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.

And I’ll keep updating this post up till the end of the month with more links and posts – keep sending them in! And don’t forget to link back to this post and include the code for the dropdown box so readers can see what else is being said.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of Equestria… it’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

We start off with Brad Gallaway, who responds to recent opinion pieces (like those by John Walker) about working for free as a game journalist. Not only does Gallaway believe in unpaid writing positions for “sweat equity,” he also argues that:

The available number of opportunities for reviewers and writers out there is a fraction of a fraction of the number of people who want those gigs. There’s just too much supply and not enough demand, so unless there’s some kind of worldwide moratorium, people who want to write for free (and who do so) are always going to be around.

Tackling the legal paradigms in which games find themselves on the industrial side, Greg Lastowka looks at how Minecraft does IP differently:

In theory, bigger and more experienced studios could have come up with a game like Minecraft years ago. The reason they didn’t, I think, is that most developers in the industry have been steeped in the logic and culture of intellectual property. In short, the dominant story of intellectual property is that game developers should make content and players should consume it.

Those interested in copyleft and other fair use issues, especially in light of last week’s anti-SOPA/PIPA protests, may find this interesting.

Writing for Kill Screen, Jason Johnson reflects on why he drinks the “purple rain” of bullet hell games, also known as manic shooters, a niche genre known for its horrendous difficulty:

The harder the game is, the more imposing it becomes. Playing on Normal is a fairly mundane activity, even inspiring a few yawns. Bump up the difficulty a notch and drowsiness turns into a meditative experience. Take it all the way and it will melt your face off. Somewhere in between lies the perfect balance—but I’m looking to be perfectly annihilated. I want to get to a place where I have pushed the game to its limits—where if there was one more bullet on the screen it would be unsolvable; where all I can do is set the iPad aside and say, “Whoa.” That sense of wonder would be lost if I came close to winning.

Surely, difficulty can be an art in itself for certain communities of players. Mattie Brice, however, says our conventional understanding of “hardcore” creates its own problems in the forms of barriers for players who are after a different “difficulty” paradigm, away from needless complexity and boy culture:

The backlash that social minorities are combating in gaming is similar to the resistance to valuing other experiences besides the simulation or abstraction of technical skills in gaming culture, and the demographics that represent each side aren’t too different. Video games reflect themes and skills found in boys’ styles of play as children, and any introduction of qualities that are different from that (especially if tagged as feminine) are cast out as inferior “casual” games. The movement of making games accessible gives designers the opportunity to boil down what works without the trappings of conventions that exist “just because they’ve always been there” and establish new ways of interacting that would be unavailable in generic RPGs.

Speaking of RPGS, we’re seeing several worthy retrospectives on the Zelda franchise with the recent release of Skyward Sword. First, Leigh Alexander looks back on the beloved Ocarina of Time and why it is not her favorite game, or even her favorite Zelda game. Next, Michael “Brainy Gamer” Abbott takes us on an insightful contextual analysis of the franchise and why it provokes such love despite its flaws:

Link often enters a “Sacred Realm” (”Silent Realm” in Skyward Sword) where he encounters beings inflicted with suffering caused by Ganon’s corruption of the earth. All beings in nature suffer from this polluting force: spirits, trees, forest creatures, and humans alike. Link must set things right by healing the land, restoring harmony to humans and nature.

In essence, he must embrace the Shinto philosophy of humans and nature as one, and he must accept his pivotal role in Shintoism’s indigenous vision of Japan (Hyrule) as connected to its ancient past. Link is that link.

On a similar bent of games addressing spiritual and ecological issues, John Vanderhoef profiles the cult classic Oddworld series and its frequent allusions to green issues. In the course of which, Vanderhoef declares: “gamers need an environmental wake up call more than ever.”

Dear Princess Celestia: this week I learned there are many ways to be a girl, even in virtual spaces. Becky Chambers at The May Sue does some informal guysourcing to get some uncommonly insightful explanations for why many of men choose to play women characters:

One friend told me that in most RPGs, he prefers to play as a woman. Bear in mind, this is a guy who is biologically male, identifies as male, and presents himself in what I would consider to be a traditionally masculine manner. He found that if the gender of the character didn’t affect the story too much, then female characters were usually easier for him to relate to than their hyper-macho, gravelly-voiced counterparts. The typical portrayal of men in games was so far removed from his own identity that he often found it easier to play a woman.

This segues nicely into Matt Kopas’s recent guest blog on The Border House, regarding childhood experiences with gender policing: “I had learned that playing as female characters invited questions that I didn’t want to deal with. If playing a male character meant that I could easily neutralize one potential site of harassment in my life, then I would do it gladly.”

