Welcome to another exciting Sunday filled with the best and brightest of videogames journalism, criticism and commentary! We’re a little late, so let’s not dally a second more. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

HOW WE PLAY

John Brindle, the most British brother of the American Midwest Brindle Clan, went to GameCamp again this year and ran a session on quizzical play. Here are the notes and recording of the talk in full.

For the bilingual, L’Arène has posted an interview in French and English with Art Game developer Pippin Barr. (Scroll down for English.)

Paul Haine has a compelling argument: the Wii U is failing because unlike its predecessor, it harbors an antisocial message:

You can see the Wii U being socially divisive with the very first scene in the video; some dick walks into a living room and declares that it’s “time to watch the baseball”, changing the channel without even giving the gamer time to pause and forcing him to carry on his game on the controller’s small screen. It’s a pretty depressing scene; the gamer doesn’t participate in the baseball-watching, nor does baseball-dick care about the videogame. The Wii U, then: two men sitting in a room together, not talking or sharing in the same entertainment. All the warmth and camaraderie of a walk-in clinic.

In a similar vein, Daniel Joseph has a few incisive words, saying that despite its prevalence, we still tend to think of playing games as a private sphere, and that results in resistance when problems are called out.

PATHOLOGISTICS

Plague Inc is used as an information tool by the CDC to educate about disease pathology, but Robert Rath wants to know how accurately it depict this. (As a side note, the man is getting married today. Grats, Rath!)

Over on PopMatters Moving Pixels, G. Christopher Williams chats a bit on building a more plausible apocalypse — to whit, why is Metro 2033 so unhygienic?

And Gamasutra blogger Sebastian Alvarado takes us through the possible science behind Mass Effect‘s Genophage.

YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE

On Big Tall Words, Mark Filipowich discusses how plural protagonism works in Chrono Trigger. And on The New Inquiry, Jeremy Antley explores We Must Tell the Emperor, a tabletop strategy game designed for a single player.

DESIGN MATTERS

Back on Gamasutra, Paul Andrew Mcgee wraps up on on Ludum Dare 26 (theme: minimalism) and comments on how we can say more by talking less.

Speaking of Ludum Dare 26, have you watched this excellent supercut from Sebastian Standke?

On Experience Points, Jorge Albor chats about the “mundane wonder” with the rise of “map games” like MapCrunch and GeoGuessr.

Over on Boing Boing, Peter Bebergal introduces us to the rise in old school Dungeons & Dragons play, as a response to the franchise’s modern transition away from roleplaying to combat focus.

From the recent Let’s Play exhibition in Chicago, Unmanned writer Jim Munroe interviews Jake Elliott while playing the latter’s Kentucky Route Zero.

Elsewhere, Doctor Professor provides us with a useful primer on the male gaze in games.

IT’S JUST BUSINESS

Simon Newstead explores a few reasons for why virtual worlds die.

Touching on the recent firing of Patrice Desilets and the indefinite suspension of 1666, Eurogamer’s Dan Whitehead asks a pointed question: if creators know their best work is going to become the property of publishers, what motivation is there to put their heart and soul into an IP?

Rami Ismail opines that established indies may not be in the best position to promote other independents. Elsewhere, Michael Brough concurs:

[H]ere’s the deeper problem with putting the responsibility of lifting up newcomers on those who are already successful in the field: even if they’re completely willing to take risks on things that might not pay off, they’re only interested in things that interest them. The gaps where things are really getting missed you don’t even see, because they’re not things you personally care about.

THE EXCITING WORLD OF WEB PUBLISHING

First Person Scholars’ Jason Hawreliak interviews Killing is Harmless author and Critical Distance’s 2012 Blogger of the Year, the beardful Australian Brendan Keogh.

Speaking of books, Jamie Dalzell has released his ebook deep read of Dark Souls. And have you picked up the videogame StoryBundle curated by Simon Carless yet?

SIMPLY SHOCKING

Francisco Dominguez of Haywire Magazine suggests the verbs afforded players in BioShock Infinite are so narrow, they reinforce the game’s sociopathy:

This would be why his dialogue is so utilitarian and deductive, always targeted towards a goal. This would be why his distinctive verbs are so narrow: he eats, shoots and cleaves. Even pandas get more agency. Nothing suggests he’s given to pleasurable activities, only the compulsively satisfying.

Fantastic. We’ve solved the ludonarrative conundrum. Now let’s make all our characters callous assholes and let’s never talk Greek again.

Meanwhile, Noah Caldwell-Gervais has produced a wonderful long-form design analysis of the –Shock games, from the original System Shock to BioShock Infinite.

RELATIONAL OBJECTS

On The Border House, Samantha Allen proposes that transitioning is a bit like JRPG grinding.

And on PopMatters, Scott Juster suggests that the story surrounding Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity may be more interesting than the game itself.

PLEASE REMEMBER TO TIP YOUR WAITRESS

That’s it for this week! As always we appreciate your submissions by Twitter and email. And yes, our email submissions form is really working this time. Really!

Also be sure to swing by Alan Williamson’s combined May-June Blogs of the Round Table prompt.

Thanks for reading! We will see you all next Sunday, same CD-channel, and probably within the same rough 48 hour period (we try to be realistic).

Helloooo, Critical Distance readers! Are you excited? I’m so excited! And I just can’t hide it! It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

FORGET IT, JAKE, IT’S THE GAME INDUSTRY

Doing our part to keep this one alive, here’s John Walker’s piece from back in April seeking to answer the question: Why did the SimCity controversy go away?

Elsewhere, Branislav Gagic has another question on his mind. He wants to know why reputable developers are heading to Kickstarter to bank on known IPs, the same as AAA.

ZINESTER: STILL NOT A PEJORATIVE

On Magical Wasteland, Matthias Burns has a few thoughts on the whole “zinester” thing:

Part of my unease with that “formalists versus zinesters” “debate” was how unnecessary it seemed (beyond providing some personal edification to the instigators); it was as if a faculty member from Juilliard had expressed a desire for “a dialogue” with Sid Vicious about chord progressions. It’s not that these two don’t see eye to eye on matters of music theory, which is what the professor thinks, it’s that the punks have arrived on the scene with such a completely different set of values that they might as well be from different planets.

There is also little fruit to be found in having a “dialogue,” I think, because it doesn’t seem particularly hard to see where the “zinesters” (if I must use that word) are coming from, and the idea that they need to explain themselves is confounding. This group consciously and deliberately rejects indie’s failed split from the mainstream and its poorly-concealed capitalist underpinnings, and instead upholds personal expression as the highest ideal, the only goal that matters. And in order to do that successfully, they must break off completely, not at a branch somewhere on the tree but at the very root of the established order. This cannot be papered over or explained away; no amount of hemming and hawing over the definition of the word “game” will fix the fact that there are games out there now that willfully abnegate other games.

Porpentine, in reposting the original draft of her “7 Thoughts on Women” on her own site, also addresses the trap of the “dialogue”:

One of the greatest challenges of this time is not blatant misogyny (an easy target for outrage anyone can participate in) but the crypto-misogynist, whose fear is concealed behind language that sounds basically okay to everyone but the women it is intended to harm.

