalomaniac architectures between Heaven and Hell.

Games give us places, spaces, whole continents to explore and wander. And all of them are here for us to sate our curiosity, to satisfy that ancient human need to see what’s behind that hill, that mountain, that horizon. Why? For no other reason than the one the world’s highest peak was conquered: “Because it’s there.”

In a piece that serves so perfectly as a counter to Sigl’s that I’m not entirely sure it’s coincidental, Steven Poole writes on Edge questioning videogames’ fixation on corridors:

The corridor is inherently authoritarian, seeking to corral unbounded biological movement into unnaturally linear paths. Early man did not grow up in corridors but on wide savannah plains, which is posited by some evolutionary anthropologists as the reason why our field of vision is wider than it is tall. To put a human being in a corridor, then, is to create a tension between our sensory equipment, tuned to one environment, and the artificial new surroundings. It is to say to us, with a sneering challenge: ‘Adapt to this!’

The phenomenon in videogames of what I like to call the ‘jungly corridor’, then, may be taken as a sophisticated joke about man’s struggle to negotiate modernity using his woefully inapt primate heritage. What looks like lush, natural rainforest or tropical island vegetation turns out to be a series of corridors no less soul-destroying than your local council offices.

ALSO PLEASE QUESTION MY USE OF ‘MAN’ IN THE PREVIOUS SUBHEADER

[This section carries a general trigger warning for discussion of sexism, racism, bullying and rape.]

Reacting to the hastily-pulled “Hire Hitman” Facebook app in which users could put out “hits” on their friends, Leigh Alexander writes on Gamasutra criticizing a persistent disconnect between game marketers and developers.

Writing for a more general audience on The Mary Sue, Becky Chambers discusses playing the recent Omega DLC for Mass Effect 3 and relates how while gender “shouldn’t matter,” as long as there are representational inequalities, it does.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker squints disapprovingly at Far Cry 3’s racist tropes and rape subplot:

Because Far Cry 3, well, it’s a bit racist, isn’t it?

I said, rather flippantly, that the people of this island are the race they are, because it’s the island they’re native to. It is what it is, essentially. And that’s the case – that’s really not the issue here. It had to be set somewhere. The issue is the horribly worn tropes it so lazily kicks around when it gets there. As it is, you have the simple-folk-natives, and the immigrant white men with their mixture of South African and Australian accents. And one black guy. White people ask you to get involved in enormously elaborate machinations, ancient mysteries, and local politics. Locals ask you to help them kill endangered species, find their missing daughters, and point out when their husbands are gay. Essentially, the locals behave as if they’re helpless without you, but when you wield their tattoo-based magical powers then true greatness appears. And it’s here that the problems really kick in.

There’s a term for it. It’s “Noble Savage“. And it also falls under the remit of the “Magical Negro“. The trope is that the non-white character possesses mystical insight, magical abilities, or simply a wisdom derived from such a ‘simple life’, that can enlighten the white man. And it’s pretty icky. The premise relies on the belief that the individual’s race is in some way debilitating, something their noble/mystical abilities are able to ‘overcome’.

The further you get, the more revered your character becomes. The antagonists call you Snow White, a derisory name but one that pretty much points out that you’re the pure white American man in this land of colourful folks. And the locals begin to hear word of not only your helpful ways (which would seem fair – you’re being very helpful) but also your abilities with their customs, your wielding of their powers. You are the outsider who has come in and outdone them, shown them the true majesty of their savage abilities. They can’t fight against the pirates for themselves, but you can save them.

[…]

And then there’s the rapey bit. (Oddly, this paragraph is also a spoiler.) General rule: unless your game is about rape, or willing to truly deal with the subject, maybe steer clear of rape. It’s way too big of a subject to nonchalantly include, and it’s pretty abhorrent to use it as a mere plot beat. […] in the end, the reveal of Jason’s victimisation is flippant, and the ludicrous mystic-trippy scene in which you QTE kill Buck is just plain offensive in the context.