Also at The Border House this week, Rachel Walmsley draws yet another interesting lens on Dragon Age: Origins, talking about her play perspective as an atheist in contrast to her theist character.

Narrative was another recurring topic this week. We start with Raph Koster, who first declares “Narrative Is Not a Game Mechanic“, then proceeds to lay out how story, as a feedback system, can be fine-tuned for the player.

Less about specific story moments and more about content and context, Jorge Albor’s Moving Pixels article this week discusses slavery as a game mechanic in Endeavor, posing whether modeling such systems can be both functional and provocative.

Two noteworthy articles from this week looked at intersections of narrative and Skyrim. Sparky Clarkson analyzes two of the game’s major war campaigns and how for all their rich promise they ultimately felt quite shallow. Next, a guest article on Ontological Geek likens Skyrim to “gonzo pornography” in both gaze and procedure, in quite the compelling essay. Here’s a snippet:

Nothing in Skyrim is special. No one in gonzo is loved. Either one satisfies your immediate and specific appetites, but are you enriched by either? Or do you walk away from both feeling like you’ve consumed something that has altogether diminished not only you as an intellectual and moral being, but also reduced a potentially edifying activity to a degrading parody of something good? They satisfy your crudest desires but also mock genuinely enriching media by mimicking their trappings while failing to use them in any meaningful sense.

Robert Yang radiates some designer wisdom in this post-mortem on his celebrated “Level With Me” Portal 2 mod, explicating not just a design philosophy but the themes of each stage. Meanwhile, Jonathan McCalmont contends that the much-maligned review paradigm, as it currently stands, is fundamentally broken, because it’s based upon a model which no longer exists:

Once upon a time, games were finite entities that emerged at the end of a long production line and dropped into the expectant hands of a grateful audience. With this kind of production process in place, it made absolute sense to have people stationed at the end of the line telling people which products were worth buying. However, with more and more games being both played and distributed online, it makes no sense to review games prior to their release, as most games do not reach the marketplace in their final form.

Lastly, reviews may be broken, but we think you’ll find this one full of friendship and magic: Peter Bright’s fantastically comprehensive review of Visual Studio 2010.

That’s all for this week! From all of us here in Ponyville, have yourselves a happy Sunday!

Yes, only 6 months late Critical Distance is proud to bring you episode 9 of the CDC podcast.

This time we decided to focus on an actual game: Braid came out many years ago and sparked critics to write a megaton of criticism. 3 years after its initial release we bring you a panel of people with strong opinions on the game. Some loved it, some with not so kind feelings towards it. Consider this a companion piece to our Critical Compilation on the game.

CAST

Eric Swain: The Game Critique

Zach Alexander: Hailing From the Edge

Tevis Thompson: Tevis Thompson

Maggie Greene: The Wayward Historian

Scott Nicols: Gay Gamer

SHOW NOTES

Braid Critical Compliation

Braid Official Walthrough

AV Club’s Jonathan Blow Interview

Podcast: Direct Download

Opening Theme: ‘Close’ by The Alpha Conspiracy

Closing Theme: ‘Wishing Never’ by The Alpha Conspiracy

Out with the old, in with the new. As we settle into 2012, the ludodecahedron keeps on a-turnin’. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

First up, a brief announcement: the folks over at Digital Love Child have put out a Call for Articles. Do take a look.

Tom Chatfield sat down with Julian Gough, author of Minecraft’s endgame this week for insight on how to “end an endless game”:

The word “dream” gets used, but it’s really a story about the dream of a game, and the dream of life. It’s dream as metaphor. I love the strangeness that comes when people get so lost in a game that the game becomes the world. Because you do get lost like that. Especially in something like Minecraft, that’s so endless. You’re actually startled to come back into your life at the end of it. So I wanted to play with that moment, where you’re between two worlds, and for a short little period you’re not sure which one is more real.??

This week also featured a host of reaction pieces, the first of which comes from Denis Farr, who reflects on his own “This Gaymer’s Story” and the reception it has garnered. He concludes: “Boys may be boys, but that does not mean boys need be assholes in public.”

Recently, a provocative academic article from Miguel Sicart went live on Espen Aarseth’s online Game Studies journal, arguing against proceduralism. This prompted several thoughtful reaction articles, two of which may be particularly worthy of your attention.

The first comes from Charles Pratt in an article titled “Players Not Included“:

The nature of this inextricable relationship between rules and play in games proves false the claim that a game’s meaning can reside in its rules alone, but also proves that the rules, and what Sicart refers to as ‘instrumental’ play, are of paramount interest to players in games. After all, just as when Bogost talks of games without players and play he is really talking about software, when we talk about games without rules and goals we are really talking about ‘playful activities’. While interesting points may be made in light of either of these subjects, in neither case are we really talking about games.