They’ve figured out they can’t call us bitches, so they resurface under a thin veneer of patronizing “civility”, neutralizing our energies with mindless, boring semantics.

They will find endless ways to intellectualize their discomfort.

[…] Even doing basic work in the games industry, whether it be in a mainstream or indie capacity, becomes filled with chronic ambient terror

DESIGN MATTERS

So, let’s talk about games with no interactivity, says Line Hollis.

Meanwhile, anna anthropy writes on the recent Different Games conference and why the context of gameplay profoundly informs a game. And on GameJolt, Paul Hack interviews Goblet Grotto developer The Catamites.

On Bit Creature, Lana Polansky ruminates on the nature of game cartography. In a similar vein, Nathan Altice on Metopal is continuing his great multipart spatial analysis of several games.

On Twinfinite, Matthew Kim shares a few notes on Demons’ Souls and how it differs from its sequel, Dark Souls. And on Video Games of the Oppressed, Mike Joffe postulates that perhaps the emotion mechanic of Super Princess Peach is more subversive than we think.

Jay Barnson muses a bit on using the unknown to co-create with the player:

[M]ight we find ourselves able to construct more powerful narratives if we let the designer and the player take care of the creative heavy lifting? Let the designer imply connections, let the player form and breathe life to those connections, and let the computer just do its thing to provide the tools and mechanics to facilitate this?

Barnson’s examples lean heavily on the horror genre in particular, which segues neatly into our next article from GayGamer’s Mitch Alexander: locating the connections between Silent Hill and gay Irish/English artist Francis Bacon. Meanwhile our own Johannes Köller invites us to think of the picturesque Proteus as “art gore” (it’s not as gruesome as it sounds).

Finally, PopMatters Moving Pixels’ Jorge Albor elaborates on the systems of security theater in The Castle Doctrine and Papers, Please.

FUCK VIDEOGAMES PART DEUX

Following on Darius Kazemi’s Fuck Videogames from last week, Janet H. Murray offers a considerate response: “Videogame design is not exciting because it is ‘new.’ Nothing gets old faster than mere novelty. Videogame art is exciting because it is a productive way of exploring the truly, historically new affordances of the digital medium.”

Also recommended: Liz Ryerson’s in-depth response to Kazemi’s post and further responses from Todd Harper and Samantha Allen.

RELATIONAL OBJECTS

Games do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by our individual perceptions. Writing for Paste, Maddy Myers illustrates this brilliantly with her visit to BioShock Infinite‘s Columbia in the wake of the Boston bombings.

Also on BioShock Infinite, Moving Pixels’ G. Christopher Williams discusses relating to the protagonists’ dynamic as a father of three daughters.

Speaking of fathers, those lie at the heart of this collection of thoughts on Red Dead Redemption from our own Cameron Kunzelman.

And That Dragon, Cancer designer Ryan Green takes to Game Church this week, to propose games have a need for “grace.”

EMBRACE PLAY

Finally, to leave us off for the week, Filipe Salgado has some inspiring words for everyone: just play. Play everything.

THE USUAL

Thanks once again for reading! As usual we greatly value your submissions by Twitter and email… and I’m happy to report our email contact form is up and running again! (Finally.)

Looking for May’s Blogs of the Round Table? Stay tuned! Alan Williamson will be posting a combined May-June prompt in the coming days, so keep those typing keys ready.

Hungry for some tasty Sunday reading? Look no further. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging, the web’s best source for prime cuts of games criticism, analysis and commentary!

INFINITE BIOSHOCKS

Set an afternoon aside for this one. Tim Rogers has finally finished his sprawling analysis of BioShock Infinite’s many systems and the best foot it chooses to put forward.

Over on Kotaku, guest commentator Jordan Ekeroth writes that rather than blasphemous, he found Infinite “deeply Christian.”

Reacting to the suggestion his last piece was “inflammatory,” Jeff Kunzler argues that there is plenty within BioShock Infinite itself to get righteously indignant about:

What’s truly inflammatory in 2013 is Infinite as a collaborative work with millions upon millions of dollars and man-hours put into it, couldn’t bother, apparently, to hire a non-white writer to put some proper perspective into the use of racism to justify a white man’s murderous romp through a floating city in the sky. The use of the (mostly non-white) Vox Populi and (black) Daisy Fitzroy as an enemy for the (white) player character to mow down and brutally murder is utterly idiotic [sic], unjustified, and completely insulting. Inflammatory.

This post by starburp, also linked in Kunzler’s first post, is a required read:

seriously? you make racism against blacks germaine to the plot of your storyline, but you don’t even do any research to find out what else blacks were up to in 1912, and then you bury our ACTUAL struggle against racism in a hippie dippy “we’re all human” resistance movement turned sour. seriously?

do you know why you did this? because the black people in this storyline aren’t fucking people. they’re props. literally. they are props. and that’s what i find so fucking offensive about bioshock infinite, is that it makes black people props in a storyline in which white people get to revise white history through all kinds of fanciful sci fi wizardry in order to make themselves feel better while STILL excluding and marginalizing black people, and we’re supposed to be happy about it.

ETHICS IN THE TIME OF MANSHOOTERS

On his personal/professional site, developer Charles Cox writes on why he will never work on First-Person Shooters again. Back on Kotaku, an industry veteran from both the development and publishing side of the fence condemns the exploitative practices of today’s games market and concludes “we need better video game publishers.”

Jay Barnson points out that always-on DRM by any other name we would know as malware:

[T]his is nothing more than a control grab by game manufacturers, an attempt to force us to their door so that we can pay for a game like it was a product, but use it only at their discretion as if it was a service. It’s the best of both worlds as a publisher, and the worst of both worlds as a consumer.

Finally, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker takes the journalism road less traveled, opining that you don’t need to resort to crass tactics to stay afloat.

BUT DOES FORMALISM ART GAME???

On the heels of last week’s Great Formalism War of 2013, Dan Cox –who has put together some excellent Twine tutorials– observes that in all this most people don’t appear to know how Twine actually works.

Elsewhere on Peasant Muse, Jeremy Antley asks why board games have scarcely been brought up throughout this conversation:

Returning to the question [raised by Raph Koster], “Is the only moral move (of Train) not to play?”, my answer is: no. It’s not just no, it’s a hell no. Why? Train is about providing the player a sense, terrible as it is, of the sort of grotesque, normalizing effects that focusing on transporting Jews to concentration camps presents to those attempting to maximize and make efficient such transportation. Playing Train isn’t supposed to be pretty, or even fun. It’s meant to be torturous, it’s meant to make you ask and question the source of your own humanity.

Did you take glee, ignorantly, of moving the most amount of people to the end of the line? Probably. And when you discovered the true purpose of the game- moving representative figures to their representative death- did you recoil and become sick at the idea? The ethical answer is yes. But would you have encountered this full range of quandary, of questioning your own humanity, if you simply refused to play the game out of moral concerns?

