Whoa, but that’s a lot of words! Our Critical Distance update is full of good stuff today, people, so let’s get right into it.

Firstly, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers discusses what she dubs the ‘Hey Sweetheart Scenario‘, using Dragon Age as an example of a game whose NPCs treat a female player character as something to be taken aback by. Says Chambers,

If you, as a game writer, are tasked with creating a story in which the player feels like a bonafide hero, then what purpose does it serve to point out that my heroine is going to have to work twice as hard to be taken seriously, purely because of her gender? That’s a feeling I already have in the real world, and it’s not one that I want to experience within a game. If you’ve actually got something to say about gender norms within the narrative of a game, then say it. Tacking it on just because it’s what you’re used to takes away from the integrity of the story and kicks female players right back to an uncomfortable reality.

In contrast to this, Ben Chapman at the Pixels or Death blog has some fascinating insight into gender in the world of Mass Effect in his piece ‘Dispatches From the Villain, Fem Shep‘. While he admits that he plays his male Shepard as a hero and his female Shepard as a borderline sociopath, he is amazed that his own “accidental misogyny” is not supported by the game world: “… scarcely anyone calls my Fem Shep ‘a bitch’. There are virtually no derogatory remarks belittling my capability to fight on account of my virtual boobs. No one makes a sarcastic remark about “my gender” and driving ability when I accidentally ramp the M35 Mako upside down into a crater.”

At Nightmare Mode, Mattie Brice frankly shares her experience of growing into a transgender identity through the lens of Katawa Shoujo’s Hanako. Brice says, “I saw her do something that triggered a muscle memory from my past: She covers her face.”

Paul Tassi, contributing to Forbes, has some things to say about piracy and the entertainment industry in his article ‘Lies, Damned Lies and Piracy‘:

I would argue that releasing crappy movies has a far greater effect on the film industry bottom line than piracy ever could. Similar things happen when a hyped TV show bombs or an anticipated game is a letdown. Companies don’t rise and fall due to piracy, but they do based on the quality of the products they release.

The point I’m trying to make is that piracy is not this mammoth specter killing the entire entertainment industry like they would have you believe. I am not saying that there has never been a dollar or job lost because of it, nor am I encouraging the illegal practice in the least, but the natural ebbs and flows of the industry with big hits and misses are far more significant than miniscule piracy loses among a specific, young, tech-savvy group who knows how to get their media for free.

Over at VG 24/7, Patrick Garratt tours Finland, with some excellent and quality reporting on what he learns of the Finnish development scene.

The Border House has picked up an intelligent analysis of ‘Analogue: A Hate Story’ by our own lead curator Kris Ligman, in which she touches upon topics such as games-as-fun, its modelling on Korean history, and its relation to the Star Trek series.

Additionally, Critical Distance contributor Eric Swain is at it again with an examination of Driver: San Francisco, this time looking at it alongside the movie Drive. Most memorable is his comparison of how the two works are firmly anchored in the act of driving:

Ryan Gosling’s character is solely defined as a person by his most potent ability: driving. He has no name, no past, and all the human contact that he has is filtered through driving. The dates that he goes out on? They’re night drives. The business ventures that serve as his main means of human contact? They are his job at a garage and stock car racing. He meets his “love interest” by helping her with her car. In an action video game, the protagonist is solely defined by the verb that the player uses to interact with the game. In the case of Driver: San Francisco and John Tanner, that verb is “drive.”

At Kotaku, Kate Cox looks at the David Jaffe’s blundering self-promotion of his newest game, Twisted Metal, asking us: ‘Does David Jaffe Really Recommend His New Game As A Sexual Aid?‘ Says Cox,

The part that Jaffe seems to misunderstand is that someone doesn’t need to be waxing a handlebar moustache and tying young ladies to railroad tracks to make a sexist or misogynist statement. Most trouble doesn’t actually come from villains and it doesn’t come from people who actively stand around shouting, “I hate women.” It comes from thoughtlessness.

By framing his statement as “let her win and she’ll give you a blowjob,” Jaffe’s said a few things he may or may not have meant to. The first is that only straight men could possibly develop an independent interest in playing his game. The second is that the best way for a man to get what he wants is to come up with some underhanded trickery to apply. The last is that a girl or woman couldn’t actually win a co-op match on her own.

