I thought glasses only clinked in movies, but nothing made people get closer than $3 Sangrias and a mural of a woman lying across a pool table. Yes, it is the eve of the Game Developers Conference, or as the game industry calls it, “Christmas”. But even with such tempting distractions in store, and Google Reader threatening the existence of our RSS feeds, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging!

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

Being Women’s Herstory month, the gaming community still has gender issues on its mind, and this week showed many different perspectives on the evolving conversation. We would be remiss if we didn’t include this insightful conversation between Yannick LeJacq and Rhianna Pratchett about the videogame woman of the year so far. The interview refuses to take a strong, one-sided stance on the game, as does the personal disclosure about the game from Rhea Monique:

“Tomb Raider triggered me, sure. But it didn’t do it needlessly. It didn’t do it tactlessly. It didn’t do it for a cheap rise. It instead captured a real emotion and a real experience millions of women will encounter in their life. Some of them won’t be as lucky as I was. Some of them won’t be as lucky as Lara Croft was, either. Some of them won’t survive. Some of them will be silenced forever.

Some of them will die and some of their attackers will live.”

But for most, Lara Croft isn’t enough. Samantha Allen at The Border House outlines why enough is enough, there should be more women protagonists in videogames by now. In the same vein, Maggie Greene illustrates via her knowledge of the brave women in Chinese history, noting that the kinds of women we need in games aren’t necessarily the most obvious ones:

“I don’t mean to imply that it’s only these types of ‘quiet’ strength that are worthy of attention, just that perhaps we don’t give it as much attention as it deserves. It’s something that is harder to valorize than the more obviously ‘heroic’ qualities. Qiu Jin is a clear hero, and she hits some of those points we like: she shunned the expected female roles of her time (leaving her husband and children to head to Japan), she embraced the idea of revolutionary violence, she was photographed with weaponry. Delicate Chinese flower she was not, despite having bound feet. But there is heroism in Xu Zihua’s story: it is not bombastic, and it doesn’t involve assassination plots, but it speaks to a person who willingly bore a tremendous responsibility in a volatile time.”

Making an unexpected appearance at BuzzFeed, Courtney Stanton explains why she isn’t shocked about the reaction surrounding Adria Richards, and in fact, has come to expect it:

“One time I was afraid to leave my house because of the internet. My unforgivable sin was refusing to just be cool about rape jokes in a gamer comic and its associated fan convention’s merchandise. Sometimes the hill you find yourself dying on is weird and unexpected; I feel a lot of empathy for Richards in this. But as final lines in the sand go, “I would like to attend a professional conference without multiple instances of men being juvenile, unprofessional, and just plain gross” doesn’t seem like an outrageous demand to me.”

In an interesting twist, Michael Thomsen makes a case against the irresponsible use of ‘dudebro,’ and how the community’s lack of rigor actually marginalizes certain experiences key to understanding the typically overgeneralized demographic of shooter fans.

Tell Me a Story I’ve Never Heard Before

The blogosphere is often grappling with the way videogames deal with narrative, and this week is no different. Over at PopMatters, Mark Filipowich extrapolates how homes are underused in games as narrative contrast and our own Eric Swain teases out similarities between cinematic time jumping and that of Thirty Flights of Loving. Line Hollis talks about how Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable work as interrogations of typical narrative structures in games and the determinism therein:

“While both games are about storytelling, they approach the theme from opposite directions. A story, traditionally, is a sequence of events that follows a chain of cause and effect. The Stanley Parable is about how story structures mock the idea of free will. Dear Esther is about how people force incomplete and untrustworthy information into story structures. One features a protagonist trapped in a deterministic world, and the other a protagonist trapped in a non-deterministic one. One of these turns out to unsettle players much more than the other.”

Worth mentioning also, back in June of last year an unnamed author over at Still Eating Oranges talked about how not all narrative structures rely on conflict, and the assumptions we have are very much ethnocentric.

It Hurts So Good

The strange relationship between pain and pleasure that games give to players has been a focus of interest with gaming thinkers lately. Kyle Carpenter at Medium Difficulty talks about the satisfying play in Trials Evolution and how it relates to J.G. Ballad’s Crash. On his blog, Robert Yang muses about how The Elder Scrolls games deal with murder and how the games set up an interesting system to communicate gravity to their murder. And thought notoriously painful, Brendan Keogh also reflects on his isolated nature in games and how Dark Souls complicates his single-player experience with multiplayer influence.

