"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…Gathering [June 6 – 10, 2016] | In Media Res In Media Res features a series of posts about card game narratives, aesthetics and dramatic game design.
” Monopoly and Tic-tac-toe are both played on paper, but that fact does not go far in defining the games….
…other, these pieces look at games about seduction, consumption and leadership.
“The aquatic feel is real. Blobs waiting to be hoovered up all bob slightly, as if subject to invisible eddies and currents. The lumpy turning circle of your snake suggests pulling against some kind of
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I’m excited to be hearing so much positive feedback about the new site design. I’ve been working hard to make this into a meaningful improvement to the experience of people coming here for the first time or checking in on a regular basis.
Partly it’s been about aesthetics: things should look cleaner now, and we have more tools available for creating fully-responsive pages. Plus, if you’re on a compatible browser, you get to see these gorgeous polygon shards containing preview images, rendered on-the-fly.
It’s also about function. We’ve aimed to make it easier to see what we
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…Animal Crossing Helps Me Cope On A Day Like Today Gita Jackson redirects the notion of escapism into a wider, humanist idea of aesthetics and values.
“[…] deep in another bout of depression, my dad told me that every day he wakes up, stares out the kitchen window, and tries to think of all the things he is grateful for. The kitchen of our family home overlooks a modest backyard with a few trees and a creek lousy with mosquitos. My mother was, and still is, an ardent gardener and on our back porch she grew basil…
Thank you for all your support for our fundraising campaign. Our next fundraising target is $1900 – once we reach this, we can reboot the Month in Let’s Plays feature, as well as the Critical Discourse letter series.
Critical Let’s Plays are a form that deserves more attention. Whether livestreamed or prerecorded and edited, Let’s Plays give critics an opportunity to show-don’t-tell, and to demonstrate their reading of a game in a more immediate way. An enthusiastic video editor can even make a Let’s Play speak for itself as an argument about a game’s aesthetics or meanings, without
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What’s up, Critical Distancers? DJ Melissa here, spinning the sickest new written beats in the gameosphere in This Week in Videogame Blogging!
That Dragon, Cancer and Its Emotional Impact
That Dragon, Cancer, an interactive look into a couple’s experience with their son’s fight with cancer, released on January 12th and touched many heartstrings.
Over at The Guardian, Keith Stuart compares his experience playing That Dragon, Cancer with his own experience dealing with the death of his father.
Stephen Addcox from GameChurch and interactive fiction author Emily Short examine the game’s usage of contradicting aesthetics
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I love it when critics find ways to get a point across without words. Images can be just as valuable a critical tool as writing; they offer a different set of techniques for demonstrating what a game is doing or what it means to you. Normally, visual essays and photojournalism are thin on the ground in these roundups, but this week I’ve been spoiled rotten with pieces that use visual expression to say something about games and aesthetics.
Let’s start with the broader topic of how to engage critically with games. A few different approaches
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…aesthetics in conversation with a longer trajectory of popular culture.
“All healthy cultures must
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…that “the websites, displays, and animations dedicated to the dark side of history do not offer its users a chance to shape content according to their own aesthetic preferences.” But what if someone prefers the aesthetics of the torturer, or of erasure? […] What he advocates is, essentially, the gamification of atrocity, which would allow newcomers to the darkest chapters of history to customize their encounter with the past. The past would be up for grabs. “
What kinds of ways of knowing become possible through game design? These two pieces consider spatiality and the…
…the site more navigable, so try to use the more popular ones as far as possible. The full list is here.
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