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Assassin’s Creed II

…city of Florence to the Los Angeles of Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, Disneyland sets up the convenient fiction that there is a “real” America outside of its fantasy world. But Los Angeles is itself “hyperreal”, an empire of simulated authenticity. By analogy, Dow replaces Baudrillard’s Disneyland/Los Angeles pair with AC2/Florence: AC2 is a fiction of hyper-real “historic Florence”, the tourist destination. Furthermore, AC2’s “game-within-a-game” structure helps highlight this relationship between the simulated and the hyperreal: because the player is playing the virtual memory of a character (Desmond), she can address her encounter with historical Florence as a simulation.

The Italian…

January 30th

…Blog Marcia discusses philosophies behind and strategies for making independent TTRPG-making a less commercialized scene.

  • Unholy Aisles | Unwinnable Emily Price interrogates the fraught and unsatisfying relationship between labour and products as expressed through three works of popular media and literature, including Wilmot’s Warehouse.
  • Unpacking Presents a Version of Normalcy I Will Never Understand | Fanbyte Jess Sebastian confronts the disconnect between Unpacking‘s Instagram-perfect vision of upward mobility and the increasingly precarious contemporary existence of much of its player base.

    • “I wondered what it must be like to have natural light in every room as…

    February 6th

    …critics are only depicted as acting in bad faith, spanning the spectrum from obstructive bureaucrats to tabloid journalists to literal terrorists.”

    Artful Time Battle

    RPGs and especially JRPGs are front-and-centre in this next pairing looking at poetic and experimental design decisions in key games.

    • Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter Revealed the Ugliness of RPGs in Stripping Them to Their Bare Essentials | Paste Austin Jones examines the interesting, experimental, and not very fondly remembered installment of the Breath of Fire series.
    • How is a battle system like a poem? | Eurogamer.net Edwin Evans-Thirlwell reflects…

    Jaroslav Švelch | Keywords in Play, Episode 20

    …and hardware industry in South Korea basically started with basically cloning a Western hardware. So, it started out as a set of these kind of DIY operations that were very similar to what was happening in, in the Soviet Bloc. There is, there are some, some, some, you know, examples from other countries. Unfortunately, we don’t know that much yet about, you know, the, the Middle East, for instance, about the history of gaming there. South America hasn’t really been that well covered. I, myself would love to do more work in the future on the Soviet Union, which, you…

    January 10th

    …looks a shoe-in for almost any first-timer’s videogame review. They do seem to say, however, that on balance the judges were generally good.

    Ian Barczewski responds to an article in the Orange County Register called, quite hyperbolically, ‘Video games were invented by the devil’. Which seems odd to me as I always thought it was William Higinbotham that invented gaming with Tennis for Two for the vintage 1958 oscilloscope. Barczewski opens his critique of the offending column with this statement that made me sit up and pay attention:

    When I was only three years old, I taught

    …

    April 10th

    …‘No Clip’ series in which he restricts his gameplay abilities in some way or another, is back with a new instalment targeting Red Dead Redemption. It is, in a word, revelatory. Playing as the most horrible, mean, nasty and evil Marston he could possibly manage,

    … there was a strange disconnect between the light-hearted but gruff John Marston from the cutscenes and the one I controlled. As I left a wake of dead sheriffs on my trail from each crime, it felt strange returning to making innocent quips with Bonnie and quietly tending to a ranch. After breaking

    …

    July 24th

    …At the ‘Blogossus’ blog, Nathan Hardisty has been working up a sweat in the deserts of Fallout: New Vegas and directs our attention to an older post on ‘The Story of Boone’. It takes a while to wind up to it, but here’s where it gets good:

    From the first instance we talked I knew something interesting was going to happen. Not just from the fact he asked me to help him shoot someone in the head, but the fact he looked so disclosed. I prodded him about his history and interesting back-story, I got nothing out of

    …

    September 4th

    …Fantasy XII, I had the feeling that Vaan was the one in whose place I inserted myself, the one through whom I operated in the game world, the interface if you will, and Balthier was the one I emotionally related to. Balthier, as a character, is a lot more resolved and stern than Vaan. Vaan has the drive and motivation to challenge the Empire, yet Balthier is the one I felt most strongly drawn to. In cut-scenes, Balthier seems to be the one who comments on things, whereas Vaan is used mostly when someone has to say something obvious or…

    September 2nd

    …we again divide ourselves from the world around us.

    Over at the Gameological Society, Steve Heisler takes us through the latest installment of his “Decadent” column with two examples of the escort adventure, ICO and Amy, noting the difference in player affect between the two. In a similar vein, Gamers With Jobs’ Julian Murdoch wonders why more games don’t address their older audiences:

    I’m not a tabula rasa any more. I’m a grown-ass man. I have baggage. I’ve changed the diapers and sat through the meetings. I’ve made the grown-up choices to not buy the electric…

    December 16th

    …Rivas get together to discuss Canadian-produced Assassin’s Creed 3‘s take on the American Revolution.

    Meanwhile, on his own blog, Jordan Rivas relates how Call of Duty reminds him of a Katy Perry song.

    KEEPING GATES

    We catch up with John Brindle again back over on Nightmare Mode, where Brindle outlines a pretty compelling critique of gamer elitism:

    [Jim Rossignol wrote that] we shouldn’t worry about what non-gamers think of games, because “in this instance,” he wrote, “we are the highly educated elite.”

    It’s a good point. It arouses in me the instant desire to defend…