The final word on the subject goes to Colleen Macklin, who motions toward a non-definitional critique of games:

Is there a definition of “game” that we can all agree on and hold up to evaluate the quality of the things that fall into our orbit as games so that “all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point?” Is it important that we determine this now, for once and for all?

I say no. It’s a trap!

To ask whether something is a game (or whether it has ‘gameness’) is the same kind of question as whether something is art or not.

Ultimately whether this thing is a game or that thing is art is determined by its context and community of practice.

This idea, that games have a purest nature and that we need to strive to make games that represent this limits what we can do with games.

DESIGN MATTERS

Who was Nintendo’s most recent 3DS Direct for? It wasn’t for you, says Jon Irwin, who believes Nintendo is stuck in a generation gap.

Over on Bit Creature, Zolani Stewart explores Mirror’s Edge as an aesthetic wasteland. And at Shut Up and Sit Down, Mark Wallace broaches the topic of licensed board games, good or evil?

On Gamasutra, Mark Slabinski furnishes us with a heady list of games exemplifying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow.’ Meanwhile, on Eurogamer, Rick Lane looks at the challenges in modeling climbing in games.

For those who were curious about Magnus Hildebrandt’s recent Kentucky Route Zero article for Superlevel.de, Dennis Kogel has helpfully translated it into English.

Speaking of German, or rather in German, our Senior Ultra German Correspondent Johannes Köller has hooked us up with another round of excellent games criticism auf Deutsch.

On Videogame Tourism, Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten have wrapped up their three-part letter series on Year Walk. Also for the same publication, Jannick Gänger wonders what Mass Effect would be like if you were allowed to fail horribly.

Finally, Christian Schiffer turned up on Deutschlandradio for an hour-long feature on interactive storytelling. (Transcript here.)

SIGNAL BOOSTING

Mike Joffe has kicked off a new blog, Videogames of the Oppressed, looking at the intersection of games and kyriarchy.

And a call for writers! Win Lin’s Insert Quarterly is a new paid publication currently seeking hires. They look pretty fetch, so pay them a visit!

(Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.)

MIND OUR DUST

You may have noticed a brief service interruption yesterday while we performed a terrifically overdue server migration. We’re in the process of tightening up the last few loose bolts and also rolling out a new site design, so expect weirdness over the next few days. If you can’t get in touch with us through our contact form please try @ing us on Twitter.

And have you seen this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt yet? Huh? Have you? Time is running out, you know!

That’s all for this week. Till next time! As a wise entertainer once said: dress classy, dance cheesy.

It’s time to pay our dues. Pull up a chair, dig out last year’s receipts, and bust out the reading glasses. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!

SHOOTY McGUNPANTS

At Unwinnable, Brendan Keogh sits down with the Konrad to his Walker and has a long conversation with Walt Williams, lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line. Over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Nathan Grayson puts the finishing touches on a three part series of interviews with Walt Williams and Far Cry 3 lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem.

SIMCITY BLUES

You might recall when Mike Rose modeled his town in the new SimCity to diagnose its traffic problem. Observing the bugs in the new SimCity’s traffic modeling, he went back to SimCity 2000 to see how it handled the same problem.

On Quarter to Three, the eternally engaging Tom Chick presents us with a pretty unsettling depiction of how SimCity’s systems (inadvertently?) model contemporary malaise.

BIOSHOCK INFINITY AND BEYOND

(A general content warning, once again, for spoilers in most of the following links.)

On Gamer Theories, Ben Meakin has written a bit on how we can look at BioShock Infinite through the lens of auteur theory. Elsewhere on Terminally Incoherent, Luke Maciak walks us through the first in a series of thorough dissections of BSI’s art direction.

On critical mainstay Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott deems the game the beginning of the end for the FPS genre. Meanwhile, Amnesia developer Thomas Grip praises the game for what it attempted to do but concludes “it feels like an attempt to tell a serious story through a theme park ride.”

On Gamasutra, Andreas Ahlborn delivers an exceptional analysis of BioShock Infinite as musical composition. Posting on his personal site, Kevin Wong views the game’s conclusion as “a metacommentary” on the multiplicity of emergent narrative. And on Critical Missive, Eric Schwarz dispenses with discussion of the setting and story and focuses squarely on a fine assessment of its combat mechanics.

On Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez peels away the layers of how the game’s design puts the player at odds with behaving like a real person. And on How Not to Suck at Game Design, Anjin Anhut criticizes the game’s “straw man racism” as a device by which to alleviate white guilt:

A thing that many movies do, most comics and Bioshock Infinite, is depict the faction in the story representing racism as unequivocally evil. Cartoonishly evil actually. This pretends like racism is some sort of thing mentally deranged people do, something sociopaths and psychopaths are drawn to or something you become when you are indoctrinated into some sort of cult.

While this of course serves to condemn racism as a concept, it mainly serves as a way out of dealing with your own internalized racism and serves as a way to absolve yourself by comparison. It also serves – and that is actually the truly ugly effect of that treatment – to push what we are allowed to label as racism into an extremist corner and it sabotages any healthy debate about racism in our society.

On Design is Law, Jeff Kunzler rails against other critics’ suggestion that the game is excessively violent, and instead poses that Columbia is a place we SHOULD be interested in destroying:

Bioshock: Infinite’s failings aren’t in its heavy use of violence, or the fact it’s a first person shooter. It’s the perversion of oppression, the creation of a world white people want to get lost and “immersed” in, instead of tearing down, the total lack of decency in regards to the views of people who have and still are the victims of racist oppression in America, and really just a general lack of empathy for the sake of entertainment.

Dan Golding decries the game as going out of its way to be inoffensive to the status quo, concluding “despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art.”

Writing for her own blog, editorial heavy-hitter Leigh Alexander weighs in as well, saying the game is flawed but engagingly so:

This is not a game about American exceptionalism and the choice between obedient prison and chaotic freedom. This is a game where you have to chase a ghost among parallel realities. This is a game that lives in its own alternate universe, is in love with its own cleverness, instead of being genuinely clever. There are tears everywhere. And in the game.

The Levine-led Irrational team has birthed a universe, now, of games about a dominant ideologue enforcing a slavish devotion to fearful systems, even after those systems have become irrelevant. It gives us worlds plunged into the stress of compartmentalized factions where teams don’t communicate, where promises are grand and lovely, but terrible on execution.

I think to some extent every game must be a reflection of its creative environment, its studio culture. Infinite strains its framework so fiercely you can see through to the flickering reality behind it. I would love to do an interview: Not a grand portrait of Levine, but with his soldiers.

And on Drop Out, Hang Out, Space Out, Daniel Joseph cautions against the cultural gatekeeping implicit in the process of artistically evaluating a game like BioShock Infinite, which segues neatly into our next section of links.

BUT IS FORMALISM GAMES

Writing on his personal/professional site, Raph Koster opens up a debate/can of worms when he responds to remarks made by Leigh Alexander over Twitter, and calls for dialogue on a number of subjects, including the role of definitions, games as rhetorical devices, and formalism.

