Search Results for:

multiplayer

February Roundup: ‘Buddy Systems’

…relates to the avatar’s thuggish friends compared with the rest of the NPCs in the game’s world. Whoo. Dark.

The Rev chronicles the great battle on Google’s Ingress, a multiplayer augmented reality game where people are aligned in teams based on their real life cities. Our intrepid narrator then relates to us how playing to the game’s virtual goals are accomplished physically. Pictures of each moment as they happened in the virtual and physical worlds particularly point to how Ingress crosses the boundaries between each kind of play.

Finally, I decided to throw my hat in the ring…

March 29th

…did plenty of interesting writing. Let’s start with Austin Walker’s “Cop Out“, which takes Hardline to task in an incredibly thoughtful review:

And so Battlefield Hardline speaks to our context, too (whether or not that’s what the developers would like). It speaks a politics even as it flails in the single player campaign, desperate to avoid saying anything about the dead black boy on the pavement—about 75 unarmed black bodies on the ground. It flails in the multiplayer, eager to wave aside any critiques of police militarization. It flails and flails and flails. And the flailing is the

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August 30th

…Tourism, Eron Rauch is embarking on an exciting new series dedicated to demystifying Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) and helping to explain their appeal as a spectator sport on a global stage.

Meanwhile, in discussing eSports’ grassroots cousin in the international fighting game community, Ian Danskin attempts to pin down (video) how an 14-year-old game like Super Mash Bros. Melee has garnered a fandom and competitive scene based around its players testing the limits of the game’s systems.

Of Lore and Character

At Literally Games, Michael Hancock offers a dense but engrossing piece comparing the lore of…

August Roundup: ‘Nostalgia’

…and Clank: Up Your Arsenal as fewer and fewer people played its competitive multiplayer mode. Over time, those matches fade into moments in Hernandez’s memory until only the background music stays with him.

…Wow.

What a roundup! I get the feeling that this roundup is going to stay with me for a long time. Hopefully, though, my rose-coloured glasses will blot out my fatigue and dire need for the bathroom when I look back on this post.

Once again, Past Alan Williamson deserves an applause for coming up with the theme and if you find yourself longing…

October 4th

…series of images. Elsewhere, in Gamasutra’s Expert Blogs, Laralyn McWilliams makes the argument that while multiplayer online games are accustomed to allowing players a range of emotional expressions, single-player games often stunt an emotional response:

Most single-player games start a conversation with players and then leave them emotionally stranded. We handle pivotal character moments in cutscenes, or when they’re in live gameplay we leave players only able to run, jump, or crouch. We’re creating a culture where the expected — and only — response to emotional moments is mute acceptance.

[…]

To that extent, single-player games

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April 3rd

…game have been affected by alleged economic bleed from the outside world.

(Content warning for everything below this line: graphic descriptions of abuse, harassment, some quotations of oppressive slurs, and references to child sexual abuse.)

  • Griefers or saviours? The Elite Dangerous players causing a rift in space In another example of massively multiplayer space-war driven by grievances outside of the magic circle, Wesley Yin-Poole investigates the mob that is harassing players of Elite Dangerous it considers not hard-core enough.
  • Tabletop Gaming has a White Male Terrorism Problem An extremely harrowing piece details the…

May 15th

…problems of making a game out of World War I | Alphr Despite the title, the strength of this piece is that it doesn’t limit its scope to a simplistic moral inquiry into the propriety of a bombastic videogame representation of WWI, but interviews academic historians to bring out informed perspectives on how the conflict dynamics of WWI might play out in the specific context of a neverending multiplayer online conflict between large teams of antagonists.

“Remember when I told you that I preferred civilized conversations”

Building in part on the Battlefield 1 controversy, these pieces address

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June 12th

…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.

  • Gamasutra: David H. Schroeder’s Blog – Notes from the Infancy of Network Gaming (1990) Returning to a more documentary form of writing, David H. Schroeder shares an article from the year 1990 speculating on design issues that would arise as games began to be developed for online multiplayer contexts.

    • ” Monopoly and Tic-tac-toe are both played on paper, but that fact does not go far in defining the games….

    July 4th

    …about game dynamics in a different light.

  • Animal Crossing Saved My Life | Women Write About Comics Rosie Knight shares a personal story about regaining a sense of safety and ownership by caring for a game world. Content warning: graphic descriptions of intimate partner violence.
  • The Desert and the Valley: Games As Refuge | Deorbital Dante Douglas discusses how games can heal by offering forgiveness.
  • Stories from Dark Souls and Journey, or “How Chirping Helped My Anxiety” | Not Your Mama’s Gamer Jynx Boyne talks about how positive multiplayer experiences can use limited communication to counteract the…

    • July Roundup: ‘Spectacle’

    …to stomp all over everything. You have other things to think about.”

    It’s a compelling piece with a rounded look at how war mechanics can be subversive, entertaining, and contribute to a larger theme all at the same time.

    Over at Kill Screen, Reed Underwood takes a look at how multiplayer games are increasingly developed to enhance an audience’s experience along with the players’. In fact, Underwood is bold enough to claim that gathering around something like a game is more significant than the thing itself:

    Ours is an era that likes to talk about art

    …