Kris Ligman is off camping the spawn point, so This Week in Videogame Blogging is being brought to you by me, Cameron Kunzelman. Let’s get to it.

All Star Party Zone

Top billing this week goes to Darius Kazemi’s essay titled “Fuck Videogames.” I’m going to refrain from commentary; going into it without any preconceptions is a good idea. After you read that, go for Liz Ryerson’s “it’s okay to like games,” which I read as a companion piece to Kazemi even though they are basically unrelated to one another.

Switch gears. Ryerson and Robert Yang both made what you could call “critical Let’s Play” videos for an event in Chicago ran by Jake Elliott. Yang’s is on the first room of Half Life and Ryerson’s is about the CliffyB sleeper hit Bioshock Infinite.

Bioshock Againfinite

If you’re not totally burned out on anything and everything Bioshocky, Nicole Marie comments on Infinite, but with a particular focus on the critical discussion around Elizabeth as one of the best female characters of all time. Nick Dinicola also has things to say about the game, reading Booker DeWitt’s character arc as a failed one.

Issues of Representation

Speaking of representations of women in video games, Samantha Allen posted an audio recording of ETSUcon’s Sexism in Gaming panel (which I was lucky enough to be a part of) over at The Border House.  At the same site, Mark Filipowich writes about privilege and how it is expressed in the RPGMaker game Exit Fate.

Helen Berents reads Ni No Kuni through the lens of peace studies, focusing on how the game positions conflict in relation to childhood. Rebecca Mir writes on Dog Eat Dog> and its representations of colonialism as a “fun” activity. At First Person Scholar, Sarah Gibbons writes on Auti-Sim and how it might be a problematic representation of autism that could push us forward to better, more equitable games dealing with the topic. A pull:

One of the important messages that disability studies scholars and autistic self-advocates reiterate is that disability should not be understood through the lens of pity. Working against a medical model that suggests that disability is an individual problem, disorder, or defect, many scholars articulate a social model of disability that emphasizes the disabling impact of built environments and social attitudes. Some scholars question the idea of impairment; for example, Shelley Tremain, who exposes the realist ontology that informs our understanding of impairment, explains that our definitions of impairments are not objective, but historically contingent . Tremain and other scholars point toward a generative model of bodily difference. The question with respect to games becomes, can simulation games enable players to explore these alternative models?

Developing A Critical Games Writing Community

Real talk: video game criticism is in a strange place. It is mostly performed by under-/un-paid people who want to talk about video games in some way other than “this was good, this was bad, 9.5/10.” So with that in mind:

The new website re/Action launched into its beta this month. As the About page states,

re/Action evolved out of the need for change. Critical, experimental writing suffers in a media landscape based on traditional publishing models, and diverse readerships only find hostile environments without proper inclusivity policies. This publication aims to celebrate the amazing writing often turned away from the mainstream sites and left unpaid. We want to capture the conversations that need to happen and create a safe space for all to participate.

The first, “beta” month has articles by Lana Polansky, Denis Farr, and EIC Mattie Brice.

Five Out of Ten Magazine also released a new issue this week. If you haven’t purchased any of the magazine so far, maybe think about buying the value-laden triple pack?

Take a Breather

Watch these motion capture videos of videogames by Nicolas Boillot.

History Schmistory

Here are some links about games history: Michael Barnes writes on the history of the “Dudes on a Map” genre of board games. Carl Therrien speaks in interview about a particular way of doing games history, laying out some basic information while pleading for a move to critical and specific history. More contemporary: read the story of Jager and how they came to develop Spec Ops: The Line. At Eurogamer, Craig Owens delves into a forum community obsessed with doing design archaeology of Shadow of the Colossus.  Finally, Joel Cuthbertson tells it like it is: “The Boston Bombings Are Not A Meme.”

Video Games Are Serious Business

Chris Bateman posted about the problem of “fiction denial” in games. Steve Wilcox interviewed Jesper Juul for First Person Scholar.

Design Time

Over at Unwinnable, George Weidman calls for a resurgence in analysis about Antichamber and makes lots of interesting points about lateral thinking. Scott Juster finds the banality of evil in Papers, Please. Adam Biessener pleads with the designers of videogame morality systems: “stop making me kick puppies to shoot lightning.”

Nathan Altice (who only writes golden articles of wonderment) analyzes basically everything about Super Mario Bros. through vectors and how they work. Go learn.

Random Things That Are Good So Go Read Them

Andrew Vanden Bossche gives us magic. Roger Travis gets to the heart of immersion in Papo & Yo. Stephanie Carmichael shows us the mirror worlds of Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition. Jason Johnson went looking for Jason Rohrer’s hidden board game. George Kokoris finally saw in 3D with Nintendo’s help. Aaron Matteson wonders if there is such a thing as “compassionate trolling.” I played Rogue Warrior and found it to be no more silly than CODBLOPZ. Joel Goodwin falls in love with Starseed Pilgrim.