Mark Nelson shows up in the comments of Pratt’s article, and subsequently lays out his own response to Sicart:

Put differently, at times Sicart sounds like he’s arguing that “proceduralism” has made a philosophical error, in that it erroneously claims game rules encode more meaning than they really do. But his concerns about instrumentalizing the player to convey didactic, moralizing messages seems to rest on the opposite view: that some games really do foreclose any real role for the player in meaning-creation.

Shifting from an academic gear to one perhaps more recognizable, Charlie Hall recounts how his fandom for military shooters got him mistaken for a veteran, prompting some introspection. Keeping the same genre of games but tackling them from a vastly different perspective, schoolteacher Kyle McKinnon draws some connections between his students’ classroom behavior and their taste in violent versus nonviolent games.

I have a hobby horse hidden away somewhere on the damage Joseph Campbell has done to the state of popular storytelling, but until then, we have Kate Cox (voted by us here as one of 2011’s best game bloggers) outlining why to read Dragon Age II as a hero’s journey is to read it incorrectly.

Speaking of RPGs, Rowan Kaiser has been bustling about with his new column on the subject, beginning with an overview of the state of Western RPGs up to the present. And Josh Bycer has a five-part series on RPGs that break the rules.

If you’re up for more multipart features, Shamus Young also has a five-part series for you, this one on Skyrim’s Thieves Guild plotline. Here’s a taste:

If he’s been stealing from the fault for “years” then how did nobody notice? I assume people have been putting treasure INTO the vault? Didn’t they ever notice that the loot was vanishing? And what’s all this for? Why would the guild pile up riches in some common pot? Is this some kind of hippie communist Thieves Guild, where everyone shares?

Here is the link to the first part, and there are links to each successive part at the head of each article.

One last shout from Skyrim before we move on: why the game’s Radiant Story system breaks the game.

For those who tuned in for our Critical Distance Confab, End of 2011 edition, you may have been intrigued by contributor Eric Swain’s description of Driver: San Francisco. Well, this week he has two articles expounding further on his affection for the game: “It’s All in the Presentation” and “Magical Realism as Game Mechanic in Driver: San Francisco“.

From magical realism to the more material realities of gender performance, we turn to Leigh Alexander’s new Gamasutra exclusive on Harmonix, “on gender, self-expression in Dance Central“.

Tami Baribeau’s latest for The Border House draws a reticle on fat shaming in games, from the perspective of character creation as well as within online communities.

Harris O’Malley is back on Kotaku with a follow-up on his Nerds and Male Privilege article, which caused quite a stir among Kotaku’s readership back in December. In “Deconstructing the Arguments“, O’Malley lays out “the 3 Ds of Arguing” used to suppress feminist criticism: Deflect, Derail, and Dismiss.

Derailing is the most common version of these arguments and serves to change the subject of the conversation, usually by the people in question. Suddenly, instead of discussing geek culture’s implied accepted roles for women, we’re discussing the hierarchy of oppression or why we’re talking about this instead of, say, female circumcision (which is, like, way worse). Or dealing with assertions that, by extension, anyone who agreed with the article wants to ban all “sexy” characters from video games forever.

Speaking of the 3 Ds, those came up a lot recently in a dustup between World of Warcraft machinimator WoWCrendor and anti-sexist critics, following hurtful remarks posted on Twitter. Apple Cider Mage outlines why the remarks were hurtful.

As a companion piece, although it does not address the same incident, our own Katie Williams declares that WoW players are a “walled city” within gaming. For those who do not play MMOs, Williams’s configuration of WoW as a subculture within a subculture might prove useful for thinking about the WoW community, even if her conclusions might prove controversial.

Likewise, perhaps a “walled city” isn’t all bad. Take this inspiring interview with a WoW “guide dog”, who plays the game as an aid to his unsighted fellow guild member.

One release which has generated a lot of talk this past week is Katawa Shoujo, a dating game developed by members of 4chan. Jack McNamee has perhaps one of the most interesting early articles on how the game both objectifies and humanizes its subject matter.

New from Paste this week is an article from Brian Taylor on a “tourist”’s impressions of the close of Star Wars Galaxies:

To start with a binary, two perspectives on the digital: It is forever, and it’s incredibly difficult to preserve. It’s always present, until it ceases to exist. It never erodes or fades. It’s accessible until it’s corrupted. It’s there until it’s gone. Tatooine, the planet I’m on, is a desert. But in a few hours, this cactus-less land won’t become a dead land. It will disappear completely. Built of ones and zeroes, the digital does not ruin. Maybe that gives the digital an edge in our minds: no pesky physical form to get in the way of our projections of past and present onto it. And maybe it’s why some video games shout their backstories so loudly: to remind you that yes, indeed, there is a past here.

