Blogs of the Round Table: February ’12 Round Up

Well I’ve managed to just sneak this post in before the end of the month – where the heck did it go?!

No matter – let’s see what the blogosphere has cooked up in response to our theme of 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.

I neglected to add the code snippet for this month into the announcement post, but if you want to add it in now, copy and paste the following:

<iframe src=”http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=February12” frameborder=”0″ width=”600″ height=”20″></iframe>

Which should look like this:

Okay, who’s first?

Alan Williamson at the Split Screen blog writes about ‘LoveGames‘ and Bad Romance:

It’s hard to imagine a medium that is less concerned with love than gaming: in films, music, art and literature, we take it for granted that it’s going to receive a mention. Although most people are probably sick of Adele by now, you have to admit that if the album 21 were penned in response to a mediocre Pokémon collectathon, it would lose some of its appeal.

At Taufmonster’s log, the author tells us about love in Shadow of the Colossus.

Cody Steffan at Where’s Your Belly? tells us a sweet tale of gaming with his partner, and with his two year old daughter.

At The Ludi Bin, Rachel Helps asks ‘Is Marriage Too Boring For Video Games?

Dan Cox at Digital Ephemera struggles with the topic and ends up talking about why we don’t feel the same thrill of love or attraction in his post ‘Bits of Love‘ .

And lastly, Rainer Sigl at Video Game Tourism reckons that ‘In games, love is just a lie, made to make you blue‘, and looks at the issue through the lens of the ending to the 2008 Prince of Persia game.

And that’s it! Thanks again to everyone who contributed, by joining in the discussion or by posting their own entries. If we missed yours please let us know in the comments below.

We’re taking a skip month in March, as GDC is likely to preoccupy a few of us for the first half of the month, but we hope to be back in April.