Patricia Hernandez also made a splash at Kotaku this week with an epic-length piece called ‘The Rules of Religion, And Why The Next One Might Just Be A Game‘. She looks at a handful of games as well as the possible gamification of religion, but most striking to me, personally, was her retelling of his own family’s attitudes towards religion, as well as the sweetly self-aware acknowledgement of her Kotaku debut. It’s a long piece, but fully worth it when you reach the final few paragraphs.

Over at Gameranx, Brendan Keogh doesn’t believe that Skyrim is cold:

I was told that Skyrim was a harsh, desolate region, whose terrifying weather chiseled the toughest men and women in all of Tamriel. But then I walk its mountains and cities and I see adults and children alike strolling through a blizzard in sleeveless attire, not even flinching. My character swims in arctic conditions and doesn’t even gasp. I’ve come across bandit camps that are bedrolls completely exposed to the elements beside a campfire that couldn’t possibly be burning without an unhealthy dose of napalm. There is a whole heap of snow in Skyrim but there is no cold.

Also at Gameranx, John Vanderhoef looks at the trope of the male main character and his female companion in ‘The Princess and the Knight: Companion Games and Missed Opportunities‘.

There’s something about L.A. Noire that lends itself to incredibly intricate and pensive writing, and Daniel Golding’s post on it at his Crikey blog Game On is no exception. Though Golding calls it a “review” and admits that it’s only eight months late, to him, this “slowness” becomes an integral part of the game itself:

Reviewing a videogame within a week of its release can force you to overlook its subtleties and emphasise aspects that, with time, reveal themselves as far more important than apparent at first blush. Yet leave it too long and you risk falling into the cracks, the familiarity of a videogame massaging over the faults. Each game may have a rhythm, but so does every player, critics included. I am stuck in the spaces between L.A. Noire’s four-note musical motif.

But by now, I know L.A. Noire, and I know that it’s worth playing, worth watching, and worth spending time with. It’s worth thinking about. It’s worth contemplating.

And finally, the hot issue of the week was studio Double Fine’s Kickstarter venture to fund a new point-and-click adventure game, which at the time of writing has raised $1,659,095 of its $400,000 goal. No, really.

Craig Wilson of Split Screen presents ‘A Double Fine Audit‘, speculating what say fans will have in the development of a game they funded. Wilson writes,

What alarmed me was how willingly people donated given how little details had been made available. Sure there’s the usual tiered list of donation gifts and a funny video but Double Fine promise involvement in the development process. But outside of the documentary what does that mean? What does my money actually buy me? To what extent, as a financial stakeholder, am I actively involved?

On the other hand, Seb Wuepper at Gameranx asks passionately, ‘Are You People Insane?‘ Addressing the controversy around Double Fine’s crowdfunding, he says,

This seems like another case of gamer entitlement. The reasons escape me, since the downsides of this approach to funding seem minimal at best. If the worst happens, gamers are out by a mere $15 at the least. Which at this point seems highly unlikely since the project is already funded with more than a month to go. Make no mistake, this is not a risky investment. It’s a—for the lack of a better term—preorder for a highly passionate company producing what’s seen as a niche product.

Finally, Rowan Kaiser sits between the two as he writes ‘Double Fine’s Kickstarter Effect: What Happens Next?‘ Despite his expressing satisfaction that an older genre is given some attention, he outlines a number of reasons why he is “highly skeptical that this will create meaningful change within the industry”.

And that’s every last drop of the gaming goodness we have for you today. If you have any delicious recommendations for next week’s post, please do send them via email or Twitter.

Welcome to the second month of Blogs of the Round Table, and thanks again to everyone who participated in January’s great discussions. Don’t forget that you’re more than welcome to post a response or addition to someone else’s Round Table entry, and in the past that’s been some of the most interesting stuff to come out of this little exercise. But seeing as it’s February now, that means it’s time for a new topic to inspire out collective blogging imaginations. This month Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer has kindly given us our topic for the month, and he’s chosen…

LOVE.

