Search Results for “Spec Ops”

Spec Ops: The Line

Depending on who you ask, Yager’s military-themed cover-shooter Spec Ops: The Line is either the most exciting game of recent time, or the most disappointing. Some argue that it is incredibly insightful and provoking, challenging many of the most rigid and ingrained conventions of videogames generally and military shooters specifically. Others argue that its own adherence to these conventions voids any insights it might make. Either way, the wealth of critical attention the game has received rightfully demonstrates that The Line is an important game

This split of the critical reception has afforded an outpouring of articles and

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This Year In Video Game Blogging 2012

…been called “print,” but the world has changed in that time and things that would have been traditionally published have in some cases moved into digital representations of the same. Not in every case, but we honor both here.

One of the most talked about critical efforts this year, Brendan Keogh’s ebook Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line is a massive achievement for game criticism.

The book has received its own share of in-depth responses as people weighed in on its take of the game. Both Cameron Kunzelman and Darius Kazemi offered up…

Episode 22 – On ‘Killing is Harmless’

In 2012, critic and Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology PhD candidate Brendan Keogh released his long form critical piece on Spec Ops: The Line in the form of an ebook. Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line was at the time the first known published book of criticism on a single game. In the years since a cavalcade of books of video game criticism has been published and more to come in the future.

Two years after initially publishing the book, we decided to interview Brendan to get his perspective on the book, the

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July 30th

…the way, goes further than this, showing that the game uses narrative complexity to construct daring choices that run counter to the assumptions of how stealth works.

Art Tickles: Defined by Their Exception – Haywire Magazine Taylor Hidalgo discusses the work of David Cage, arguing for the broader value of things as separate to whether or not one personally likes them.

Spec Ops The Line… 5 Years Later – YouTube (video: auto-captions. Spoilers for Spec Ops: The Line) Raycevick summarises the history of Rockstar Vancouver, and finds all kinds of hidden gems to build up an argument about…

November 29th

…to history.

“The aura of semantic instability produced by redaction is what separates the “black op” in Call of Duty from a mere secret mission, or even the structurally and tonally similar “spec ops” of the Modern Warfare games. Black ops in Call of Duty are sites of chaos and collapse, where protagonists undergo various kinds of disintegration before a self-contradictory imperial ideology that raids, kills, or tortures in the name of peace and humanity. In Black Ops Cold War, the phrases stricken out by the censor correspond to a multitude of disavowed, “plausibly deniable” spaces.”

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July 22nd

…post for Gamasutra, regaling us in tales of game industry corporate incompetence. It probably won’t cheer you up, but the stories are so absurd they might just anyway.

Meanwhile, TWIVGB regular Josh Bycer takes aim at a few recent “hard” games and asks where their difficulty really comes from: “it’s easy to make a hard game. The quandary and where a good designer is needed, is being able to separate hard from challenging.”

For more in-depth textual reading, we turn to Michael Clarkson, who takes Spec Ops: The Line to task for the cowardice of its critical message:

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Now Accepting Submissions for TYIVGB 2013 Edition

…it or keep seeing it brought up. Pieces that get cited to this day. Examples from previous years include:

–The New Games Journalism by Kieron Gillen ‘05 –Ludonarrative Dissonance by Clint Hocking ‘07 –Taxonomy of Gamers by Mitch Krapta ‘08 –Permanent Death by Ben Abraham ‘09 –Video games can never be art by Roger Ebert ‘10 –The Pratfall of Penny Arcade – A Timeline (aka Debacle Timeline) by Unknown ‘11 –Killing is Harmless: A Critical Reading of Spec Ops: The Line by Brendan Keogh ’12

2. Any pieces that are an excellent example of larger trends within the…

This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2014

…him that The Crew‘s fantasy of accumulating power is not the Americanism he wanted to engage with.

Stephen Beirne found he had made a mistake in Spec Ops: The Line under pressure by a moment in the game’s fiction. Comparing the game with BioShock Infinite, Beirne found that the moment left a far greater impact than BioShock Infinite‘s carnival throw because he could “point back to afterwards and see a ghost of myself living in it, so impassioned and alive as to be conceited of the absence of any alternative, so foolish and honest and gloriously mine.”

Ansh…

Episode 32 – Supplementary Grades

…Extra Credits creates a short cartoon Youtube video as a basic introduction of design concepts, craft implementation and surrounding issues of the videogames industry. Over the years, supplementary shows have been added. You can check them all out (as well as specific episodes we discuss on the podcast) below!

http://www.critical-distance.com/podcast/Critical-Distance-Confab-episode-32.mp3

Direct Download

SHOW NOTES

Extra Credits Channel

Extra History

Extra Remix

Extra Play

Design Club

Video Games and Storytelling

Call of Juarez: The Cartel

Spec Ops: The Line Pt. 1

Spec Ops: The Line Pt. 2

Power Creep…

February 12th

…– Haywire Magazine (Content warning: middle-east wars) Miguel Penabella revisits 50 Cent Blood on the Sand, bringing a new perspective to its nihilism and embrace of ignorance.

“The game may resemble conventional third-person shooters, but its ugly power fantasy has close parallels with Spec Ops: The Line in particular, albeit with a meta-commentary not deliberately authored but emergent […] while Spec Ops directly skewers and subverts these conventions to comment on the morality of violent videogames, Blood on the Sand wholly embraces its violence, resulting in a differently sobering perspective on videogame culture.”

The darkest…