Kill Screen archive
…head of rose quartz
tetris
October 16
…as object in and of themselves and took a look on how they impact the lives of people who play them
- How Video Games Are Keeping Long-Distance Relationships Alive | Game Informer Javy Gwaltney interviews several couples living apart from one another who use games and other digital technologies to keep in contact with one another
- In Conversation with the King of Game Boy ‘Tetris’ | Vice Mike Diver interviews Uli Horner, the long-time world record holder for the Game Boy edition of Tetris about the game’s personal and global impact and what distinguishes the Game Boy
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September 6th
…are reflected upon, we realize how quickly the game and its attendant statements dissolve into a pile of gibberish.
At Gamasutra, Katherine Cross refers to Polansky’s essay when she dissects the recent outcry over the “slave Tetris” minigame in Playing History 2 – Slave Trade:
The game was, at bottom, terribly incoherent. It mixed a serious topic with a sunny atmosphere and gamey elements that trivialized that topic rather than illuminated it. The Tetris minigame, further, has the stunning side effect of rendering the player complicit in creating one of the signature atrocities of the slave…
August 5th
…Dys4ia:
Anna’s uncertainty and anxiety regarding her body is represented through a tetris piece that can’t properly fit through a wall. The aggravation of her breasts during hormone therapy is translated through a pair of breasts dodging obstacles as it floats upwards. The harmful words of naysayers berating her and denying her goals are represented by projectiles which a shield that you control needs to avoid. And the beauty of it is that it makes so much sense! Anna as a shield, words as dangerous projectiles, a body as a tetris piece, trying to properly fit-in with its
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April 26th
Links updated 29 June 2017
This Week in Videogame Blogging, 65 die in a tragic Tetris accident in NYC, and Hard-casual also get the scoop on the Fallout: New Vegas protagonist!
In slightly less tongue-in-cheek happenings, Jim Rossignol, one quarter of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, noted that “Locked Door” was close to the biggest article ever published on RPS. It’s certainly well worth a read, and a great example of the fact that good games crit doesn’t have to be the straight-forward essayist type. RPS continued its standard of excellence this week with some fantastic coverage of upcoming game
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January 10th
…no mirror available]. I liked the part about the size of the earth being all wrong, and how a certain shockwave that plays a major role in the plot would actually fail to propagate through the vast vacuum of space. The above quotes are there for a reason.
Jim Rossignol at Rock Paper Shotgun looks at some recent gaming-related scientific research and summarises the results. It’s quite an intriguing read, for instance, playing Tetris can help with post-traumatic stress related flashbacks.
Alex Raymond wrote this week about why she writes about games [dead link, no mirror available], namely…
August 21st
…with regards to their ultimate fate.
Unlike Alyssa, I don’t get stressed when my first person player character “dies” in Portal. Her death is impermanent; the player’s respawn is nearly instantaneous and the game replaces puts the avatar pretty much right back at the site of the player’s failure. I no more stress out about launching myself into a turret (oops) than I do about laying a jigsaw puzzle piece in the wrong corner, or about missing a move in Tetris. Portal is ultimately about solving puzzles and although there’s a great narrative framework going on, I don’t
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August-September Roundup
…Mark argues that games don’t just need a good story; they need good storycraft as well. We don’t need to look at it in such narrow terms as plot and character: even games like Super Mario Bros and Tetris have their own ‘design grammar’ that helps us contextualise their worlds. Story is one part of the language of game design, but if it is there, it has to make grammatical sense.
Sylvain L. looks at ‘cinematic’ storytelling in games.. I’ve just started a Film Studies night course to help me understand this kind of inter-disciplinary writing, but I can…
January 2015: ‘Player’s Choice’
…the Round Table, let’s talk about ‘Player’s Choice.’
This month, we’re interested in hearing about self-regulated or self-inflicted rules. For instance, do you take stealth games so seriously that any detection causes you to restart from the last save point? Or maybe, when you played Skyrim you completed the game without once using a melee weapon? Alternately, perhaps you refuse to run left in side scrolling games – no backtracking allowed. Maybe you only ever allow yourself to rotate Tetris pieces two times. Maybe you played with an all female cast in Fire Emblem? Maybe, just maybe, you
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January Roundup: ‘Player’s Choice’
…for an exciting roundup. This month’s theme was ‘Player’s Choice’
This month, we’re interested in hearing about self-regulated or self-inflicted rules. For instance, do you take stealth games so seriously that any detection causes you to restart from the last save point? Or maybe, when you played Skyrim you completed the game without once using a melee weapon? Alternately, perhaps you refuse to run left in side scrolling games – no backtracking allowed. Maybe you only ever allow yourself to rotate Tetris pieces two times. Maybe you played with an all female cast in Fire Emblem? Maybe, just
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