Foreign Correspondence

As always, Johannes Köller is here with the foreign correspondence appreciation station:

Over on Kleiner Drei, Lucie Höhler interviewed Lea Schönfelder about her Kinect game/art project Perfect Woman. On videogametourism, Rainer Sigl, Franzi Bechtold, Christof Zurschmitten und Robert Glashüttner all shared their experience and thoughts on the recently concluded AMAZE festival (or A MAZE, or Indie Connect, or whatever it’s called these days). On superlevel.de, Benjamin Filitz also wrote about the AMAZE at length and Dennis Kogel has an interview with Jana Reinhardt of Ratking Entertainment and Arnold Flöck of Tinytouchtales up, in which they muse about the structures of the local indie scene and wonder why it doesn’t seem to produce any well-known, polarizing figures. Why is there no local version of Phil Fish?

Details

That’s all for this week!

We’re still having issues with our contact form, so please keep submitting links via Twitter or by emailing Kris.

Thanks for reading!

I am not Kris Ligman. I am Cameron Kunzelman, and because of events both dangerous and deceitful far and wide, I am running This Week In Videogame Blogging this week. I don’t have any notes up top beyond the notes that I just wrote.

Oh, actually, I do: Kris does a great job of organizing posts thematically. I don’t. So–

Mark Rowlands doesn’t write about video games at all, but his “Tennis With Plato” is some amazing writing about games in general and their maybe-intrinsic value to someone who is growing older.

Sarah Wanenchak writes for Cyborgology on the concept of winstates and how the necessity of winstates in games means that they have fundamental limitations as a medium. As she says,

Our actions are naturally constrained by what we perceive as not only appropriate but possible. We can’t do certain things with certain technologically mediated forms of storytelling because there are limits to what users can imagine within the context of those media. What I want to emphasize here is that this is a very real problem for anyone trying to do anything innovative with design; too innovative, too unfamiliar, and the user won’t possess the baseline assumptions, imaginings, and understandings necessary to experience the medium in the way the designer intended.

Keeping with the same theme, this past week saw the formal release of Proteus and a general storm of whinyness about its gameness/notgameness. Mike Jones lets everyone know that it was okay to not like anti-games. Rob Parker lived the game for a little while. Ed Key, one of the developers of Proteus, responded with an exasperated post, generally confused about why we are still having debates about “game.” And Oscar Strik does some etymology and provides some Wittgenstein to round out the debate.

Trigger warning for sexual violence: Mat Jones takes a bullet for us all and does a short oral history of the Reddit game forum and how it feels about Sarkeesian’s Tropes Against Women.

Michelle Ealey writes for The Border House and explains that blaming entertainment for X thing isn’t the way to go about it. At the same time, Simon Parkin writes that the military industrial complex has many tentacles and that manshooter games are intimately linked to the actual gun industry. Mitch Krpata responds to the debate at large by writing that we should actually figure out if video games are harmful and, more importantly, that we should be open to the data that comes from studies.

Enough of that.

David Valjalo works through Thirty Flights of Loving with creator Brendon Chung and gets twenty seven references out of him.

Angela Washko teaches people about feminism in World of Warcraft. Not feminism as embodied in World of Warcraft, but actually inside the game.

Zoe Quinn explains how the guy who made a game about his job ended up getting fired.

Roger Travis continues his series about the “life” of Bioshockand how it operates in the critical and academic assemblages.

Self promotion station: I think that video game writers could learn a lot about their own critical community by looking at early cinema criticism.

Sparky Clarkson wrote a review of Hotline Miami in Twine.

Aaron Gotzon writes about reading Super Mario Bros. as a surrealist, psychoanalytic event that processes the self.

Jill Scharr writes on The Legend of Zelda and how it gave her a sense of wonder as a kid. Brendan Keogh hones that feeling down to a fine edge, tracing the development of his own “gaming grammar” at a similar age.

Maddy Myers writes about why she has always played at violence in games. A teaser:

But what about my guilt over enjoying violent power fantasies, given how judgmental the media and politicians and Americans everywhere have been about violent media lately? What is it that I love about holding an imaginary gun and shooting hundreds of avatars in the face? Am I just acting out some Tarantino-esque revenge fantasy on the daily micro-aggressions that I feel from strangers, and even friends, who talk down to me because I’m a wee little baby-looking girl who must need help, who can’t do anything on her own?

Ian Bogost writes about Hundreds.

And that’s all I have for this week.

In case you missed it, January’s Blogs of the Round Table has wrapped and the results are tremendous. Stay tuned for February’s theme.

And please be sure to submit your recommendations for This Week in Videogame Blogging via our email submissions form or by @ing us on Twitter!

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.