"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…complex.
“There’s an old quote that goes something like “whatever world war III is fought with, world war IV will be fought with sticks.” to which I’d like to offer a brief and contemptible counterargument: whatever World War III is fought with, it will still be featured in Call of Duty: World at War IV.“ Yes, I’ll take my apocalypses half-and-half this week, pre-and-post, as values and practices bleed through and transform across the virtual and the material.
Ruined Worlds
…acoustic design of MWII‘s gunplay.
“The goal is to look like something and be nothing. But to look like something. But be nothing. But to look like something.” Here we have a pair of design-minded pieces focusing on crunchy mechanics with accompanying thematic payoffs.
Number Crunch
…GlitchOut Oma Keeling ponders the absurd futility of replicating Twitter in a Spider-Man game.
…ain’t it.
“I’m not sure how to feel about this, and that growing unease in the pit of my stomach makes it hard to recommend over games with fictionalized settings. While people trying to be smart will now point at titles like Medal of Honor or Call of Duty and their use of World War 2, I’d say that my experiences with Six Days in Fallujah have left me feeling more unsettled about those games, too.” Different design angles come together here in meditations on randomization, genre, and good old gunfeel.
Reload, Revisit
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…a community.
“Games that utilize the engine best focus on intimate moments of contemplation, quietness and repose. Far from the bombast of their AAA cousins (a shorthand term for mainstream game studios with multimillion dollar budgets and vast labour pools at their disposal, like Call of Duty), Bitsy games celebrate silence – both literally (since the tool doesn’t support audio without a plug-in) and figuratively: there is a hushed tone about Bitsy games, a whisper in the ear, pillow talk murmurs, airy soliloquies.” Now for a game-specific section, on a title that has …
Venba
…Middle-Eastern settings for first-person shooting…that has significantly impacted how the world sees that region and the people from there,” GameSpot managing editor Tamoor Hussain said via email. “[Games and other forms of media and entertainment] present the region as places to be blown up and as having populations that are all evil cave-dwelling terrorists, whether that’s Call of Duty soldiers mounting Spec Ops missions to kill dangerous militants or Tony Stark proudly standing in front of a backdrop that is immediately recognizable as the Middle East…When you see those same settings in real-world news reports for long enough, the line…
…self-expression, for performing and curating identity. All I’m saying is that in the broad view, there’s not much difference between that and Call of Duty.”
Featured author Bigg this week is right to identify a paucity in critical writing (and attention on that writing) when it comes to adult and porn games. By the same token, there’s an opportunity to right the ship; here’s two picks to start conversations.
…make itself ugly as she snuffs out another human life, and the knowledge this is what she wants. You are the engine and what you want is immaterial, she is driving you. The tension of The Last of Us, what makes the whole thing go, is being the passenger.”
Next let’s focus on creative and experimental moments in wider franchises.
Ben kindly asked me to take over this week as he would be away from the internet and, as you can imagine, that makes it difficult to complete one’s duty of rounding up the best the blogosphere has to offer.
To start off I want to note two works that comment on an ongoing debate and criticism of the larger video game culture, namely the video game review. Jim Sterling at Destructoid does his best to give the public what they want, a completely objective video game review. He does a magnificent job on Final Fantasy XIII, ending
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…them how to do their jobs. Furthermore, Lien talks about how journalists have a duty to ask serious questions about the videogames they cover, in addition to all the peripheral information gathering about a game’s weapons and all the “sweet killz” it provides gamers.
On International Hobo, Chris Bateman writes about the dominant presence of guns in modern videogames.
Why are there so many videogames based around guns? It is not because play depends upon guns – board games have far fewer guns than, say, bank notes. No, the gun is dominant in videogames because we have
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