Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

Look up. There is a vast, majestic void filled with thousands of stars looking down at you. But are they really watching? Are they actually real? The horror of empty void fills your heart with terror.

With Kris Ligman gone for the week, Intern Mattie takes the mic to lead this precious town through the day. I know not to go to the Dog Park.

Welcome, to This Week in Videogame Blogging.

The Illegal Seizing of Motor Vehicles

Local scientists have blamed traffic congestion on the decline of car robberies in town, most likely due to so many people busy stealing virtual cars in Grand Theft Auto V. Concerned townsfolk worry about children growing up learning to not steal cars, but Alisha Karabinus pens a reassuring statement that children can tell the difference between reality and videogames with assistance from their parents. Anjin Anhut agrees that the game will not play tricks with our minds, since it doesn’t have a well enough grasp of satire to challenge the status quo:

When joking about any form of oppression out there, you need to make the oppressor the punchline, NOT the oppressed. When joking about any form of inequality, you need to make privileged people the butt of your joke, NOT the marginalized and disenfranchised.

I have just received a message from our vague, yet menacing government. It is tattooed on the arm of a faceless child who, somehow, still makes crying noises. They want me to announce a reminder that women are still considered the dominant gender, and all videogames would do well to remember that. Over at The Border House, right by Aunt Jenn’s Pizza Shop, Quinne asks when is enough enough, citing the toxic behavior and somewhat apathetic reaction of community leaders to gamer’s sexism and other horrible qualities. I know it’s unprofessional for me to editorialize, but I must say listeners, how long will we let publishers of all kinds who take our money to continue such rude, and illegal like everything else in this town, behavior? Paul Tassi seems to have an answer, saying that as long at GTA doesn’t have a lead woman character, none will be given the depth that such a game can afford.

Taking a different route, Tom Bissell shares a letter, hopefully not made with contraband writing utensils, to Niko of the previous GTA game, saying how the games resent gamers, and how he is aging out of that demographic. A truly touching piece. Rather than turn away from life-rending horror, Nate Ewert-Krocker embraces the grotesque qualities of the game and likens it to the horror genre, where everything is meant to be disturbing:

Both the world and the characters of GTA are meant to elicit both disgust and pity in the player. The counterpoint of those two emotions is what makes a grotesquerie so compelling: the player (or reader, or viewer, or what have you) wants to continue the narrative because they want to see whether or not the characters come to a place that’s less disgusting, less pitiful.

Mayor Leigh Alexander held a press conference this week, mostly staring at the sun, mouth agape, and emitting noises of unspeakable horrors. She concluded it with a list of government-sanctioned subversive games, to which she pointedly dismisses GTAV as a contestant. In the pressbox, journalist Brendan Keogh was too busy trying to take selfies within the game during her speech, and was promptly escorted to the ReEducation Camp.

Some Words From Our Sponsors

Is the world ready for the decadent evils of digital sports? We say yes. Jorge Albor recaptures how we are witnessing the emergence of a new sporting culture, that follows traditional sports’ footsteps.

Dan Solberg goes back to SimCity 2000 to talk about the architecture it predicted we’d have by now, and how real life stacks up to its vision. Don’t despair, dear listeners, I’m sure there’s an ominous, oak door that will take us to that promised world.

Our own Eric Swain goes to grips with Endgame: Syria, and reassures us of the inevitable: there is no paradise for those looking for it in the horrors of humanity. He says:

At one point, I thought I had done it. The regime was ousted with no sectarian violence, no destabilizing of the region, and no religious extremists emerging. The only downside was the loss of hospitals, utilities, and other basic facilities from functioning properly. I mentioned this on Twitter and got the response I deserved. “So you made a desert and called it peace?”

This segment is brought to you by PopMatters!

Stay Home, Or Else

The Secret Police are relieved to report that Old Man Ian Bogost has finally finished an oral rendition of his review on Gone Home, much to the enjoyment, or possibly chagrin, of his neighborly angels. I must admit listeners, I was concerned it was an evil incantation for an actual display of viscera whenever anyone said ‘visceral.’ Despite the tight watch on his modest home by the car lot, Daniel Joseph was able to spread subversive thoughts gained from Bogost’s words before the government could censor it:

There is nothing literary about Gone Home, if we are to weigh it against the history and progression of the last 200 years of western fiction. And yet it is beautiful (and wildly effective) in its simplicity and earnestness because our own lives are actually quite simplistic. Or at least we perceive our own lives simplistically, amateurish, forced, and heavy handed even when they are almost certainly never only those things. To use Heidegger’s tool analysis, most of the wild complexities of our lives fade into a series of interlocking sequences of events and objects ready at hand, a series of moments linked and made sense of through widely available tropes.

How he knows this restricted knowledge is currently under investigation.

Community Reading Corner

Despite books being illegal in our humble town, much talk about narrative elements persists around social media watercoolers and bloodstone circles. Angela R Cox reframes Phantasmagoria, a community favorite, under Gothic literature instead of its usual film comparison:

The house governs nearly every part of the game: it is the source of isolation; it is the containing structure for both the supernatural demonic presence that drives the plots and for horror and terror; it tells the story itself through architecture and spatial distribution of plot elements.

This week has seen an uptick in grammatical analogies, so make sure to lock your doors and keep your children firmly preoccupied with television. The story vs mechanics tension often comes up in our community, but Mark Filipowich aims to take it a step further and adamantly tries to fuse story and mechanical elements into a language we can talk about games. On the same note, Mitch Krapta refocuses current game conversations on looking not at the rules of play, but the verbs the game affords the player. If you see either of these two men approaching your residence, pray to your family obelisk for a quick and painless departure from this plane.

What does it mean to be a character? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be you? Chris Batemen explores these terrifying questions digging through a strange paradox: why does a personality-absent cipher character like Gordon Freeman win fan character contest polls?

And now, to Germany

After some strange happenings around the Critical Distance office bathroom, we are sure to have Joe Köller on the job of translating any strange German transmissions we get from the strangle black and purple hole in the wall. He recently translated a message from Rainer Sigil, about the recent horrors of Amnesia – A Machine for Pigs:

Instead, it presents primarily an aesthetic experience, atmospheric horror, living on the moment of fear and, beyond that, dreadful suspicions. Its rationality is faked time and again – just like the fragments of Dear Esther don’t amount to a full story, A Machine for Pigs offers no conclusive whole. Why and how should it, when its themes are taken from a century of mass murder and ideologies of genocide?

Troubling words.

Joe also just now slipped me this note, but with a tentacle arm, before being sucked into the portal. It reads:

Marcus Dittmar wrote about environmental storytelling and the limits necessary to appreciate open worlds, Markus Grundmann covered Cookie Clicker and consumerism and Dennis Kogel interviewed Jasper Byrne of Lone Survivor and other things. Superlevel is also providing smaller features on entries in the Experimental Game Pack 01 over here.

If anyone can translate the foreboding warning hidden in this, please call the station’s number immediately.

All Is Well

There goes another day in our lovely community. Remember that if you spy any shadow monsters leaving the bowling alley or notice your romantic partners turning green, to let us know via Twitter or email. Just want to send us some thoughts? Submit to Blogs of the Round Table and hopefully some powerful demons will take a liking to you.

Until next time, good night videogame bloggers, goodnight.