The Bonds Between Us

Relationships and intimacy is a long standing fascination of game critics, and writers continue to push our thinking on how relating can happen in games. Jordan Rivas speaks to the Citadel DLC of Mass Effect 3 and how it created a feeling homecoming, of friendship that essentially fulfilled your needs for some bonding. This time on Medium Difficulty, Mark Filipowich renews the conversation about intimacy in games through the Prince of Persia games, and how they explored the Prince’s lack of emotional bonding. Over at his personal blog, Brad Galloway shows the subtle ways sexuality politics works against diversity in the newest Fire Emblem while Matt Marrone exercises his relationship anxieties through playing Spaceteam with his girlfriend and friends at Unwinnable:

“Is your former college roommate’s wife overseeing the V-pod? She’s furthest away from you at the table. Maybe you’re not saying it loud enough. Maybe she’s never really liked you.

Or perhaps it’s your girlfriend who’s ignoring you. You’ve been training her to do it in your spare time, anyway, with your incessant rambling, and now you’ve doomed yourself to an eternity floating through the empty vacuum of space.”

Utter Miscellany

Sometimes game bloggers don’t like to be easily categorized, much like the confusing experiement that is presenting Dwarf Fortress as a museum exhibit, as highlighted here by Bill Coberly. Megan Patterson speaks to Actual Sunlight‘s Will O’Neill about the nebulously personal, but inspiring direction game development is headed. Going in a different direction, Mohammed Taher gives a detailed run-down on the influences and progress of game development in the Middle East.

And if all that was too heavy for you, perhaps instead of the top 40 lists of attractive women in tech, why don’t you try out Darius Kazemi’s ClickBait, created in response to the piece?

In San Francisco this week? Make sure to say hello to your favorite Critical Distance contributors, and come see my panel with the very timely theme of women in the games industry. If you cannot join in the wonderful festivities that is GDC, fear not, as we will be back here, same time and same place, with even more juicy videogame blogging. You can still reach us by email and Twitter for recommending good reads, which is always immensely helpful! And don’t forget about this month’s Blogs of the Round Table.

Until next time!

The sun over the Critical Distance virtual offices was blotted by clouds and naked branches scratched at the windows. I was alone in the room, listening to the howling wind that matched my intentions, full access to the site at my fingertips. When Kris Ligman is away, Mattie Brice gets to play. LiveJournal open, it’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging.

05:28 PM February 8th, 2013

It’s the first day of the Mattie take-over, and I’m not quite sure what my first move should be to dethrone the powers that be and make Critical Distance mine. Reading Robert Yang’s meditation on Cardboard Computer’s Limits & Demonstrations, how some more conceptual games resist being played, and players’ relationship with cheating. Maybe I should make a post that defies being read?

09:34 AM February 11th, 2013

Sorry I haven’t been keeping up with my journal, I had to initiate my first phase in weakening games criticism for my eventual rule:

Herein lies the problem- when you leave out the personal, all that’s left is the status quo. Because that ‘standard’ consists of the values of a particular type of culture associated with the hegemonic, privileged class, there is actually something personal and subjective going on all the time. Thus, by leaving out the particular experiences of the silenced and marginalized, it bars anyone from revealing the bias that exists within this supposed stoically neutral discourse. It takes away the vocal chords of a person in a room full of shouting.

But enough of such grand schemes. Today, Gus Mustrapa spun a legend of eternal struggle, an overlooked opera I felt represented the toiling emotions in my heart. The last time that happened was when I was 8 years old on my first art museum visit, when I, much like Richard Terrell, questioned whether I was fully capable of understanding the full experience of a piece. With a swing of a paddle, I bounced back to reality when Andrew Vanden Bossche sharply criticized the zeitgeist of mainstream reviews, in this case Arthur Gies’s Dead Space 3 review, much like my 5th grade teacher scolding me for calling out answers in class.

2:53 PM February 12th, 2013

I have a lot of feels swirling around today, mostly about how Anthony John Agnello’s observations on voice and silence affecting the game experience reminded me of the correlation between my habit to talk to myself in empty rooms and the commodification of pink haired girls in visual novels.

The rest of my day was gloomy, having to consider David Cage might be right about something, or so says Brad Gallaway when it comes to the non-gamers’ perception of videogames. To make matters worse, Simon Parkin over at New Statesman further complicates the violence in games issue more than my paradigm can handle.