Touching off this, Kotaku’s Patricia Hernandez features a good roundup of discussion about the game and what motivates people not to pick up certain games.

On Bitch Magazine, Katherine Cross, aka The Border House’s Quinnae, highlights the real problem of the “it’s just a game” or “it’s the Internet” defense:

That phrase is the machine to which oppressive power dynamics are the ghost. How many times have you heard someone say “It’s the Internet; you shouldn’t take that seriously”? This kind of thinking supports the idea you can do anything you want with no consequences, when in all actuality, virtual actions like sexual harassment, stalking, abuse, prejudice in all of its forms—racism, sexism, transphobia, or all of the above—do have consequences.

[…]

The real issue is a lack of accountability, fostered by the idea that what happens online does not have “real world” consequences. Whether people write their hate using a pseudonym or with a real name and picture attached, they’re culturally supported in doing so because “it’s just a game.” But one’s avatar or screen name can be a vehicle of accountability as surely as any other. When you level in an online game and garland yourself with the rewards of dungeon-delving, raiding, or player-vs.-player combat, you develop a personality and reputation that you cannot easily shed. Even if no one ever knows your legal name or face, accountability and responsibility can still accrue to that avatar. Such a person becomes unaccountable not because of anonymity, but because too many gamers throw their hands up and say “This is the Internet, what can you do?” It’s similar to “boys will be boys” in its handwashing of responsibility.

PRESS A FOR MEANINGFUL INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIP

On Nightmare Mode, Kim Moss points out the ways relationships are modeled in games are not just flat, they can be downright sociopathic:

In any Bioware game, kindness is a currency. You make regular payments to earn affection points. You pay by listening to someone talk about their problems and giving them cheap gifts. Put in enough coins and sex falls out.

After that, the relationship is over. Sex was your end goal, the reason for everything you did. There was no reason to stick around after you got it. That was what you were paying for.

It doesn’t matter if you find Morrigan’s Ayn Rand inspired morality to be utterly repulsive. Just sit there, nod your head, and she’ll fall for you. It doesn’t matter that your Shepard is a paragon of virtue and integrity. If you play at being anything but when Jack’s paying attention, she’ll love you someday. In these games, telling women what they want to hear and listening to their problems is all it takes to get laid.

Of course, that’s not how the real world works. A Nice Guy will tell you this is unfair; that they paid for a service they did not receive. A human being knows better.

SHOOTY McMANSHOOTER

John Brindle appeared as a guest on Helen Lewis’s column on New Statesman this week writing about how textual games, especially interactive fiction, disrupt the “glamor” of war. In it, Brindle covers the work of several IF writers; he’s also posted a valuable coda on his own blog containing a more extended interview with one of these writers (and a name who’s been getting quite a bit of well-deserved traction of late), Porpentine.

Bit Creature contributor Alexandra Geraets writes in her own blog in an effort to hone in on what it is exactly that games do to their players:

Spec Ops didn’t do anything to me. It’s a game. I’ve never believed that video games make people violent, nor do I think that shooters ‘train’ people to kill.

It made me pay attention a little more, yes, and it gave Jace and me plenty of late-night conversation, where we realized that we were both seeing a commentary on the nature of military-themed games, shooters, and on the nature of good and evil, especially on how good men can move from sense and reason to madness and destruction simply because they believe they are in the right. If you believe you’re right, you can convince yourself of anything.

Captain Walker is one of my favorite video game characters. I don’t like him, but he’s found a special place in my gamer’s heart of characters whom I’ll never forget.

Games as a whole have shaped me as a writer – certainly my fiction feels different than it did when I was in college, just starting out as a gamer – and when I see games exploring real world themes – war, history, action and inaction – I pay closer attention.

Has any one game ever done anything to me?

GENTLEMEN, PLEASE! NO LITERARY THEORY IN THE WAR ROOM!

Geraets’s fellow Bit Creaturer Drew Dixon draws a spiritual conclusion from the illusion of choice in The Walking Dead.

On Unwinnable, Jill Scharr gets elbows-deep into the narrative structure of Final Fantasy X.