How do games communicate love? Can they? Do they? Can we find something approaching love in our relationships to games? When we say we love a game, what does that really mean? I’m interested in the the capacity of programming, silicon, and input/output devices to convey or impart feelings we can truly characterize as love. I’m guessing each of us has a story…and maybe for some, the answer is simply no.

Love! I don’t get enough of it / All I get is these vampires and blood suckers… ahem. I don’t know about you, but I’m extremely excited about this topic and although a double bout of tonsillitis kept me from contributing last month, be sure I’ll be doing my best to get a post in this time. The topic actually reminds me of many of the things the Digital Romance Lab have been interested in, and you can check out their blog here. As always, questions, comments, and links to your own responses to the theme can be left here in the comments, sent in via twitter to @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag, or you can send us a plain ol’ email.

I can’t think of a clever intro. It’s This Week In Video Game Blogging.

The recently released Katawa Shoujo has garnered a lot of attention for how it came into existence and for it being a quality experience, something no one could have seen coming. Our own Kris Ligman says that Katawa Shoujo could be accused of many things, but cynicism is not one of them. And given where it came from, that is something. Know Your Meme, meanwhile, is heading off comments about the people saying “I’ll never meet a girl like that” countering with “You’re doing it wrong.”

Michael Peterson at Project Ballad writes extensively on Persona 3 and how the game presents the concept of free will.

Richard Clark writes a response at Christ and Pop Culture about one person’s reaction to Settlers of Catan who said the game is “fundamentally antithetical to Christian vision and existence.” Clark responds: “Perhaps the #1 rule of approaching a game rightly is as follows: take it seriously, but keep your perspective.”

Lana Polansky writes a review of Oíche Mhaith for KillScreen - it’s an indie game about a girl in an abusive home, and how it conveys the utter destruction of a little girl.

Matthew Schanuel, the Ontological Geek, examines Deus Ex: Human Revolution from the perspective of its mythic roots, borrowing from both the story of Icarus and Genesis.

Matthew Armstrong at The Misanthropic Gamer has just finished Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. He writes about how the game has granted him “a new appreciation for Castlevania’s current state of affairs in today’s gaming landscape.” He thinks the fact it does not stick to formula should not be held against it.

Petros of Sparta at A Blog of Random Things, writes “What I would have changed: Twilight Princess.” Going over what was fundamentally off about the game and how it could have been great and innovative instead of the stagnant entry of the series.

Eric Schwarz of the Critical Missive blog is back again, this time writing about Rage and multiple design missteps it takes.

Rowan Kaiser in his weekly Joystiq column on role-playing games turns his eye to the two most recent Fallout entries, comparing the different rhythms to the quest structures in Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. The former is based on free form explorations whereas the latter was more stringent in its hub based structure. Meanwhile, at Insult Swordfighting, Mitch Krpata types out a series of “Rejected Endings to Fallout: New Vegas.”

Guest Blogger Apple Cider Mage posts “Let’s get rid of ’slut plate’ forever” at The Border House. It isn’t about the skimpy armor of World or Warcraft, but the term itself.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, John Brindle of the Brindle Brothers talks about the moral psychopathy that Blizzard has continually displayed. They know they have a moral obligation to their community, but don’t seem quite capable or knowledgeable on how to execute their intentions.

From one company to another, Benjamin Jackson writes a piece entitled “The Zynga Abyss” for the Atlantic about games that treat players like rats in the Skinner Box, requiring little creativity. In a similar vein we have Jamin Warren at KillScreen focusing on Zynga’s practice of cloning games and the multiple factors that allow people to get away with it. Finally, Ian Bogost weighs in at Gamasutra comparing the Tiny Tower/Dream Tower cloning scandal to the myth of Bellerophon and Pegasus. Unpacking that essay could require an essay itself.

Shifting away from the specific toward more overarching themes, we have Pippin Barr giving a talk on what games are, how the boundaries are limiting and thankfully how they are now being pushed against. For some reason though, the video goes dark 17 minutes in.

At The Wall Street Journal, Conor Dougherty published a piece on the way some players are changing the way they experience games with pacifist runs. And Eric Lockaby talks about how critics and gamers are “Pretentious as Shit” when it comes to their snootiness towards difficulty and accessibility in games. Though I agree with the sentiment, I think ‘pretentious’ is the wrong word. Replace each instance with ‘jackass’ and it’s much more on the mark.