Leigh Alexander responds in kind, reposting her comment from Koster’s blog and adding: “We have much more to learn and gain, at least for now, by eschewing definitions than we do by prescribing them.”

Writing on his Radiator blog, Robert Yang continued the discussion, responding to Koster’s letter with one of his own in which he lays out the reasons for some of the original post’s negative reception. “[With personal games], game design is not physics, engineering, or science — rather, it’s political science, it’s history. Maybe we could approach our criticism of these games more like those fields?”

The comment thread on Yang’s post, starting with some thoughtful remarks by Jesper Juul, are also very much worth reading.

Reacting to all the dust-up caused by these posts, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman appeared on Polygon, opining that mutual respect and openness to feedback is called for.

Tadhg Kelly soon chimed in as well, erecting a (some would say unnecessary) dichotomy between formalists (as he self-identifies) and “zinesters,” borrowing a term from anna anthropy to describe the outsider artists taking umbrage with his and Koster’s statements.

Andrew Vanden Bossche quickly called for a decoupling of the idea that systems are the unique territory of formalists:

“Formalist” vs “zinester” is not a binary that exists … Everyone gets to talk about mechanics. The game/notgame binary is not an immediate conclusion of a frame of analysis that focuses on mechanics. I believe instead that it is a very strict and limited definition that carries its own political agenda, consciously or not.

Zoe Quinn, developer of Depression Quest concurred, noting that limiting the number of systems in a game can be a justifiable design choice, adding: “I feel like there’s almost this attitude among the people that decry this sort of thing as a notgame that creators of interactive fiction and twine games especially somehow just don’t know how to make real systems.”

It wouldn’t be a debate about terminology without someone getting Storified, and this time around it’s John Brindle, in a curated set of tweets dismantling some of Tadhg Kelly’s positions.

Craig Bamford is briefer but just as energetic: “Tadhg Kelly, please stop trying to tell me ’what games are’. To be extremely blunt, judging by both your site and your CV, I don’t think you’ve earned the right.”

Consciously adopting the role of old man with kids on his lawn, Daniel Cook relates a history of game development establishment and rebellion, as he sees it anyway. Back on Gamasutra, Devin Wilson invites us to think of the discussion over definitions of the word “game” as, itself, a game.

Rounding us off, Mattie Brice reminds us why, in the midst of all this bandying about of labels, labels matter, and they are always charged.

I RATE THIS FORMALISM 8.5 OUT OF 10

Switching gears a little (or a lot), on Kotaku Jason Schreier writes on how Metacritic harms games.

DREAMIN’ OF GDC

If you missed this year’s Game Developers Conference, you cannot afford to miss Dan Pearson’s writeup of the GDC Hothead Rants.

On Unwinnable, Sam Machkovech sits down for an interview with Cart Life developer Richard Hofmeier.

Keeping the German-language ludodecahedron strong, Dennis Kogel follows up this week with a GDC game roundup auf Deutsch. On the English side, he has an interview with Hotline Miami luminaries Devolver Digital.

DESIGN NOTES

On Game Manifesto, Joel Jordon explores the ludodiegesis of Corrypt and Portal. Over on PopMatters Moving Pixels, Nick Dinicola looks into how the opening of the Tomb Raider reboot evokes the horror genre.

As part of Ontological Geek’s Religion Month, Hannah DuVoix muses on the extent to which Skyrim has you desecrating holy places. And reacting to the formalism debates highlighted above, Naomi Clark performs a taut formalist reading of Porpentine’s Howling Dogs.

Back on Gamasutra, Taekwan Kim has finished up his Mechanical Narratives series.

Over on Videogame Tourism, our German-language colleagues have stayed busy: Reinhard Zierhofer speculates on a game adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; our own Johannes Köller unpacks how Far Cry 3 failed not only as a satire, but as a critique of violence and millennial zeitgeist; and Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten are engaged in a letter series discussing Year Walk.

KYRIARCHY

Sidney Fussell turned up on Medium Difficulty last week, exploring the notion of closeted homosexuality in games. Fussell also popped up on VentureBeat, posing that game violence appears to disproportionately be brought up as a motivator for white spree killers.

Back with Kill Screen, Jordan Mammo takes a gander back toward Katamari Damacy as a game in which the artifacts of consumerism add up to “a snowballing addiction that literally uproots the earth itself.”

On Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alex Layne lays out an infographic breakdown of EA’s employee code of conduct. And at Kleiner Drei, Lucie Höhler recaps the major sexism-related issues of the last month, from GDC to RPS, for German-language readers.

JAM ON!

Two successful international game jams took place last weekend. Kill Screen’s Jason Johnson provides us with an overview of one of them, the QUILTBAG Jam hosted at MIT. And at Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander profiles the weekend’s other big jam, the Pulse-Pounding Heart-Stopping Dating Sim Game Jam.

TWINE TWINE REVOLUTION

Cara Ellison is just gonzoing it up all over the place lately. She popped up at PC Gamer with a feature on and interview with Porpentine, and a scant few days later appeared on The Guardian, interviewing anna anthropy.

HEY! LISTEN!

It’s strange to think we may be heading into a leg of critical discourse for games where academic mainstays like book reviews become common again, but that’s just where things seem to be going. Shaun of Arcadian Rhythms recently reviewed Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless and First Person Scholar’s Danielle Stock reviewed Ivan Leslie Beale’s Video Games for Health.

First Person Scholar is turning into a hot new pub, now that we think of it. This article by Rob Parker on voluntary player constraints –featuring Mattie Brice’s Pokemon Unchained, among others– is a good read.

On the topic of new blogs, Shut Up and Sit Down is gearing up to be a great new blog for fans of board games. Here’s Matt Thrower with a primer on wargaming.

At some curious intersection of academia and devlog is Michael Cook’s Games By Angelina, Cook’s PhD project and game-making AI.

ALL THE REST

Thanks again for setting part of your Sunday aside for Critical Distance! As always we’re indebted to our readers for all your wonderful submissions by tweet or email. Keep them coming!

And if you haven’t yet checked out this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt, this is a prime time to get involved!

Lastly, we will be performing a server migration in the coming days. Readers should not experience any lapse in access to the site, but we are going to try to update the layout at the same time so… keep your fingers crossed for us.

Lastly, for my fellow USians. Bitter about tax season like I am? There’s a game for that now.

Oh my glob, you guys. This is only going to be, like, the biggest This Week in Videogame Blogging ever. Aren’t you so totally floored?

BIOSHOCK INFINITE

(General content warning: most of these involve some manner of spoilers.)

This game came out recently, you might have heard about it. Something to do with shocking infinity and women in too-tight corsets. Our very own Cameron Kunzelman has drafted a preliminary critical compilation for some of the early critical response.

That’s not to say we’re off the hook, though. Here are some extra articles not included in Cammy’s roundup.

On Edge, Adrien Chmielarz takes issue with the design of the game’s opening as a gamey mess. On io9, guest poster Kyle Hill asks: if the city of Columbia really ran on helium (not that it does), could it?

