Amnesia

…model a complex economic system of globalized production and consumption across borders. Civilization’s are neatly confined and controlled. Poverty and inequality are not an issue, and class holds no explanatory relevance for historical processes or civilizational growth.

Albor also wrote for Pop Matters about ‘The Topography of Fear’ in Amnesia: The Dark Descent.

Darshana Jayemanne got in touch this week to let us know about something he’d written a while back in the Overland literary journal looking at videogame culture. It’s a piece titled ‘The Resident of Evil Creek’ and it starts a bit like this:

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…important: this is Sport. Each kill is a way of measuring how big the big man really is and satisfies his own perverse amusement alone.

Thanks to reader Jeroen for sending this next piece in: The Amnesia: The Dark Descent developers Frictional Entertainment have a lengthy post up on their blog about ‘Finding Videogame’s True Voice’. It hits similar notes to Clint Hocking’s GDC 2011 talk about games creating meaning through dynamics.

Steven Totilo at Kotaku profiles the virtual world… personality… Jon Jacobs, and in particular his curious desire to immortalise his late wife in virtual reality:

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…Future, Tom Stafford suggests that Tetris is addicting because it taps into our human impulse to “tidy up.” Meanwhile, writing for io9, Esther Inglis-Arkell explores how Tetris seeps into the minds of patients suffering from anterograde amnesia.

The Art of Play

Culture Ramp’s Luke Rhodes is back with an eloquent essay on the game and ‘way’ of Go:

The game itself is not an art, but a well-played match becomes a work of participatory art. We see that sentiment dimly reflected in the Western concern with sportsmanship; likewise in our preoccupation with cheating. The bombastic and

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…of auteur theory. Elsewhere on Terminally Incoherent, Luke Maciak walks us through the first in a series of thorough dissections of BSI’s art direction.

On critical mainstay Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott deems the game the beginning of the end for the FPS genre. Meanwhile, Amnesia developer Thomas Grip praises the game for what it attempted to do but concludes “it feels like an attempt to tell a serious story through a theme park ride.”

On Gamasutra, Andreas Ahlborn delivers an exceptional analysis of BioShock Infinite as musical composition. Posting on his personal site, Kevin Wong views the game’s…

…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…