Over on Ontological Geek, Hannah DuVoix explores the existentialism of Fallout.

On Gameranx, Brendan Keogh has been plumbing the depths of Binary Domain for a while, but his recent discovery that he can use the voice recognition system to disrupt combat is fascinating.

Nightmare Mode’s Matthew Schanuel discusses locating gaming’s negative space, particularly within Dark Souls.

And at Bomb the Stacks, musician Daniel Korn takes a vinyl lens to Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP in order to get at the heart of its magic.

Meanwhile at Spin, Alex Eaton cuts together a sick video history of game samples in rap.

DELICIOUS DATA

On Youtube, Shaun Inman presents us with a seriously interesting, seriously close look at the camera behaviors in Super Mario World. Don’t be put off by Inman’s voice work–as the video continues, you’ll get a clear impression of just how much he knows his stuff.

The singular Jesper Juul satisfies this week’s statporn quota with these incredible graphs charting the rise and decline of both platforms and genres over the decades.

STARHARDER

Writing for Unwinnable, Jordan Mammo takes us on a peek inside South Korea’s tireless affection for StarCraft.

HEROINE’S QUEST

On Digital Spirit Guide, Katherine Owen shares an autobiographical tale of using games to cope with a chronic injury.

BUT WAIT THERE’S MORE

Helen Lewis’s recent New Statesman piece asking “Why Are We Still So Bad at Talking About Video Games?” sparked a flurry of response pieces, well, pointing readers to where all the good games criticism is. To that end she’s graciously handed over the reins of her column to these writers.

The tireless Brendan Keogh an excellent roundup of go-to sites for good criticism (we’re proud to say, including this one) and a lot of this year’s stand-out articles.

Following up, Liz Ryerson presents a critical reader including many from blogs off the beaten path.

SIGNAL BOOSTING

So help me, if JS Joust doesn’t reach its Kickstarter funding target in the next 32 hours I’m calling shenanigans on the entire Internet.

HOUSEKEEPING

For those who missed it, Alan Williamson has (mostly) settled into his new place and thus has gotten around to posting November’s Blogs of the Round Table Round-up. BoRT will return in January.

As always, we depend heavily on readers’ contributions to point us toward the latest and greatest games blogging from around the web. If you have a piece that you’d like to see on This Week in Videogame Blogging, please be sure to send it in to us via @-replies on Twitter or our email submissions form.

That’s all for this week! Till next round-up, stay frosty or toasty as your hemisphere dictates, and keep an eye out for our annual This Year in Videogame Criticism call for submissions post coming later in the month!

Critical Distance

I am Cameron Kunzelman. I don’t have any gimmick. I just have links to things that were written this week. Let me tell you, as an occasional person who does this, that curating this is a special kind of hell.  Imagine a infinite row of tabs scrolling into a human eyeball forever. It is a little bit like that.

This is This Week in Videogame Blogging. Here are the links. There isn’t a real order to them–no beautiful cataloging like Kris would do. But you will deal with that just fine.

Rob Zacny writes about the implosion of Homefront developers Kaos Studios over at Polygon. It gets deep in the nitty-gritty; names are named. Go check it out. For the reverse story, read Dean Dodrill’s narrative of how he created Dust: An Elysian Tale out of nothing but blood, bone, and bits.

A key theme of the week, based on this distinction that I just made up, is violence. Rachel Helps, writing at Nightmare Mode, explains “How Mormons Get Away With Murder In Videogames“. She writes:

The fantasy aspect of a game is necessary to distance ourselves from videogame violence, and by extension, intending to apply it to real life. It’s the reason why most parents are perfectly comfortable with their children slaughtering innocent goombas, but get nervous about them playing Uncharted. If videogame worlds are completely unlike the real world, it’s harder to transfer the virtually practiced actions of killing (unconsciously or otherwise) to real life. In real life you can’t jump high enough to jump on top of your enemies like Mario does. But you can carry around a gun and shoot someone in the head like in Uncharted.