Kieron Gillen, whose description of Infinite‘s floating city as “the 1893 Chicago world fair takes off and becomes an American Exceptionalism Death Star” will hopefully live forever into posterity, posts some “assorted thoughts” on the game including what it could possibly be saying about parenthood.

Rab Florence, reacting to other journalists’ criticisms of Infinite‘s violence, invokes the term “gaming cringe” to describe a sort of hyper self-criticism:

If there is any game that can justify its violence, it is Bioshock Infinite. It is a story about a violent man, and about the violence within society. It’s a story about extreme beauty, and extreme ugliness. It’s also saying a lot about videogames, and as it delivers its story and themes, it does it through patterns and behavioural codes that we all understand. The violence isn’t only justified by character, story or themes. It’s justified by the language of game mechanics that the game is using.

What games can’t justify their use of extreme violence? Almost everything else. And yet I haven’t seen commentators call all those other games out. Why wasn’t Gears of War widely taken to task for gruesome violence? Why wasn’t Modern Warfare 2? Was it because those games didn’t aspire to be anything other than silly old videogames? Was it because those games knew their place?

On PopMatters Moving Pixels, Scott Juster praises the “Strong Pictures and Subtle Themes” of the game. Meanwhile, SnakeLinkSonic is more critical, saying, “There’s Subtlety, Then There’s Cowardice.”

Not so much a critical article, but Andy Kelly offers up a good explication of some of the funkier bits of the game’s plot. Elsewhere, on Kill Screen, Yannick LeJacq interviews a terribly exhausted Ken Levine.

Lastly, an article auf Deutsch via our German-language correspondent Johannes Köller, Marcus Dittmar of 99leben describes how his on-and-off relationship with motion sickness prevents him from playing the game.

AFTER –SHOCK

But wait! There’s more. On Eurogamer, Richard Cobbett paints a fond retrospective look at that other BioShock sequel, BioShock 2. Elsewhere, Daniel Weissenberger digs even deeper into some thematic roots and cousins with a retro review of System Shock 2.

TOMB RAIDER

The other AAA name on everyone’s fingertips these last few weeks remains Crystal Dynamics’ and Rhianna Pratchett’s Tomb Raider reboot.

Back on Moving Pixels, Nick Dinicola comments on the “desperate” feeling of Tomb Raider’s combat. Meanwhile, on The Border House, ACLU worker Daniel Bullard-Bates explores its treatment of bravery.

On Groping the Elephant, Justin Keverne discusses Tomb Raider‘s “identity bubble.” And on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the shamelessly female Cara Ellison sits down for a memorable interview with lead writer Rhianna Pratchett, surely undermining the entire internet in the process.

DESIGN MATTERS

Straddling the two games above, Paul Tassi of Forbes wonders if we aren’t oversaturating games with ultraviolence: “I have nothing against killing in games. It’s just that as video games continue to evolve as storytelling vehicles, this idea that the main protagonist has to kill HUNDREDS of people per game is starting to seem a bit odd.”

On Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander hosts a roundtable with Andrew Plotkin, anna anthropy, Emily Short and others on the building renaissance of interactive fiction.

Leigh Alexander also popped up this week on Polygon with Quintin Smith, bringing us a new letter series on Persona 4.

On GameCritics, I was really gratified to come upon Brad Gallaway’s meticulous breakdown of male- and heterosexual privilege in the newest Fire Emblem.

Since we’re on the subject of JRPGs, Mark Filipowich is putting together something of a series on the role of ensemble casts within the genre. He’s currently continuing the discussion with Breath of Fire 4 on his personal blog.

There seems to be a mini-trend lately on drawing connection points between game design and improv theatre. Following on that, Problem Machine has a few interesting thoughts on the improv precept of “if this is so, then what else is so?”

QUANTUM GAMING

This is pretty dire. Richard Morgan suggests the new SimCity actually collapses the quantum wave-form of multiple realities. Eat your heart out, Rosalind Lutece.

In some other place and in some other time, Jordan Rivas presents us with a touching, if rather unserious, interpretation of Mass Effect 3’s “Citadel” DLC as taking place in the afterlife.

And somewhere in there Kambyero’s Mix Villalon managed to sneak in a well-designed three-part series in defense of bad endings.

FAITH

Two excellent pieces showed up on Medium Difficulty this week, on the subject seeing one’s loss of faith mirrored in games. First, Samantha Allen likens her departure from the Mormon Church with the feeling of isolation experienced in Dead Space. As a companion piece to Allen’s, Kaitlin Tremblay shares her experiences leaving Catholicism for atheism, and seeing that transition paralleled in Starseed Pilgrim.

On Gamasutra, Rob Lockhart approaches the subject from the point of view of a developer, musing on how one might model the transition from theist to atheist through game mechanics.

BUT IS IT ART

John Brindle, busiest of the Brindle clan, has produced a fantastic essay on Pippin Barr’s Art Game.

On Unwinnable, Dan Crabtree returns to the island of Dear Esther with a rumination on the convergence point of ‘understanding’ and ‘salvation.’ Dear Esther is also on Line Hollis’s mind these days, as she compares it with The Stanley Parable and how the two games approach storytelling from opposite directions.

Gamertheories explores horror in tablet gaming with Year Walk. Our own Eric Swain poses an interesting thought experiment on the different visuality of first- and third-person “walker” games.

On VGRevolution, Marc Price calls for more “immersion criticism” in games, “exploring every nook and cranny until there’s no pixel left untouched.” Meanwhile at Uncanny Postcards, Sylvain Lavallée proposes that it can be productive to think of games as possibility spaces.

Touching on the recent ousting of Sweatshop from the Apple Games store, the latest in a series of serious games dropkicked from the outlet as ‘unsuitable,’ Jorge Albor wonders: where is the place for them?

And here’s another German article brought to our attention via Senior German Correspondent, who describes this piece by Magnus Hildebrandt as “the definitive guide to understanding Kentucky Route Zero and its cultural roots, references and relations.”

BUT IS IT WAR

Regulars of Critical Distance know well my fondness for essays on the intersection of military, industry and games. Here is a fabulous piece courtesy of Jeremy Antley on how nascent drone warfare and the recent sequestration has an impact on military war games.

ESPORTS

We don’t feature pieces on eSports near enough on Critical Distance. Here’s an interesting interview with Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime on the recently announced StarCraft 2 World Championship Series.

Commenting on the Museum of Modern Art’s recent acquisition of Dwarf Fortress, Bill Coberly muses how the game might function as spectator sport.

PEOPLE AND PEOPLE AND PEOPLE

I had the distinct pleasure of running into Simon Parkin at GDC, who shared with me some of his secrets to his fabulous life-changing interviews. I believe I called him brainful, to my and his horror. And no, you won’t hear his secrets from me! Here he is, however, profiling the one and only Notch, Markus Persson himself.

Back with Kill Screen, Clayton Purdom brings us a feature on the artists behind “cloud rap,” “the unlikely convergence of JRPGs and indie hip-hop.”

THE LONG VIEW

Courtesy of The Magazine’s Mohammed Taher an elucidating look at the contribution of the MSX to the 1980s Middle Eastern game scene, and where the industry stands now.