Joel Jordon from The Game Manifesto believes games are like music. He extols the inherent rhythm to a game’s actions, and sees similar qualities present in games from Dance Dance Revolution to Resident Evil 4 and Rayman Origins.

Alan Williamson of the SplitScreen blog looks at a quick history of cheating in games from the early cheatcode to modern hacking, to the publishers cheating gamers out of legitimately purchased content. To quote Williamson: “It’s hard for the modern gamer to be a cheater, but easy for them to feel cheated.”

On a similar subject, John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun muses on the question of “Do we own our Steam games?” and discusses the issues around digital ownership that have yet to legally be answered.

We end with a few more responses to Raph Koster’s post “Narrative is not a mechanic“: Chuck Jordan questions whether Koster’s assertions are based in the fundamentals of what narrative and games are, or merely how it’s been done so far. And Mattie Brice in her PopMatters column outright contradicts him saying “Narrative Is a Game Mechanic.”

Witty closing remark. Hyperlinks to email and Twitter for submissions. Warm farewell!

Welcome to the first Blogs of the Round Table round-up post for 2012, first let’s remind ourselves of the theme we’re talking about this month.

Being Other:

Games, like most media, have the ability to let us explore what it’s like to be someone other than ourselves. While this experience may only encompass a character’s external circumstances–exploring alien worlds, serving with a military elite, casting spells and swinging broadswords–it’s most powerful when it allow us to identify with a character who is fundamentally different than ourselves–a different gender, sexuality, race, class, or religion. This official re-launch of the Blogs of the Round Table asks you to talk about a game experience that allowed you to experience being other than you are and how that impacted you–for better or for worse. Conversely, discuss why games haven’t provided this experience for you and why.

So, we’ve got our theme, and we’ve got a few entrants already. We’ve also got a handy dandy iframe code (care of Darius Kazemi) for you to embed in your BoRT posts, allowing for everyone at home to jump from post to post via an easy drop down menu. To do that, just past this code somewhere in your post:

<iframe src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=January12" frameborder="0" width="600" height="20"></iframe>

Which should then look like this:

And as you can see it working up there, each entry for the month is listed! Huzzah! (NB: The list has to be updated manually, so there will be some lag between submitting posts and being added to the drop menu).

So what’ve we got so far?

At Nightmare Mode, Aaron Myles talks about ‘Mass Outbreaks of Xenophobia and Inbreeding: A stroll through the ghettoes of San Andreas’.

David Carlton does some musing on the theme of the Blogs of the Round Table itself, as well as raising the point that there are very few games in which he identifies with the protagonist.

Tami Baribeau at The Border House writes that ‘In games, I’m always someone I’m not because I’m fat’, with a particularly illuminating story of a former coworker who encountered online incredulity that they would create a ‘fat’ avatar.

Adam Burch at Thus Spoke Pi writes about the collision between Brave New World’s ‘feelies’ and a story about an acquaintance of his experiencing the effects of racism.

Amanda Lange at Second Truth writes about her experience role-playing as a straight man in ‘On Gettin Ladies…In Games‘.

Matt Kopas wrote this piece for The Borderhouse Blog which he admits wasn’t written with the theme explicitly in mind, but which still fits well enough under the heading – it’s on ‘Gameplay, Genderplay‘.

At Nonfiction Gaming, Eric Howell writes about empathising with the characters he played in both Mass Effect and Bastion in his contribution, ‘Choosing to Be the Other‘.

Patrick Stafford writes about ‘Roleplaying games and the fundamental problem of sympathetic characters‘ on his blog The Problem With Story, talking about how the more constrained characters of Mass Effect and Deus Ex: Human Revolution gave him more of a sense of empathy and connection than the blank slate of Fallout 3.

Rainer Sigl at the delightfully named ‘Video Game Tourism’ blog explains that ‘Being a criminal psychopath sucks – but what did you expect?‘.  So apparently it can suck to be ‘other’ when that ‘other’ is a murderous psychopath. Who knew?!