Speaking of Uncharted, Greg Weaver writes about the theme of that game and how it is totally rad. I will admit to both having no idea what music is and to also thinking the article is awesome.

Daniel Golding writes about watching Robin Hunicke play Journey. The piece will turn you into a giant weepy baby.

Hunicke eventually put down her controller. had reached its climax, and she would not go beyond the early scenes of snow. It was too personal to continue, she said. Though it would have been thrilling to see her play through perhaps the most moving section of Journey, she was right. Some things need to be experienced alone—or with only an anonymous internet user who could be hundreds of kilometres away.

Jamin Warren thinks games are too long, Yannick LeJacq thinks gamification and freemium politics has exploded outward,  and Stephen Beirne thinks long and hard about determinism.

Alice Kojiro writes about content in games. (I want to interject here and just say that Alice writes some of the most content-full posts about games on the internet.)

Speaking of appropriate levels of content, there’s a rising trend that really bothers me about most newer RPGs: postgame content. Such a thing shouldn’t really exist; postgame is going online and telling your friends, fans, and whomever else wants to listen about the game you’ve just finished. Or otherwise, telling your real life friends, if you’re one of those people with non-digital friends; filthy socialites. When you finish a game, it should be finished, but many developers are insisting upon putting a little something extra for which you must return to the game to experience, often taking place in a continuity shattering place in the timeline before the battle with the final boss that you’ve already killed.

Andrew Vanden Bossche brings us an all new, all better scoring system.

The rest of the links that I have to show you are based around three recent games: Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation, Dishonored, and Hotline Miami.

Two links about Liberation: Daniel Kaszor interviews Jill Murray, the writer of the game, about, well, the story of the game. Evan Narcisse points out that, surprisingly, a game about a black woman in America actually contains a little information about what it would have been like to be a black person at the time.

More and more Dishonored posts pop up every week. Rowan Kaiser points out how the game uses its steampunk aesthetic as shorthand of class criticism. Justin Keverne explains that Dishonored is all about how poorly you treat those you choose to treat poorly. Cameron Kunzelman, in a moment where he chooses to promote his own writing, puzzles out the ethics of the world of Dishonored and finds them painfully and artfully sad. Oh, and Scott Juster thinks that river krusts are creepy.

One second. Let us check ourselves lest we wreck ourselves. Joe Martin wants us to pause of a minute and realize that Dishonored is a lot like Thief. XCOM is back, too, and we’re all drooling and the thought of a new Sim City. Are we…back in the 1990s?

For years now, I’ve felt the games industry was stuck in a cynical and boring rut. It seemed like there was an endless cycle of games which were moving us in the wrong direction, that were getting bigger instead of better. Modern Warfares rolled by like they were coming off a production line and, it turns out, they kind of were. Publishers were getting us excited over all the wrong things – release platforms and the amount of playtime and polygons and 3D. The sort of stuff that’s good to know, but which isn’t why games actually matter.

Do you want to know the reason that Call of Duty hasn’t had a new idea in five years? It’s because it hasn’t needed one.

Oh well! Lets just power through it and get all the way back to the sweet, sweet 1980s (I’m told the 1980s air was much more fresh!).

Hotline Miami has made a lot of people excited since it was released. Kyle Carpenter makes the comparison with Drive and with at-home dentistry. Rami Ismali does some amazing work to try and get at why Hotline Miami is so important, finally coming to the conclusion that

The trick that Hotline Miami employs perfectly is offering no time for thought during its violent gameplay and then offering abundant need for reflection through pause and uncertainty of narrative. All of that was not achieved by telling me to feel this way, nor by voice-over or dialogue – it was that unique combination of interactivity, visuals, audio, dialogue and atmosphere that only games can offer.

Hotline Miami took a daring step forward into an uncharted territory in which ego, player, avatar, autonomy, trust, action, responsibility, justice, morality, games and gaming all hold relevance, but never are quite clearly defined, never quite take shape and often overlap, exclude eachother or challenge eachother in impossible ways.