And on IndieGames, Robert Fearon reflects on the evolving coverage of indie games.

#1REASON

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker has posted a new mission statement on feminist allyship within games writing. “Many women are mistreated and misrepresented within the games industry,” he writes. “It’s not a matter of opinion, a political position, or claim made to reinforce previous bias. It’s the demonstrable, sad truth.”

On The Mary Sue, Jill Pantozzi addresses the recent sexual harassment incident at PAX East, and in doing so touches upon several incidents at other recent events and the endemic problem it represents.

Back on The Border House, guest poster Sarah Argodale challenges the “accepted wisdom” of game advertising’s narrow representation.

GDC CATCH-UP

What’s the big deal with this Game Developers Conference everyone and their dog went to in March, anyway? I couldn’t adequately convey everything which went down but here is a great sampling of posts on the conference (and GDC-adjacent events) which showed up in my feeds these last two weeks.

First, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Nathan Grayson has a great overview up in which he describes this year’s conference as “a worrisome, hopeful contradiction“:

RPS’s own wayward ronin word master Cara Ellison, during a post-convention victory dinner, put it best: “GDC is where we first hear about all the stuff everyone will be talking about next year.” Maybe it’s a trend-setter, or maybe it’s just a megaphone for gentle tickles of trends that are already in motion, but the point remains: GDC tends to be pretty indicative of where we’re at. People often view E3 in that light, but the fact is, it’s a dinosaur wreathed in fireworks, frilly undergarments, and little else. E3 is a projection. GDC has evolved into its opposite: introspection. We look inward, and then we discuss. And this year – thanks to things like the renewed prominence of PC gaming, a focus on indies, and the #1ReasonToBe talk – I came away quite optimistic.

David Rosen has posted the write-up of his rant from this year’s Indie Soapbox, encouraging independent developers to make not eschew technological advances because of their AAA stigma. The one and only anna anthropy also posted a write-up of her dys4ia post-partum and other talks given at GDC. Elsewhere, Dennis Kogel conducted an interview with anthropy for Superlevel.de.

Bit Creature’s Jason Johnson looks back at some of the indie titles he encountered during the conference. In a similar vein, Jenn Frank played That Dragon, Cancer at the Unwinnable Salon the closing night of GDC, and reflects powerfully on the game’s subject matter.

Responding to recent controversies about hired models at GDC parties, Jason Killingsworth invites us to look at it from a different angle: his sister, a professional model, has attended plenty of similar events, and “there was nothing shady about the practice.” Killingsworth adds, “The way I see it, a little demystification goes a long way.”

On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander, who spoke at this year’s conference, shares why GDC brought out so many emotions for her. Writing for the same, Kirk Hamilton describes this year’s conference as a wake-up call for the videogame industry: “Change is in the air. Change for the better.”

On the German side, Dennis Kogel delivers in spades, with splendid series of write-ups and interviews for Superlevel.de. Here he is interviewing Austrian games journalist Robert Glashüttner. Here, he covers the FTL postmortem, the #1ReasonToBe panel, and the Creatrilogy talk with Andy Hull, James Lantz and Davey Wreden. He also covered the IGF and Developer’s Choice Awards!

LOST LEVELS CATCH-UP (PART 1)

You may have also heard some murmurings on the Twitters about Lost Levels, a GDC “unconference” held across the street from the conference. George Weidman has an excellent write-up of the event. We should have a more thorough collection of video, photos and write-ups from the official site in a few days, in time for next week’s roundup.

And if you read German, Dennis Kogel has you covered there too.

OH MY GLOB WHAT IS IT

Have you heard of Alpaca Niisan? It’s about to give you nightmares. Thanks, Anne Lee. I think.

THE USUAL, PLEASE

The new Blogs of the Round Table topic is up! Go have a gander, for your health.

As always, we are dependent upon our readers for sending in your reading recommendations via Twitter and email. And yes, we welcome self-submissions! Don’t be shy.

Join us next week where we will hopefully have a slightly more manageable list of links for you to dig through. For now, we apologize if we just ruined your Sunday plans. But I think we can all agree it was surely worth it.

It happens sometimes. With Mattie Brice, Katie Williams and yours truly all tied up at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and with Eric Swain busy working on those podcasts, things just fall through the cracks.

In honor of Critical Distance’s terribly exhausted contributors, we are taking this post-GDC Sunday off. Tune in next week for a right proper This Week in Videogame Blogging. Probably with animated gifs and such, even.

Until then, here’s Analogue: A Hate Story developer Christine Love in her exclusive Metal Gear Solid 5 Phantom Ground Pain Zeroes cosplay.

Have a good week, C-D readers.

Welcome to another sunny Sunday filled with top-tier criticism and commentary from the world of gaming! Contrary to previous reports, I, your senior editor, will be taking the reins again this week, while Mattie Brice rounds off the last two weekends of March. Consider me the necessary middle-woman.

But enough talk. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

ANALYSIS

We start things off with this compelling and quite thorough analysis of what author Line Hollis dubs the “minigame montage” format, in which different sets of mechanics are introduced to the player.

Elsewhere, GA Tech instructor Celia Pearce has updated her course blog, Game Design as Cultural Practice, with a host of this semester’s student work. This essay by Mary Macheski Preston in particular stands out as a lucid analysis of Pokemon Black/White’s treatment of race, gender and sexuality.

CHARACTERS

The AppleCiderMage notes an interesting quest line in a recent World of WarCraft patch in which female warriors take center stage.

Meanwhile, at The Border House, Samantha Allen puts her foot down regarding the scarcity of female protagonists in games: “We pride ourselves on being a young but fast-moving medium. Let’s kick it into high gear and give Lara Croft some company.”

And speaking of the leading lady herself…

PROTAGONISTS

Reacting to a recent news story about a suicidal teen finding solace in the new Tomb Raider, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers suggests that we need more vulnerable heroes:

I won’t deny that playing an over-the-top hero can be an awful lot of fun, but for a story to really grab me by the heartstrings, it’s got to appeal to my humanity. The typical heroic message of “don’t be scared” can bolster my resolve for a little while, but “be scared and do stuff anyway” is far more resonant.

On Play Like a Girl, Cary shares of her complicated relationship with the Tomb Raider franchise and observes that the inclusion of sexual assault in the recent series reboot isn’t “realistic” (CONTENT WARNING: discussion of rape):

I know what you may be thinking. They’re trying to make it more realistic and, sadly, rape often used as method of terror against women.

True.

But until I can get shot numerous times, hide behind a barrel, and after a few moments emerge back into fray at full health, video games will not be reality and while Tomb Raider is more realistic is it not realism. Still, the developers felt in necessary to include this scene. Why couldn’t the man have simply threatened to kill her? Pull a knife to her neck? Put a gun to her head? Why did he have to objectify and sexualize her? Bring to life a very real fear for millions of women all over the world?

[…] If you think I’m being a little too sensitive about this, I’ll ask you to picture one of the games I mentioned above – Uncharted, Far Cry, or Dishonored – and image one of those male leads being threatened with rape. Seems silly and out of place, doesn’t it?