10:15 PM February 13th, 2013

Did you know videogames made me an atheist? It totally makes sense now that Tom Dawson explained how games exercises our relationship with religion and how gods can be parasites:

I wonder, did anyone sit down to consider their own understanding of God before making these games? After all, these two examples can be viewed as commentaries on the nature and necessity of religion: in From Dust the Breath is created by the Men to aid them in their quest for survival amidst an incredibly hostile world, and Black & White’s opening sequence shows the god of that game being called into being by the fervent prayers of humans in need. In neither case is the god pre-existing, never claimed to be a creator – they are invented by societies which feel the need for them. The obvious insinuation is that is that people create gods, rather than the other way around, to benefit themselves. From these parallel beginnings the two games part ways and the nature of the human/deity relationship branches.

It also looks like many in the critical community are thinking of relationships the day for Valentine’s. I see Liz Ryerson’s questioning Duke Nukem 3D’s design and her intrigue as an allegory for the post-feminist Marxist’s plight with receiving chocolate on February 14th. Or take Lana Polansky’s experience with belonging and labels as the descent of neo-Derrida horsemen onto the videogame landscape.

8:29 PM February 14th, 2013

Dear internet, I had a wonderful Valentine’s Day! Let me tell you all about it:

At first, I woke up with a sense of panic, much like the vulnerability Jorge Albor speaks to in the tension between horror and co-op modes in games. Even worse, when I arrived to surprise my boyfriend at work with gifts, he wouldn’t answer his phone! But I remembered Keith Stuart working through the nuances of difficulty, and knew I had to be patient to win my prize:

So frustration is not a universal commodity. It’s okay in some games, let’s say, but it’s not necessarily okay in all of them. Indeed, some studios have developed clever ways to sidestep frustration. The Easy mode is the obvious one, and it has become prevalent now that games are a mass entertainment medium. Most narrative adventures will offer an option for players, ‘who just want to experience the story’. However, I can’t help but wonder if this is a dereliction of duty on their part – if you have produced a game with a win state, there should be a way of challenging inexperienced players without spoon-feeding them narrative sequences in between one-hit kills and dozens of lobotomised enemies.

Soon enough, I found him lying in the park where we whispered words only lovers should hear, much like Jason Rice’s memory of Talana from Star Control II and their intimate scene together. If there was ever a clearer metaphor for the last hours of Valentine’s day, is it Sean Sands’s confession on his personal relationship with violence and protecting his daughter’s innocence.

6:01 AM February 15th, 2013

My heart wants to sing like how critics want games to tell stories. Nick Dinicola at good ol’ PopMatters explains storytelling decisions in action games, akin to past lovers who ignore me at Starbucks but are friendly over a cheap bottle of wine:

[Binary Domain’s] Dan is a very plain [person] when you think about it. There’s not much to him beyond the white, rugged male soldier cliché, but because the game encourages us to forge multiple personas for him depending on the group, he comes out in the end feeling like a well rounded, fully realized person. Not an archetype.

Throughout my life, I’ve wanted to be in a game or live as a musical, and now I know that combination isn’t as absurd as it might sound, according to Aaron Matteson. And it seems like things have been getting too personal for some peoples’ tastes, so Andrew comes to task again to interrogate the lack of conversation surrounding the craft of personal writing. He will be a great number one for my eventual rule. So would Sam Machkovech, who’s frankness about the impossible position game critics are in is, like, so meta. To make up for it, Ian Bogost writes three reviews for Proteus, which spoke to my experience of being in a bar with a game critic, performance artist, and a synesthete on an acid trip.

11:59 PM February 16th, 2013

My first wave of subversion is almost complete. All I need left is L. Rhodes’ plunge into the murky waters of narrative and puzzles in games, an obvious analogy to my anxieties of post-feminism and choosing which shoes to wear:

Puzzles, as it happens, are one of the things that distinguishes games from many forms of narrative art. Not that those narrative arts don’t contain puzzles. It is, rather, a difference in kind. Both Agatha Christie and Professor Layton present crime and punishment as a kind of puzzle, but it’s doubtful that a novelization of a game like Antichamber will ever be able to achieve more than an awkward approximation. That’s something to celebrate, if you ask me; in the Venn diagram of games and art, it’s the critically ignored spaces that don’t overlap which interest me most.

12:00 AM February 17th, 2013

This might be over for now, but I will be back again. Send me leads of subversive content through the site’s email submission form or mention a piece to Critical Distance’s Twitter. Make sure to use code words, so Kris doesn’t catch on to my plan.

And check out this month’s Blogs of the Round Table too.

Until next time!