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mass effect

Calling for Critical Compilations!

…Bioshock 2

  • Bioshock Infinite
  • Dear Esther
  • Deus Ex series
  • Dishonored series
  • The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
  • Fallout: New Vegas
  • Fallout 4
  • Far Cry series
  • Final Fantasy VII
  • Final Fantasy X and X-2
  • Final Fantasy XIII
  • Gone Home
  • Heavy Rain
  • Journey
  • Kentucky Route Zero
  • L.A. Noire
  • The Last of Us
  • Mass Effect series
  • Metal Gear series
  • Metro series
  • Nier Automata
  • Nier Gestalt and Replicant
  • No Man’s Sky
  • Papers, Please
  • Pathologic
  • Portal and Portal 2

  • Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    March 13th

    …about ‘How To: Commune’ [mirror] in Multiplayer Minecraft.

    Responding to the Tom Bissell / Simon Ferrari back-and-forth on Paste a few weeks ago, Patrick Holleman at The Game Design Forum discusses ‘The Architecture of Dreams’ (which sounds like it could be about Inception, but it isn’t).

    Brendan Caldwell at The Shore blog writes about, well, a dream or hypothetical situation in which he tells the UK Prime Minister David Cameron a joke about a Human, a Turian and a Salarian. ‘From Here to Eternity‘. Mass Effect and The Real World collide.

    Okay, so I’m super duper conflicted…

    March 24th

    Happy Sunday, readers!

    First of all, if you haven’t already seen it, we’ve got a new Critical Compilation this week–this time on the Mass Effect Trilogy, courtesy of Emma Kostopolus. She’s gathered a bunch of great writing on how the series intersects with queer romance and representation, so check it out!

    With that out of the way, this week’s topics run the gamut from online radicalization, to masculine vulnerability, to colonialism, but they’re also nearly all about communication, too. This could be how we communicate to one another in multiplayer games; how we communicate ideas and themes,

    September 1st

    …from the edges against the industry-wide reflex to make everything in games for and about men.

    “The Wine Aunt sneers at the “Dad Build” talk, Dadification, and the burgeoning someday-Dads who are already upset when they’re not exclusively catered to, when marginalized non-Dads dare to ask for inclusion in this hobby, in more thoughtful ways than they clamored for a new Mass Effect 3 ending.”

    Storytelling by Design

    I’m always interested in the small and large ways that stories are built into games and all their myriad systems, as well as how players alternately

    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    September 22nd

    …her students at anime theocracy school.

    “The politics of horny are less of a marketable bullet point than the politics of gunning down brown people or their monstrous stand-ins. No one, as I recall, ever pulls Commander Shepard aside in Mass Effect to talk about how maybe it’s inappropriate to bang the subordinates in her direct chain of command, in the middle of an interstellar invasion no less. But Fire Emblem does. So, I backed up into my beliefs, and decided that Byleth wasn’t going to date one of her students.”

    Critical Chaser

    You

    New Call for Critical Compilations!

    …most prominent, hotly-discussed games of years past. When we last opened a call for pitches in 2018 (yes, we know), we ended up with some absolutely astonishing compilations for games like Kentucky Route Zero, Assassin’s Creed II, and the Mass Effect trilogy.

    What will we see when we open pitches this time? We’re excited to find out! Critical Distance has decided to commission ten new Critical Compilations. Here are some of the games we’re looking for:

    • Amnesia
    • Animal Crossing series
    • Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2
    • The Beginner’s Guide
    • Civilization series
    • Dear Esther

    Bioshock: Infinite

    …tragedy and the role of the Lutece twins in being the plot’s primary actors. On a similar topic, Maddy Myers at Paste Magazine wrote about how playing Infinite compared to her experiences living through the 2013 Boston marathon bombing, and how the game uses fate and destiny to underscore its message.

    Drew Byrd looked at the use of choice and player narrative freedom in Infinite in comparison to two other games, Mass Effect 3 and Deadly Premonition, and interrogated the role of interactivity in the medium as a whole.

    Francisco Dominguez, at Haywire Magazine, examined the ways in…

    September 24th

    …structure of four rhyming couplets–four pairs of articles which together foster critical conversations moving in different directions. The first looks at series that might have had more transgressive narrative ambitions in the beginning, but which ultimately lost their bite to bets hedged in the name of market appeal.

    • It’s That Lonely Sinking Feeling | No Escape Skeleton looks back at the women of Mass Effect 2, sanded down for Fox News sensibilities, and asks who they are really written for.
    • Terraforming Oddworld | KRITIQAL Jessica Hill presents an anticapitalist reader’s guide to the Oddworld series through all

    October Roundup: ‘Masks’

    …short, tell us about how masks effect a game, a player, and the culture.

    Luke Pullen kicks begins at his blog, The Conversation Tree, with a look at how power armour shapes identity in three of Bungie’s first-person shooters: Marathon, Halo and Destiny, among several other examples. Pullen discusses how exterior protection subsumes the wearer, dehumanizing them into a killing machine:

    The mask is a weapon of mass destruction, a monstrous cybernetic zombie.

    You kill because you have been programmed to. ‘Honour’ is a fantasy constructed as a hidden form of discipline. The…

    January 27th

    …something considerably more impressive by proposing thoughtful and substantial answers.

    • Conversation as Gameplay (Talk) | Emily Short’s Interactive Storytelling Emily Short talks about talk in games–about how to design for conversation as a meaningful and rewarding element of gameplay.
    • Playing for Dramatic Effect | Ada Play Adarel discusses different approaches to making player decisions in story-based games: playing for character consistency, for morality, and for “dramatic effect.” Also, Draaagon Age <3
    • character creation – DEEP HELL Skeleton digs deep on identifying with–no, living through–our avatars.

    “For a few hours of the day I