That is all I have for you this week. Please remember to send in your link suggestions by Twitter or email. And be sure to check out Alan Williamson’s roundup for October’s Blogs of the Round Table.

Critical Distance

A little later than we expected, but here we are! Thank you for your patience while the French-Canadian down in Engineering sorted out the dilithium crystals or whatever it is that keeps the U.S.S. Critical Distance running. We’re ready to go, so full speed ahead, Mr. Sulu. Engage!

ALL THE PRETTY DEAD HORSES

Let’s get this one out of the way right at the start. Jonathan Jones catches word that more games are being inducted into New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and takes umbrage at the idea of games being featured alongside traditional art. Sophie Houlden, tired of the “are games art?” debate, reverses the question in this terribly on-point riposte:

Having situated the art on a wall in the living room, I asked Emily if there was a special way to look at it to make the art work. “No, you just look at it.” she explained, clearly as frustrated with the experience as I, “Like a TV?” I asked. The look on Emily’s face then became that look you get when you’re at risk of losing a friend, so I quickly said “Oh never-mind, I think I’ve got it figured out.” and stared at the lifeless picture, pretending it gave me a similar sense of emotion I got from actually exploring the beautiful landscapes that developers craft for their games.

After Emily left I checked on the internet and it turns out she was right, you really do just look at it, that’s all!

Where was the engagement-building interaction of games? Where was the sense of teamwork and community you get from multiplayer games? Where was the emotional investment you can only get from stories and characters that actually involve you, a real person?

BIG CHEESES

Saul Alexander has a great interview with Obsidian’s Chris Avellone up at Gamasutra.

Meanwhile, at Flash of Steel, Troy Goodfellow suggests that Molyneux is out of touch with developments in his own field of expertise.

In the wake of the Rab Florence Affair (or Doritos-gate, if you prefer), Florence has ventured to tumblr to pursue a less regulated platform for his strongly-worded criticisms. On the chopping block this week: Kickstarter, or rather the industry veterans who are increasingly turning to it to fund their games.

[T]hese capitalist animals, Molyneux and Braben to name but two, are transforming Kickstarter into a shopping website for products that don’t yet exist. They package their products with ridiculous “bonuses” that the gaming audience are paying small fortunes to secure. This is the same game audience that, just a few years ago, was laughing Bethesda out of the room for charging a small amount of cash for horse armour. And we at least knew something about that game.

DID SOMEONE MENTION KICKSTARTER

Also on the subject of the crowdfunding platform, Cliff Harris likewise has some criticisms for the “fixed dreams” it sells the comfortably well-off: “Kickstarter is the absolute poster-child for inequality amongst gamers, based on income.”

MEANWHILE IN LOS ANGELES

Here’s a nice article, courtesy of Kill Screen, profiling the upcoming LA Game Space, games’ “first high-profile residency program.” Predictably, it too has a Kickstarter. (Although arguably, this project better fulfills the intentions of the service as a charity platform than many of the greenlit projects that have gained notoriety in the past.)

IT’S VIDEOGAMES, KIDS

Critical Distance contributor Cameron Kunzelman returns to his own blog to advocate for a more inward-facing style of game criticism:

Instead of writing about the internal human process of playing a game like Dishonored, Game Centered Criticism takes the game as its own self-supporting entity. Dishonored‘s diegesis and mechanics do not exist wholly for the player–rather, Dunwall exists for itself, and its own history, just as much as it exists for me to “read” it or interact with it. It has a life of its own. It has a complex universe and being that rewards careful attention.

Obviously, isn’t a conservative appeal for Old Games Journalism, whatever that was. This also isn’t a denigration of New Games Journalism on the whole. More than anything, I’m just kind of tired of games only having worth because they were transformative for a human subject. We need a critical toolbox that allows us to talk about the digital and material qualities of games-in-themselves, not just as extensions of human minds into ludic spaces where we get to vacation sometimes.

Kotaku’s Tina Amini proposes that sometimes the most fun you can have with a game is exploring its glitches. In a similar vein, check out this humorous video by Nick LaLone which explores the same idea, of glitches as “disruption.”

