Search Results for “bodies” – Page 6

April 8th

…in part, it’s because games are so tightly coupled to consumer electronics that technical progress outstrips aesthetic progress in the public imagination. […] Thatgamecompany’s work thus offers us an unusual window into the creative evolution of a game maker, one in which the transition from green students to venerable artists took place before our very eyes over a short half-decade on a single and very public videogame platform.

Lastly, Jason Killingsworth has a theory on the source of Journey‘s aesthetic power: the jumping.

Our real-world bodies are dense with fat, sinew and muscle. Gravity pins us…

April 22nd

…names attached to bodies. That was just an illusion, though. No matter how much I liked Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the lesson that I got from the book was that power will never rest in the hands of a creator who will not play the studio game–every famous director is a puppet. That’s the reason Coppola decided to open up a vineyard.

Another iconoclast, Richard Dillio, has some strong words for the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco, an article which really comes into its own in the final third:

If you were a big cheese over…

July 29th

…the matter is [Ryan Perez] who went on a rampage against Felicia Day is just a sexist who doesn’t accept that woman have anything to offer other than their bodies, full stop. No need to make excuses for him. Again, that type exists in all sorts of fandoms, and not just geek ones. […] I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard men say that women only listen to music in order to be more appealing to male music fans. I honestly don’t know what guys like this think women do with all our spare time that we’re not…

June 2nd

…game dev limbs with a co-written essay toward an erotics of videogames, and play as political, subversive act. (Content warning: abstract nude figures, sexual subject matter.)

I desire living play:

Play that collaborates across artforms, across bodies.

Play intended to “provoke admiration” of other humans.

Play for human, not for capitalist death machine.

The goal isn’t to replace one corrupted form of play with some recovered, true one. Instead: exploration, acknowledgment of difference. Explosion of the lie that there are right/wrong ways to touch, to fuck, to create, to play.

CHEW ON…

August 25th

…Always Going Home

While I appreciate Eric’s efforts to arrange our Gone Home recommendations according to spoiler content, I have no such patience. Sorry! Trust that most if not all of these will have spoiler warnings in their own bodies of text, where it’s appropriate.

Actually, on the subject of spoilers, let’s start out with this essay by Scott Nichols: on what constitutes a “spoiler” for the game, and why our unwillingness to “spoil” a particular point actually reveals a kind of latent homophobia.

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s get to the rest of…

January 26th

…archetype is too widespread to ignore, but insist that that wasn’t their central source of inspiration and such, American policy and social convention regarding prison culture isn’t wholly relevant to the design of Prison Architect.

Resistance is Futile: Invasion of the Academic Game Critics

The Journal of Games Criticism has just been released, an open-access game studies journal whose flagship piece by Brendan Keogh, “Across Worlds and Bodies: Criticism in the Age of Video Games,” has sparked discussion about the relationship between game academia and game criticism produced outside of that system. Keogh argues that the preoccupation among…

February 2nd

Delicious friends, how glad I am to see you! Come closer, take a look around. I have brought you the finest in games writing, hand-picked for your enjoyment.

Try a bite! It’s This Week In Videogame Blogging.

The Formalisms of Discussing Formalism

“Across Worlds and Bodies: Criticism in the Age of Video Games,” Brendan Keogh’s call for more close readings in the Journal of Games Criticism continues to make waves. Lana Polanski and Zolani Stewart discuss the kyriarchal structures of academia at length in this untitled podcast, while Mattie Brice weighs in with her own

…

March 9th

…Holodeck

Ben Kuchera’s well intentioned, if perhaps poorly executed opinion piece on Gender Swap, a two-person VR simulation in which players briefly experience ‘inhabiting’ one another’s body, has garnered a bit of criticism.

Rose & Time developer Sophie Houlden outlines over the course of two articles what Gender Swap (and its too-eager embrace by cisgender writers) fails to account for:

You haven’t had to experience with how people treat that body. You haven’t felt pressure to change based on the expectations of having that body. The bodies we are born with force us to have experiences…

October 19th

…from the ‘Influences’ panel, in which she discusses the hard road to really waking up to what games can do and be:

this “new flesh” [from David Cronenberg’s Videodrome] is as another way of looking at digital devices as extension of our bodies – and embracing them as body parts we exercise full autonomy over. because if we don’t, we can easily fall under the order of strong, powerful cultural programming that favors the aims of corporate ideology and the military-industrial complex.

[…]

the problem with fighting back against the tide of all this powerful cultural programming

…

October 26th

…in the vein of military games, over at Vice the seasoned Leigh Alexander attempts to pin down that most inscrutable of creatures, Metal Gear Solid 3. In doing so, she reveals some of its least talked about, yet incredibly compelling commentary on the dirtiness of war.

Hollow Bodies High

At Polygon, Claire Hosking shares a solid takedown of the Damsel in Distress trope and just why, precisely, it’s creatively lazy. (Content warning: Polygon’s choice of stock imagery peppered throughout the piece features close-ups of terrified women tied up and gagged. Why this seemed a good idea to anyone,…