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Episode 2 – Descent into Dissonance

This week on the CDC Podcast we discuss Bioshock and narrative dissonance. Join us as we attempt to wrap our heads around the subject and come up with the definitive answer to the question “How do we define narrative dissonance?” You don’t need to go to GameFAQS or Youtube to discover the ending of this conundrum; we don’t end up coming up with a consensus on the subject! My apologies to Roger Travis who become disconnected midway through the podcast and could not return due to prior obligations.

Direct Download (32MB, 42min)

CAST: D. Murray, Denis Farr,

JG Ballard, Boredom, And The Violent Promise Of Videogames – Offworld

Jim Rossignol, Editor of RPS and writer-extraordinare, wrote a fitting farewell tribute to the late JG Ballard on Offworld today. In it, Rossignol eloquently examines Ballard’s effect not only on his own creativity, but on that of contemporary culture and the consumerist society Ballard saw growing around him.

The future would be boring, said Ballard. Our modern age sits at the point at which the march of rationalism and reason has peaked, divorcing us from our early extremism and our innate primitivism, and giving us a bland culture of calm consumer choices and deadened emotions.

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

No Culture? Gameplay Aesthetes

Sure, it’s about a board game, and a forgettable one at that, but Greg Costikyan makes a point that it’s important to know about the history behind even bad or un-interesting games:

For what godforsaken reason are we featuring Twiggy Game today? To make a point: the danger of lack of culture.

What do I mean by “lack of culture?” Just this: with novels, cinema, music and every other form of art, we have long-standing traditions of criticism, analysis, reviews, and discussion. People know something of the history of the forms in which they are interested,

Anna Anthropy on Games

This will be the second time I’ve linked to something involving Anna Anthropy (a.k.a Aunti Pixelante), but I think she’s got a particularly different take on games and play than what we usually hear. I feel this (too short) interview highlights some of that:

The videogame medium is being held hostage by a small group of people, or it would be if big games publishers really were the gatekeepers to the medium they want to be perceived as. The increasing accessibility of game authorship means that games are becoming culture-created and communicated in the same ways as

Chris Avellone on RPG Conventions

Last week saw the ‘Framework’ conference in Melbourne, and Kotaku Editor David Wildgoose attended a lecture given by Chris Avellone – he of Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, and Knights of the Old Republic 2 fame. In a nice recap, Wildgoose talks about how Avellone turned his disdain for RPG clichés and conventions to his advantage:

In Knights of the Old Republic 2, Avellone hated Star Wars and the Force. In particular, he hated the concept of predestination implicit within the Force. So he built the game’s story and characters around this idea. He focused on what a

Soren Johnson Discusses Sid’s Lessons

Soren Johnson discusses a number of lessons he learned from Sid Meier during his time at Firaxis.

All four observations are good, but the third and fourth are especially resonant for me. Calls for thematic simplicity and “show, don’t tell” have grown increasingly loud as of late. When Jeff Kaplan says at GDC “we need to stop f*cking writing a novel in our game [World of Warcraft]“, I doubt he’s saying that the story in WoW is completely wasted effort. Rather he’s observing that presenting a massive wall of un-engaging writing to the player is the laziest and

May 3rd

Links updated June 29th 2017

Welcome to another exciting instalment of This Week In Videogame Blogging. Before we dive in, I should probably explain how I go about compiling this list of the best stuff from around the blogosphere from the week. It goes something like this:

I have a Word document. When I read something on a blog that I think is worth noting, I copy and paste the URL into the document. That’s it. The downside is I only have so many blogs in my RSS feed and I can’t cover them all. When I

Achievement Unlocked: Sex!

Alex Raymond, of the While !Finished blog at the Iris Gaming Network, explains how games have established a rather simplistic view of relationships in her post “Women Aren’t Vending Machines: How Video Games Perpetuate the Commodity Model of Sex“:

What the vast majority of these games inevitably do is present relationship mechanics that distill the commodity model down to its essence-you talk to the NPC enough, and give them enough presents, and then they have sex with/marry you.

This design approach is extremely simplistic and perpetuates the commodity model of sex-the player wants sex, they go

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Episode 3 – Showing, Telling, Performing Narrative

It has arrived! Episode 3 of the CDC Podcast. This week we discuss the approaches to videogame narrative, specifically the differences between showing and telling narrative in games. We have a very special international cast this week. So sit back and enjoy as once again we interrogate game narrative, go off on an array of tangents, and eventually come back to the question of “show and tell.” Feel free to leave us feedback on the Critical-Distance comments thread and continue the discussion on IRC. That is the freenode.net server, the room is #GBConfab.

The Cast: D. Murray: http://www.graduateschoolgamer.com

Critical Distance: The First Month and the Future

Dear Critical Distance Readers, Contributors and Interested Parties,

What is Critical Distance? What is its purpose and what is its aim? What gap in the field, what niche of interest, does it serve to fill?

These are questions I have been asking myself for the past few weeks, and they go largely without satisfactory answers. However, I think we are beginning to see at least the general form these answers will take – outlined by the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, as it were.

So far, we’ve operated quite successfully from a