Rachel Helps of Nightmare Mode reminds us that humans don’t just eat food–we have complex cultures of preparation and consumption, and games serve as a unique venue to explore that.

On Gamasutra, Nick Halme argues for a more sophisticated understanding of “difficulty.”

Michael Brough makes the unconventional suggestion that games are too mature:

The days of the arcade, where every second game was new and strange and different, are long past. (The rest were clones, but never mind those.) That cacophony of ideas has been replaced by fixed genres, mostly the fully consolidated FPSRPG – a powerfully mature setting for a certain kind of interaction and storytelling, but a very limited thing to be the main thrust of our medium.

Meanwhile, back at Nightmare Mode, Bill Coberly writes at length about how gun games miss the haptic reality of guns as physical devices, creating an abstraction which doesn’t “respect” their lethality:

Most modern military shooter-games heavily market the authenticity of their weapons and equipment. Medal of Honor: Warfighter has an entire section on its marketing website dedicated only to descriptions and photographs of the various real-life weapons modeled in the game. The implication is clear: the marketers behind these games want you to think that this is how real warfare works, and that these are the tools used by real warriors.

The idea that these are real weapons that mimic real life is contradicted by the unembodiedness of firearms in the game. Gun usage in the modern military shooter does not foster the necessary respect for firearms. By using the same grammar as more obviously preposterous games such as Borderlands, these games teach that firearms are neat toys, magic wands to be used to “solve problems” and neutralize targets. Behind their cosmetic differences, smart-talking laser guns in Borderlands 2 and AK-47s in Call of Duty: Black Ops behave exactly the same.

This lack of respect seems to foster dissonance in both discussions of military action and civilian gun ownership. Even ignoring all the other ways the modern military shooter has little in common with real war, by ignoring the physicality of the soldier holding the gun and fostering a lack of respect for that particular gun, these games gloss over the fact that real war is fought by human beings against other human beings. […] It’s a deeply physical and embodied experience, and decisions around if, when and where we should send American soldiers to shoot people need to be made with this in mind.

On a similar note, Scott Juster of Moving Pixels writes of Call of Duty’s troubled relationship with reality.

ONE (OR TWO) FOR THE HISTORY BOOKS

Buzzfeed contributor Chris Stokel-Walker gives us a lengthy but rewarding history of Pong.

On Eurogamer, Simon Parkin furnishes us with a vibrant tale of the Grand Theft Auto player who “spilled” Hot Coffee.

LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS

It wouldn’t be TWIVGB without a few in-depth critiques of specific games. Let’s get to it.

X-COM

Josh Bycer wraps up his analysis of X-COM: Enemy Unknown’s strategic and tactical layers.

ASSASSIN’S CREED 3

Joe Flood, a Native living on the Pine Ridge reservation of South Dakota, engages with gaming’s first high-profile Native American protagonist.

THE WALKING DEAD

Michael Clarkson digs deep with The Walking Dead’s take on the Hobbesian “state of nature.” Also worth reading is Clarkson’s close critique of the series’s second chapter, Starved for Help.

BORDERLANDS 2

Lana Polansky experiences an unexpected paratextual gutpunch while going through the game’s campaign missions.

REVIEWING IS HARMLESS

Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line released last week to generally enthusiastic response. Now Keogh brings us a roundup of some early and very worthy reviews of his book, acknowledging what his critique does and doesn’t accomplish.

LIVE, EAT, GAME

At Unwinnable, Jenn Frank pens this emotional introspection on her work in games, the death of her mother, hanging on and letting go. Also worth reading is this very valuable B-side.

Daniel Starkey pays tribute to his own ailing mother in this Gameranx feature about dealing with his mother’s failing health through the Commander Shepard he modeled on her.

And over on Kotaku, guest contributor Phil Owen offers up this strong self-examination of his suicidal depression, unemployment, and how his gaming habits may have helped or fed into that depression.