Over on Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez has a conversation with fellow columnist Kirk Hamilton (yeah, he co-wrote it, BUT) on a certain inevitable compare-and-contrast: Tomb Raider vs Uncharted.

LIFE AND SUCH

Writing in her own blog, Leigh Alexander meditates on what really attracts us to simulation games:

What’s interesting is the way games that simulate life slot into our real lives. They give us a sense of control over the uncontrollable, they flex the part of our brain that make us feel like skilled managers of growth. Within the context of a system, elements feel manageable.

They call some large-scale simulations “god games” because you play god – but maybe they take a role in our lives like religion, a repetitive ritual that makes us feel less afraid, like success is always attainable because the system is fair.

Back on Kotaku, Tina Amini shares some even-handed tips on balancing a gaming hobby with adult life.

FEATURES

Kill Screen’s Michelle Young offers up an interesting essay on the new SimCity as modernist artifact.

On Not Enough Shaders, Emily Rogers relates the immense (and occasionally, difficult to believe) history of Howard Lincoln, former attack dog lawyer for Nintendo of America.

And the shining star of Polygon, Tracey Lien, has a new feature up on the birth and success of FTL.

DEVELOPMENT

Critical Distance doesn’t feature only critics– we’re also interested in the experiences and observations of designers from all aspects of development.

On her personal blog, interactive fiction legend Emily Short has posted some valuable design notes on why her new IF engine, Versu, is designed around Jane Austen’s world of “precisely defined manners.”

Meanwhile, free-to-play and social game veteran Laralyn McWilliams delivers a swift gutpunch in this recent Gamasutra feature, which connects her personal experience with the ethics of monetization:

Social and social/mobile companies are trapped. Faced with an aggressive marketplace and skyrocketing costs, jobs and even whole companies are at stake. It’s hard to justify turning your back on a proven model. To do that, you have to take risks. You have to look beyond data and understand its emotional context. You have to be in the game for the long haul and not for whatever increases tomorrow’s profit. You have to see players as your allies instead of test subjects.

You have to stop thinking like GLaDOS and start thinking more like Stephen Jay Gould.

On Gaming as Women, #1reason founder Filamena holds an interview with Gillian Fraser, lead developer of Wicked Fantasy. And on her studio’s Rat King blog, German indie developer Jana Reinhardt wonders why the local indie scene isn’t more prominent.

GET OUT THERE AND PLAY SOME GAMES

Never been to SXSW and wonder what it’s like? Leigh Alexander has a Twine game for you.

And everyone has by now heard about the dad who hacked Donkey Kong to let his daughter play as Pauline, but have you heard about the female animator who hacked Zelda to play as the titular princess? File under: awesome.

AND THE REST

There is still time to submit for this month’s Blogs of the Round Table theme on the subject of female role models!

As always, Critical Distance relies on your submissions to make This Week in Videogame Blogging the best that it can possibly be. Remember that we are always accepting your links by email and Twitter.

Finally, this year’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is fast on the approach, and I am pleased to announce that no less than three of Critical Distance’s editors –Katie Williams, Mattie Brice and yours truly, Kris Ligman– will be in attendance at the conference. Drop by and say hello! Or at the very least pay a visit to Mattie’s panel on March 27th along with Brenda Romero, Robin Hunicke and more!

In the year 2148, commenters on Brainy Gamer discovered the remains of an ancient spacefaring civilization. In the decades that followed, these mysterious artifacts revealed startling new blog topics, enabling travel to new critical heights. The basis for this incredible technology was a force that controlled the very fabric of space, time and the ludodecahedron.

They called it the greatest discovery in game critic history.

The civilizations of the blogosphere call it…

In this adventure you play Commander Kris Ligman, the galaxy’s most desk-bound human Spectre. Press [Spacebar] to skip this narrative flavor text we worked so hard on at any time. Go on, just try it, see if we care.

EPISODE 1: MORE THAN A NUMBERS PROBLEM

Commander Ligman’s first encounter starts in the humble human colony of Gamespot, where Alliance Navy Chief Petty Officer Carolyn Petit aggressively criticizes game development’s unwillingness to include women characters:

Right now, the fear that big-budget games about women won’t sell is self-fulfilling. Developers are afraid to make and properly market big games with female protagonists out of a fear that they don’t sell, but if developers don’t make and properly market those games, they don’t have a chance to sell. It’s time for industry leaders to abandon the antiquated notions and tired excuses they sometimes trot out when talk turns to female protagonists.

Elsewhere, on the planet Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez reveals that the lack of women presenters at the Playstation 4 presser goes much deeper than a numbers game– it reflects a larger, system problem of erasing women role models from tech fields. Or Reapers. Possibly it’s Reapers. Shh.

Also on Kotaku, we overhear Evan Narcisse in conversation with David Brothers on how to increase racial representation both within games and in the development industry. Press [Left-Click] to join conversation.

EPISODE 2: IT’S A GREAT BIG WORLD OUT THERE

Critical biotic commando John Brindle of The New Statesman suggests that while the predicted epoch of top-down political games as propaganda appears to have failed to materialize, grassroots, bottom-up political games like September 12 and Cart Life represent a growing genre.

Captain Terrence Jarrad of the PC Powerplay battalion has released the complete interview with the directors of IRL Shooter a “real life” FPS (don’t they call those LARPs?).

Existing in a world where air cars do not, Gamasutra’s Mike Rose presents a fascinating experiment using SimCity to model, and diagnose, his town’s traffic congestion problem.

EPISODE 3: IT’S THE MATRIX, NEO

Joker, quit using your out-of-date sci-fi movie references, no one thinks you’re funny. (Except EDI.)

Anyway– while it’s no doubt a familiar approach to some of her readers out there, Commander Ligman still appreciated this analysis by Push Select’s Mark Jensen using Final Fantasy VII to illustrate several philosophical tenets of existentialism.

EPISODE 4: A NEW HOPE

Seriously, Joker. Stop.

Elsewhere, back with the plot, Commander Ligman discovers a mighty entity that must be destroyed before it consumes another race of synthetics: the Bit Creature! It’s already claimed Gavin Craig, who this week turns his gaze on a particular scene in Heavy Rain which not only misdirects the player but breaks the rules of the gameplay (and possibly space-time) entirely:

We’re used to and know how to read unreliable narrators in books and film. We’re even familiar with unreliable characters in games. The “would you kindly” revelation in BioShock is jarring, but it’s also frequently discussed as a high point in game narrative and not as evidence of a broken game. With some very rare (and usually clearly signaled — think of the Scarecrow sequences in Batman: Arkham Asylum) exceptions, what the player sees is treated as objectively reliable. It becomes difficult to imagine functioning in most games if what you see isn’t what, for the game’s purposes, is really there. In Heavy Rain, however, just for a moment, the camera itself becomes an unreliable narrator.

