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multiplayer

May 3rd

…and the Lost Art of Casual Play | RE:BIND Emily Rose traces linages between Star Wars: Jedi Academy‘s more supportive and welcoming community and structural affordances in its multiplayer that allow for breathing space, chill time, and a certain etiquette.

“Our rhetoric and approach towards multiplayer gaming is now identifiably rooted in the sluggish rat race once found only in highly coordinated MMORPG raids. Now, more than ever, we need serene spaces of meditation mixed with challenging thoughtful gameplay, an act that brings us together instead of pushing us apart.”

Teachable Moments

In each

September 13th

…a lot more complicated than that? Understanding the design logics and structures in games that impede as well as facilitate positive social experiences is kind of an important thing right now, since so many of us are relying on games to fulfill needs they weren’t necessarily designed for. Two sturdy pieces this week detail some of the minutiae of these processes.

  • E-Sports, a.k.a. The Antisocial Medium | Corporate Future Nightmare World Brendan Vance delves into the antisociality and abuse baked into anonymized matchmaking.
  • Why Online Multiplayer Isn’t So Social – Uppercut Henry Ewins traces the complex relationship

October 2020

…are too often needlessly conflated in contemporary games criticism. (Manual captions)

  • How Much Does Multiplayer Population Matter? – Raycevick (14:40)

    Raycevick reckons the bottom-line of player numbers does sometimes affects the player’s core experience of multiplayer games, but far less frequently than is decried by “game is dead” online commentators. (Autocaptions)

  • Scary Month is Real

    I didn’t get around to playing any horror games this Halloween, but I did enjoy watching a whole bunch of videos about them.

    • Unhaunted Houses | Static Canvas – Thomas Ife (8:25)

      Thomas Ife records four brief

    This Month in Videogame Vlogging: February 2024

    …were just really great and didn’t fit into other broader discussions this month.

    • My Experience Acting and Writing for God of War: Ragnarok | ProZD (16:53) Voice actor SungWon Cho talks about his stint writing and doing the motion-capture for Ratatoskr in Sony Santa Monica’s God of War: Ragnarök.
    • Incorporating Accessibility into PVP Multiplayer Games | Access-Ability (14:36) Journalist Laura Kate Dale ponders the challenges and opportunities that creating multiplayer experiences that are accessible to people with disabilities might bring to the game-development table.

    Critical Chaser

    • Pollyanna (I believe in Mother 3) |

    Achievement Unlocked: Sex!

    …dehumanize its inhabitants. While this is in response to the recent MTV Multiplayer article on Alpha Protocol, she also takes a look at Mass Effect. As she points out:

    In addition, it perpetuates the narrative of the Nice Guy (described in Millar’s essay, and elsewhere): that men are entitled to sex from women if they follow the rules and do the right things, or in the case of Alpha Protocol, “select your responses wisely.” It is not only dangerous but just plain unrealistic to portray a world in which every single woman is a potential sex partner: in

    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    Flower

    …if “In the quest to find the Citizen Kane of video games, are we not in danger of ignoring the Fantasia of video games?”

    Much of the discussion of Flower centered on what traditional game elements it omits. Stephen Totilo reports in MTV Multiplayer on revelations by Jenova Chen at GDC that the team considered and discarded using timers, desert terrain, spells, and orbs; interestingly, they discarded these features not because players didn’t like them but because players reacted in a way that the team wasn’t looking for. Matthew of Magical Wasteland goes further in this direction, talking about…

    Gears of War

    …action sequences, even these calmer periods are overlaid with heavy-handed dialogue and attempts at stirring emotions. Everything about Gears of War feels loud and noticeable — even the moments when it’s trying to be subtle and reflective.

    If Gears of War is a series built around a dichotomy then nowhere is that more apparent than in the divide between the singleplayer/co-operative campaign and the multiplayer — especially the sequel’s Horde mode. Stripped of any narrative beyond ‘kill or be killed’, Horde mode is almost survival horror-like in its focus on the pure concept of staying alive in the face…

    Ten Years of Penny Arcade

    …the descriptions from Richard Bartle’s taxonomy of Gamers. Gabe is the Killer/Achiever while Tycho is the Wizard/Socializer. At E3 in 2003 Tycho is obsessing over game design ideas while Gabe gets ready to attack the Bungie booth for Halo 2’s sins. Gabe’s love of awful word puns is only matched by Tycho’s wordy sense of humor. Like Bartle’s argument that a solid multiplayer game must have all four archetypes to be successful, the comic’s coherence comes from the interplay between the two. Gabe is willing to make anything competitive, even a game like Crayon Physics. Tycho’s immense knowledge of all…

    February 28th

    …games can do for narrative.’

    Jamie Madigan takes inspiration from Penny Arcade and asks, ‘Why do we love genres so much?’

    Joana Caldas writing for The Border House on Local vs Online multiplayer [mirror] has some of the best use of captioning I’ve ever seen.

    I’m sure by now most have heard about or watched the DICE talk given by Jesse Schell but David Sirlin had a response, wondering whether external rewards are as unanimously positive [mirror] as Schell proposes. Following on from both, Dan Lawrence thinks a bit about the psychology of game design, inspired by…

    March 7th

    …off, our own Ben Abraham posted about the use of postmodern-style unreliability in narrator and narrative in games.

    And in a switch Ben sends me a post by Robert Yang on the expressive potential of Half-Life 2 character models and the importance of bridging more than just the visual uncanny valley.

    Last week L.B. Jeffries went back to analyzing multiplayer and took a look at the map structure in Modern Warfare 2 while this week he turned his critical eye to video game review ideology.

    Jonathan McCalmont from Futurismic.com looks at racial essentialism as an out of…