#1REASONWHY

(This section carries a general trigger warning for descriptions of sexual harassment and verbal assault.)

One of the sweeping stories of the past week has been the #1ReasonWhy hashtag, in which women game developers, journalists and players from around the globe share personal experiences of harassment, isolation and invalidation within the game industry and gaming culture at large.

Alex Raymond starts us off with an overview of the hashtag mini-movement as well as choice tweets and links.

Critical Distance contributor Katie Williams takes to her personal blog to outline her own myriad reasons, noting finally: “Because I’m scared to post this on Twitter.”

Rhea Monique adds her own voice as a critic and a hardcore player. The women of Not Your Mama’s Gamer weigh in as well.

Tami “Cuppycake” Baribeau relates a harrowing first-person experience with industry sexism and gender inequality.

Gamespot editors Laura Parker and Carolyn Petit share a discussion on the importance of addressing sexism in the games industry.

On Gamers With Jobs, Colleen Hannon provides a good dismantling of some of the common derails and criticisms written in response to the hashtag. (Skeptical readers are encouraged to read this thoroughly before deciding to leave their own comments.)

Johnny Kilhefner storifies a virtually inexhaustible roundup of #1reasonwhy tweets from all sources.

Writing for the Guardian, Mary Hamilton shares a good treatment of the hashtag as well as the need for proactive responses to inequality. To this end we’ve seen quite a few answers: Rhianna Pratchett initiated the #1ReasonToBe hashtag, and almost immediately in its wake emerged #1ReasonMentors, designed to create a support network for women developers. Elsewhere, IndieCade speaker and LA-area developer Akira Thompson has set up Be the Solution, a new tumblr intended as “a proactive response to #1reasonwhy.”

MARATHON FOR EQUALITY

Many articles this week tackled discrimination in the industry and gamer culture at large beyond the scope of the #1Reason hashtags.

On Polygon, Tracey Lien profiles Iron Ribbon, a grassroots effort to end discriminatory trashtalk and other behavior in gaming.

Edge observes that the representation of women in the industry is at its lowest point in a decade and asks several devs and advocates how the trend might be reversed.

Emily Short provides us with an excellent roundup of women game developers both AAA and indie.

Merritt Kopas discusses using games to educate on systemic social inequality and injustice:

Because [anna anthropy's] dys4ia requires active participation by the player, it draws them into the logic of a system bigger than the individual. It gives non-trans players a tiny glimpse of the frustrations of living in a society that tells you over and over that you do not exist, and that, when it on occasion deigns to admit that you do, then drops obstacle after obstacle in the path of your desires and goals. Here, one student said that the game helped them to better understand the process of transition and all of the institutional and societal barriers involved. Another told me that the game helped them to better understand the idea of ideology as a force bigger than the individual, something that can structure one’s options and choices in life without one’s knowledge or consent.

Much has been made of tactics to remove the barrier for entry into game development. Writing for Nightmare Mode, the mononymous Porpentine provides us with a brief history, and stirring manifesto for the creation, of interactive fiction including a good Twine how-to. In conjunction with this, here’s a recommended interview with Porpentine about her Twine work Howling Dogs, conducted by IF luminary Emily Short.

Lastly, from the desk of Cara Ellison, have a poem:

Had to be screamed from the studies of businesswomen
Had to be hissed under breaths in bars in San Francisco in March
Had to be ummed by women games designers
Had to be thought in elevators at conferences
Had to be leant over a keyboard at 3am with Merlot eyes half shut
Had to be seen in absence
Had to be seen in the lack of trying
Had to be seen in statistics of applications
Had to be segregated in schools
Had to be guided away from sciences
Had to be a self-taught programmer
Our apathy and the games industry are in cahoots

*drum tap*

HOUSEKEEPING

That’s all for this week, but as always we look forward to your submissions which you can send to us via Twitter or email.

Please note that the tireless Alan Williamson is in the process of moving house so the December Blogs of the Round Table should be a bit delayed. Take advantage of this opportunity to sneak something in for November’s “origins” theme!

Critical Distance