Admiral Robert Yang of the SSV Radiator muses on how we might think of game narrative as improvisational theater, and not just on a “yes, and” level:

[L]ongform improv comedy involves actors cooperating to “find the game” — to find the core of a joke. Each actor makes “offers” to expand upon a premise and move action forward, hopefully toward a funny destination, and usually, actors err on always accepting offers (“saying yes”) and building upon it since “blocking” offers frustrates your scene partners. However, it’s very possible to “say yes” to a premise while still “blocking” the “game.”

Finding himself lost in a non-Euclidean alternate universe not of his own design, Corporal Zolani Stewart transmits a few notes on nature soundscapes as narrative design in Antichamber.

Back with Gamasutra, specialist Sebastian Alvarado presents the latest installment of his series on nanotechnology, this time focusing on the Nanosuit from Crysis.

Writing for his own blog, known rogue agent Jay Barnson (call sign: “Rampant Coyote”) categorizes some recurring post-apocalyptic game setting variants.

Citadel publication Games That Exist sees Alex Pieschel presenting us with a long-form look at the oeuvre of designer Michael Brough.

Elsewhere, Fabien Sanglard has been found disseminating a four-part deep-read of the source code of Duke Nukem 3D.

Not to be outdone, special agent Liz “ellaguro” Ryerson takes us through a close analysis of John Romero’s and Tom Hall’s level design in Wolfenstein 3D Episode 3.

Shane Liesegang (wanted by the Council on suspicion of working for Bethesda) suggests we should look at Skyrim not as a necessarily representational work but as impressionist gameplay:

[The] realism exists in this kind of ever-shifting bubble around the player. The area you see looks and feels as real as we can make it, but the relationships between things dilate and compress to accommodate a good gameplay experience. That mountain in the distance would likely be 10-20 miles away based on the amount of atmospheric color shifting going on, but in the game you could be there in a matter of minutes without even hitting the sprint button.

It all kind of hangs together because our brains aren’t great at processing long-term experiences at that same immediate level – realizing that it didn’t take you nearly long enough to reach the peak requires active reflection, and the game doesn’t really give you any reason to reflect on that particular experience.

EPISODE 5: (OMNI)DEVTOOLS

Captain Sophie Houlden of the Unity task force calls for further tolerance of the Twine Revolution and other code-light development tools:

back before I learnt how to make games, I was really passionate about my 3D art (it was originally my intention to never program at all, I was all about the visual art) I hung out on deviantArt and shared my work and it was cool. but then tools appeared that made certain things easier; poser, terragen and similar software let people make 3D models without even requiring an understanding of the 3D building blocks; faces, vertices etc.

I was seriously miffed, I had worked crazy hard to make character models, and these people had the nerve to submit poser models alongside mine as though they were equal? it wasn’t right, it wasn’t fair. I had worked hard and these people had barely worked at all.

Ladies and Gentlemen, if you find yourself thinking like this you are an asshole, and you are in the middle of a tantrum.

EPISODE 6: RUN AWAY! RUN AWAAAAY!

Great. Who drove the Mako right into a Thresher Maw nest?

Known Rampant Coyote associate Lars Doucet was spotted writing this guest post with a thoughtful look at the mechanic of escaping battles. Just like we’re doing, right now. Reverse, reverse!

Elsewhere, C-Sec lieutenant Jill Scharr warns Citadel residents of the real Red Menace: Tetris!

By 1988, Tetris was the highest-selling computer game in the U.S., available for purchase on the Commodore 64, Super Famicom, and Apple II and IBM personal computers. The question of who owned the rights – and on which devices – was still hotly contested, particularly between Atari, who acquired it from Microsoft, and Nintendo, who acquired it through Spectrum Holobyte and began distributing it through a publisher named – if you can believe it – Bullet Proof Software. Coincidence? Perhaps. In any case, Bullet Proof worked hard to secure the rights to Tetris across multiple devices. They were hoping to prepackage the insidious little game with their upcoming portable handheld console, called a Game Boy. Facilitated by this little machine, Tetris would grow even further, spreading beyond the arcades, living rooms and office cubicles where it was once constrained. The great big Tetris board called Earth was starting to get dangerously full. And all of the pieces were red.

President Reagan sought to fight Communism with his “Star Wars” initiative, but the Soviet Union countered with a gambit out of Star Trek, a Kobayashi Maru that we were never meant to solve. An unbeatable scenario whose purpose was not to teach us, but to leach us, to drain us dry of enterprise and rational thought, to strand us in a wasteland of wasted hours.

Carl Sagan help us all.

EPISODE 7: TAKE A BREAK

Fresh back from those damned Thresher Maw ambushes, Commander Ligman investigates a report on Gamasutra by Ben Serviss on a few different possible models for what he dubs “meditative games.”

EPISODE 8: YOU, ME AND KENJI ENO

Elsewhere along the cutting edge of Gamasutra blogs, Christian Nutt pay tribute to the work of the recently deceased Kenji Eno.

EPISODE 9: I RATE THIS NAVEL 8.5/10

Reacting to the infamous blog spat between New York Times car critic John Broder and Tesla’s Elon Musk, probable Citadel dissident Sam Machkovech speculates on a future where game companies similarly refer to play data to contest bad reviews.

Kambyero’s earthborn Job Duanan confesses that he finds Earthbound difficult to write about. Press [Left Click] to engage.

No, you pressed [ESC]. Stop. No, don’t go to the language menu. Hey!

FOLGE 10: AUF DEUTSCH

Our new “foreign correspondent” Johannes Köller sends word of recent activity in some of the German colonies.

We start with Videogame Tourism’s Rainer Sigl, whose English-language articles have reached Kommandantin Ligman’s desk several times in the past. Here, Sigl discusses Dead Space 3, and in our correspondent’s words:

Sigl [...] wonders what it might have taken to make it truly terrifying: Vulnerability, Pruning (of locations and NPCs) and Unreliable Perception, something to turn it into a subjective body horror experience a la Cronenberg, with constant doubts as to your own health and sanity.

On superlevel.de, Dominik Johann pens a love letter to the Twine Revolution, and in particular Christine Love’s Even Cowgirls Bleed. Quote Johann (in translation): “Twine and its users don’t give a shit about norms and conventions. Punkrock!”

Okay, that’s enough, and Kommandantin Ligman’s German voice actress sounds weird. Let’s switch back over to English-language pieces for now.

EPISODE 11: SHUT IT DOWN

We must’ve missed some intervening DLC chapter which explained the transition here, but it seems that Commander Ligman’s subordinate Cameron Kunzelman has gone and made the actual Citizen Kane of games, so we can all go home early. Nevermind that Reaper thing, we guess.

EPISODE 12: SELECT ENDING COLOR

That’s it. That’s really it. Did you feel your decisions were meaningful?

If not, please use the email submission form or @ us on Twitter to send in your recommendations for next week. Or just pop on over to Alan Williamson’s Blogs of the Round Table to increase our Galactic Readiness Rating. No pressure.

Still here, huh? In that case, press [Shift+Spacebar] for New TWIVGB Plus. Enjoy the roundup again with all your EXP and equipment! Just try to romance someone other than Garrus this time, okay? We’re getting concerned.