From the morbidity of a dying MMO to the macabre, two articles this week attended to the topic of game design from a horror genre vantage point.

First, Steve Gaynor likens the celebrated Junji Ito horror manga, Uzumaki, to the potential for games to play with the fundamental rules of reality:

It’s a way of thinking that many artists possess, and that leads us to follow them into their imagined works: the power of visualization, not to take the world around them for granted, but to picture, “what if things were different?” It connects straight back to how we see the world as children. Before we know how everything around us works, and we settle into static assumptions about our surroundings, the possibilities are endless. It’s the fertile ground in which imagination grows. Could there be a monster in the closet or under the bed? No reason there couldn’t be, so maybe there is! Could aliens come down out of the sky? Could dogs and cats talk to each other when people aren’t around? Could there be ghosts and angels everywhere, that we just can’t see? Could another world exist on the other side of the looking glass, or down the rabbit hole? Before we knew it couldn’t, it could, and we imagined, “what if this IS the way the world works?”

The second arrives from John Brindle of the Brindle brothers, who opens with a look at that Creepy Watson video I’m sure many of you have seen. Proceeding to apply the lessons of the unsettling visuality in the “Creepy Watson” video, Brindle turns to the use of the camera in Amnesia and concludes:

In ordinary circumstances first-person games have an empiricist bias – problems are solved by looking at them. Amnesia, conversely, makes the player complicit in her own fear by forcing her to repeat Daniel’s self-othering, self-inflicted ignorance and voluntarily look away from danger, sacrificing territory to the encroaching realm of the unknown. The negative space beyond border of the screen becomes a thing to be wielded as protection, and a glance a freighted act.

Our last bullet point for this roundup is the recent volley of discussion which emerged when NowGamer announced a contest to “win” an unpaid blog position on their site. John Walker, best known from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, produced three articles in rapid succession regarding unpaid journalism and potentials for exploitation: “12 Tips for the Young Games Journalist“, “To Clarify on Working for Free” and lastly directly addressing the competition in question.

Lauren Wainwright responded to the Walker posts and NowGamer situation, weighing the pros and cons of unpaid writing.

We leave off with the start of a metacritical letter series between Patrick Klepek and Bioware’s Manveer Heir: on the difference between games reviews and game criticism.

That’s all for this sunny Sunday! Join us next week for more from the top tier of videogame blogging, criticism and commentary. Till then, stay salty!

Hello Dearly Devoted Critical-Distance Readers!

So the most attentive amongst you may remember that I teased a ‘new thing’ that would be starting in January here at Critical Distance – well, it’s January and I can now announce that we are officially re-launching ‘The Blogs of the Round Table’.

For those who might not have been around for as long as the rest of us, The Blogs of the Round Table was a great monthly program run by Corvus Elrod. Corvus would provide a theme upon which to write a blog post, everyone else would go off and have a think about it and write something based on the theme for that month. The responses were incredibly varied and diverse, working more as an inspiration and motivation to post than anything else.

One of the best things about The Blogs of the Round Table (or the BoRT) was that we all got to read each others writing, which often inspired our own responses and conversation pieces, encouraging a real sense of being an open and inclusive community full of life and lively discussion. Progressively throughout the month, Corvus would compile all the entries in a big ongoing post that linked to all the posts and kept similar discussions together. It really was a pretty excellent idea, but as Corvus got increasingly busy with other projects (particular the successful ‘Bhaloidam’ storytelling game) the Blogs of the Round Table eventually tapered off.

But no more! It’s back with a vengeance, and it’s our pleasure to be hosting the initiative right here at Critical Distance. Corvus has even done us the honour of providing our first monthly theme.

So what now? Well, if you want to be involved in the Blogs of the Round Table, read Corvus’ outline of the theme below, have a think about what you’d like to say on the topic, then write! Post the final piece on your blog, or a friends blog, heck we’ll even take Google Plus posts, and then let us know about it by emailing or tweeting to us @critdistance making sure to use the #BoRT hashtag. From there, depending on how many pieces people write and what our team of tireless editor’s workload is like, we’ll collect them into a post with links to all the pieces, which we’ll update throughout the month. Easy! The other alternative is to just read, enjoy and comment on the excellent work the fantastic community produces.

One last thing before we reveal this month’s theme – we’ll be periodically inviting some of our favourite writers, thinkers, and whoever else we enjoy to pick a theme for a month. But for January 2011, the theme Corvus has been kind enough to kick us off with is 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 get cracking, the flood-gates are now open. There’s no limit to how many posts you can write on the theme in a month, and no min-max word limit – all we ask is that you include a link to the main monthly theme post (link back to this post for this first one) and, of course, that you let us know you’ve written it. The comments on this post are also open for questions.