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mass effect

April 21st

…of ‘flow.’ Meanwhile, on Eurogamer, Rick Lane looks at the challenges in modeling climbing in games.

For those who were curious about Magnus Hildebrandt’s recent Kentucky Route Zero article for Superlevel.de, Dennis Kogel has helpfully translated it into English.

Speaking of German, or rather in German, our Senior Ultra German Correspondent Johannes Köller has hooked us up with another round of excellent games criticism auf Deutsch.

On Videogame Tourism, Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten have wrapped up their three-part letter series on Year Walk. Also for the same publication, Jannick Gänger wonders what Mass Effect would be…

May 19th

…the man is getting married today. Grats, Rath!)

Over on PopMatters Moving Pixels, G. Christopher Williams chats a bit on building a more plausible apocalypse — to whit, why is Metro 2033 so unhygienic?

And Gamasutra blogger Sebastian Alvarado takes us through the possible science behind Mass Effect‘s Genophage.

YOU ARE (NOT) ALONE

On Big Tall Words, Mark Filipowich discusses how plural protagonism works in Chrono Trigger. And on The New Inquiry, Jeremy Antley explores We Must Tell the Emperor, a tabletop strategy game designed for a single player.

DESIGN MATTERS

Back on Gamasutra,…

June 16th

…i encounter all the time that essentially just shames people for not having enough sex and pressures them into doing it more. making masturbation into a universal competition is going to achieve only that: people are going to get pressured into using their bodies in the ways that are arbitrarily defined as normative.

Apps, you can do better.

Assorted Other Things

Rob Rath has some suggestions for how to do a better job of representing muslims.

Denis Farr on queer culture and videogames, specifically Mass Effect.

Jordan Young examining the role of religion in…

June 30th

…Sean Sands got in on the act with this narrativization of a play of Crusader Kings II.

As a side note, this stuff makes me miss Bit Creature. Someone find James Hawkins some venture capital.

GAMES AGAINST HUMANITY

Slaus Caldwell recently logged into his wife’s Mass Effect 3 multiplayer account and got to experience first-hand the torrent of misogynistic trashtalk women players face on a daily basis.

Quintin Smith turned up on Kotaku in recent days decrying videogames’ overreliance on killing and win/lose states, saying that it’s stifling the medium. He offers some alternatives befitting his…

February 9th

…subject I’m very keen on myself – the use of dialogue as merely a means to an end. Hubbell focuses his attention on the benefits of strong rhetoric for adding character to what’s otherwise a deadened exchange of information in the case of Mass Effect 3. Problem Machine wrote a nice wee thing on the tensions between design verbosity and concision, with examples from the adventure genre.

Many Different Videogames

Soul James uses Papers, Please to muse on the strengths of the medium. Peter Christiansen wrote about the mechanics of ideology in Civilization V. Mark Filipowich turned his…

April 20th

…Virtue’s Last Reward and Sweet Fuse. Elsewhere, on Ontological Geek, Albert Hwang presents us with a staggeringly detailed survey of romance arcs in BioWare games, and suggests that perhaps BioWare could still learn from some of its early experiments in this area.

Speaking of BioWare, on Unwinnable Rowan Kaiser has shared an excerpt from his upcoming book Possibility Space, here detailing why beloved turian Garrus Vakarian is the moral heart and soul of Mass Effect.

The recently launched Kotaku UK has an interesting feature from Dave Owen on the aesthetic possibilities of drawing upon Middle-Eastern and Islamic art…

July 27th

…forum is often the only point of direct contact with devs, and how it shapes their perception of fan preferences and trends, and how that shapes their future work. Let’s talk about how the female-dominated online spaces are considered intrinsically easy to dismiss, the butt of a joke. “Man, tumblr overanalyzes everything and hahaha ships what’s with that anyway. Oh hey so this guy did a sweet 360 noscope montage to dubstep music let’s publicize that!!!”

Let’s talk about how folks in fandom were rewriting [Mass Effect 3] in a massive variety of creative and clever ways for over…

August 3rd

Hello, lovers and other strangers. Welcome to a short but edifying edition of This Week in Videogame Blogging. This week brings us offerings on love, hate, media studies, and the greater horrors that lie between them.

Play it Again, Sam

Kicking us off, Jennifer Culp invites us to take another look at the badassery of one Dr. Karin Chakwas, Mass Effect’s Chief Medical Officer. Culp sings the doctor’s praises while also observing the dearth of visible–let alone active and interesting–older women in videogames,

In a medium in which women are often fridged early on in

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August 17th

…Noah Caldwell-Gervais looks at the Mass Effect series, and Stuart Arias has a critical series of System Shock 2 up on Twitch. Critical Let’s Playing is really interesting approach, and I’m excited to see more of it!

All That’s Fit to Print

On Ontological Geek, Oscar Strik reviews Cameron Kunzelman’s On August 11, A Ship Sailed into Port. Meanwhile, at Words That Won’t Sell, Edward Smith writes a very interesting piece about the sense of exhaustion and defeat that pervades the new Wolfenstein.

At Game Church, Joshua Cauller examines the risk of love in war that Valiant…

September 28th

…with anxiety. On First Person Scholar, Luke Arnott discusses Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard and the “sovereign exception”:

Beyond the protection of human law, already belonging to the gods (hence ‘sacred’). Reduced to ‘bare life,’ the homo sacer could be killed with impunity by anyone, but, conversely, he could not be offered up in sacrifice.

Some light is shed on Metro: Last Light by Stephen Beirne, who reads it alongside The Last of Us, and Ed Smith, who reads it alongside Modern Warfare.

At Joystiq, Ed Smith compares the storytelling of Gone Home to X-COM. “Rhaomi”…