Mark Serrels at Kotaku Australia has a touching and poignant piece on meeting his daughter for the first time (in the sims) and how it made him feel and think about potential childrearing in his real life.

At Second Quest, Richard Goodness wrote about ‘Role-Playing a Pervert in Silent Hill: Shattered Memories‘. I’m just going to grab this little excerpt to whet the appetite: “…Shattered Memories gave me a very weird, disturbing little glimpse of what sex addiction feels like.”

Yolanda Green at the Althogether blog wrote about what playing a role means in an RPG.

At The Ludi Bin, Rachel Helps talks about ‘Punching a Woman in Assassin’s Creed‘ which was for her a rather novel experience: “It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be a powerful man, but I think playing Assassin’s Creed helped me see why it’s a fantasy for some people.”

At Digital Ephemera, Dan Cox wrote about ‘One Soldier in a War‘ and the distinction between first and third person perspective, the value of ‘life’ and what happens when he stands around looking at butterflies in Call of Duty.

The Arcadian Rhythms blog has a double-header, with thoughts from the sites’ bloggers AJ and Shaun. AJ didn’t find he identified with many game protagonists, and talked about Dead Rising’s Frank West as an excellent example of an unsympathetic protagonist that doesn’t diminish the game. Shaun wonders “if the theme itself overestimates the extent to which videogames are structurally capable of genuinely conveying an experience other than one’s own” and then goes off into some quite interesting territory.

And the final post of the month goes to Denis Farr, blogging at the Border House about ‘Mayday; Or, How I Learned to Love Grace Jones‘. It’s a great story about the classic N64 game Goldeneye, self expression and fighting the power.

That’s it for the January Round Table! Thanks again to everyone who contributed this month, we’ll be back soon with another great theme for February real soon.

So you may remember a certain campaign run about this time two years ago to fly me all the way from the other side of the world to GDC in San Francisco. Well, this year David Carlton & co. have teamed up to send rising star Mattie Brice to GDC and I can’t think of a better candidate for it at the present. Below is friend of Critical Distance Brendan Keogh’s post explaining why you might like to contribute to the campaign, and any assistance is greatly appreciated.

———

There are a lot of excellent writers writing lots of excellent things about videogames. You already know this. Across blogs there is a vastly diverse collection of writers looking at games from all different kinds of angles and making all different kinds of insights.

But on the bigger, professional sites, everybody seems just too agreeable. It’s not that people aren’t writing good articles or are saying things that are uninteresting, but, simply, there are just too many of us from similar backgrounds saying similar things while the dissenters, saying equally interesting things, are stuck on blogs.

Slowly but surely this is changing. It has to change if videogame criticism is to advance and mature. We need more writers approaching more videogames from more perspectives. And, more importantly, we need these writers to have exposure and actually be read.

This is why I am super excited that there is a fundraising effort to get Mattie Brice to GDC this year. Mattie appeared out of nowhere in 2010 and is now writing for a range of places. She’s all over Popmatters; She writes candidly about sexuality and games for Nightmare Mode; and she’s even had the intestinal fortitude to take on Kotaku’s cesspit comment sections head on.

I don’t always agree with what she writes, and sometimes her forward-gazing optimism just outright frustrates me. But this is why games journalism/criticism/whatever needs her and those writers like her: she is saying interesting things that many of us wouldn’t or won’t say. She is starting interesting discussions and debates.

GDC is the biggest annual event in the game’s industry and is exactly the place any budding game’s writer needs to be if they want to “Make It” as a games journalist. 2010 was the first year I went to GDC and in the eleven months since I have written for Edge, Paste, Ars Technica, and a whole heap of other amazing outlets I could never have imagined writing for a year ago.

If we can help get Mattie there this year, I don’t doubt she will have just as many opportunities out of it as I did, if not more. She has already marched confidently onto a stack of mainstream websites with very alternative views, and attending GDC will only help bring her alternative, interesting writing to larger and larger readerships.

So this is why you should chip in a few dollars and help get Mattie to GDC. Do it for games journalism/criticism. Help expand the angles and voices and articles and topics that people are writing and reading about. Games criticism needs more dissenters, and there are few writing at present with as much potential as Mattie.