mass effect

…also where many players feel they lose Mass Effect, because until the final moment, the plane of men has been the only ground the game knows.

Lastly on the subject of Mass Effect, I don’t know who this pretty lady is, but a few of you wrote in recommending this link as a capstone to the discussion: “In which Squaresoft wrote a Bioware game.”

While most of the ludodecahedron spent the week effecting masses and taking journeys, a few more interesting discussion topics sneaked in. Jamin Warren sat down with Jesper Juul on the subject of failure…

…shit if games are art.

IGN UK’s Michael Thomsen, the same man who declared Metroid Prime to be the Citizen Kane of video games, writes a lucid Contrarian Corner post on Fallout: New Vegas [mirror].

Jose Gonzalez Bruno on his blog gamereader (which he should tell some people exists) writes about the “Tyranny of the Masses” [mirror] with regards to the Mass Effect 2 player data, saying:

As we have seen, publishers and developers have profoundly different ways of looking at the world, and this creates the possibility of conflict when it comes to interpreting player

…

…Own Adventure style.

Dan Bruno discusses at length why Mass Effect 3‘s conclusion is unsatisfactory. Et tu, Bruno?

Segueing back to the part of the internet not dedicated to effecting masses, Tommy Rousse writes on the relationship between “the miniature” and the player:

The RTS is a fetishization of cybernetic control. It is a simulacra of the modern Western military paradigm of command and control; sometimes a more efficient one, sometimes less. It almost always privileges positions of management and control over the autonomy of the individual.

John Carter McKnight reveals how the concept…