Search Results for “killing” – Page 3

January 14th

…a pair of academic pieces on the warped and racialized perspectives which remain prevalent in western game dev, with a focus as well on the reverberations and harms that cross from digital back to material reality.

Imagining Latin America: Indigeneity, Erasure and Tropicalist Neocolonialism in Shadow of the Tomb Raider | Game Studies Yoel Villahermosa Serrano details the othering tropes, white saviors, and Indigenous mouthpieces that continue to dominate western gaming’s engagement with Latin America, in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and elsewhere.
Killing the Black Body: Necropolitics and Racial Hierarchies in Digital Gaming Kishonna L. Gray

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Robotics, Games and Warfare

…is controlled remotely with an Xbox 360 controller.

Reactions to videogame violence often careen between two extremes: moralistic proselytizers who scream that videogames cause the Colombines of our modern world or game playing apologists who scoff at the idea that letting off steam playing games can possibly have any real world consequence. Whether either group’s position is grounded in reality (and granting that there is a continuum of nuanced views in between those polarized camps), what is inarguable in this case is that the armed forces are interested in designing their killing machines to use a high quality…

BioShock

…Braid that “The player can only converse with the text within the confines of the game’s design and always remains at the will of the designer.” The illusion of choice is not a subject unique to gaming, according to Roger Travis. He notes that the non-choice of killing Ryan resembles Achilles’ non-choice to join battle in the Iliad. Travis also expands on this idea in arguing that the game’s ethical challenges exist to highlight the illusion of choice.

The first-person perspective heightened the impact of the climax. Matthew Gallant regards the first-person viewpoint as essential, especially in moments like…

September 27th

…stuff that I’ve written, but I’ll make exception for an announcement about the ever popular ‘Permanent Death’ story series that I don’t want anyone to miss. I’m very excited about the final production.

I have on good authority from twitter user m_eilers that the GSW column ‘Design Diversions: (Press Any Key to Skip This Article)’ is a good read. It starts like this:

About thirty levels into World of Warcraft, I realized that I did not need to read two paragraphs of text to justify killing twenty specific woodland creatures. It was at this point that I

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November 22

…it will be living in their diseased shadow”. I’m not personally content to leave that as the final word about Modern Warfare 2, as it were, so here’s Suki’s piece on the least examined aspect of MW2 – that the game is a chicken killing coup. That’s much better.

Kat Bailey’s Retronauts blog on 1Up talks about the omission of Princess Peach as a playable character in New Super Mario Bros. for the Wii. The reason is that she’s once again the object of rescue, and the result is there remains no playable female character.

Shigeru

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January 31st

…a world gone half crazy.

Corvus Elrod discusses a particular fascination with the ease of pouncing on and killing guards in Assassins Creed 2. While on the subject, Richard Clark has some thoughts about the end of that game (with HUGE spoilers) and some of the things its provocative ending says about the audacity of the developers.

Lastly, Create Digital Motion talks about the upcoming GAMMAIV competition in ‘Indie Game as Visualist Event: As the Deadline Nears, One Button Inspires‘. Since I’m going to be in San Fran for GDC I’m definitely going to go to see…

May 30th

…week is Jason Killingsworth’s “Groundhobbit Day” in which he notes of the game Demon’s Souls that, “Despite the game’s Tolkien-inspired milieu and bevy of fantasy-RPG videogame conventions, Demon’s Souls’ most suitable movie analog is not Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. Rather, Demon’s Souls is the unlikely fraternal twin of Harold Ramis’s 1993 comedy Groundhog Day.” Killingsworth gets extra credit for photoshopping the head of Bill Murray into Demon’s Souls for his post.

A quick reminder that for all TWIVGB posts on Critical Distance comments are turned off by default to encourage discussion on the original entries, and…

November 28th

This the final week of November sees perhaps the strongest cohort of posts in a long time – great posts, one and all. It’s This Week In Videogame Blogging.

From a couple weeks back, Jonathan Stickles at Preparing for the Apocalypse talks Splinter Cell: Conviction, feeling that the latest entry in the series lacks its titular characteristic. In previous iterations, says Stickles,

I felt like a real hero. I could work hard to avoid killing people as I achieved my objectives, and the game not only enabled that, it supported it. You’re the kind of person

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February 6th

…ever important problem of financing to your lofty goal of killing the bad guy. Normally, this kind of stuff is meta-gamed into the process. Items cost money, so go out, kill some monsters and come back when you’re not a broke chump. In this instance, however, the game itself is demanding the money from you. The side-quests are no longer some half-assed walk into the woods, but a way to earn dough, to literally move the plot forward.

According to Matthew Breit, the ever growing list of ‘People Who Were A Game Designer Include Harold Ramis’. I’ll admit…

May 29th

…following objective.

Craig Wilson at the SplitScreen blog has thought about Duke Nukem: Forever and concluded that the point-scoring mechanics from Bulletstorm would have worked better in Duke Nukem: Forever. I have to say, it’s fairly convincing (disclaimer – I haven’t played either):

Bulletstorm’s sport-shooter makes more sense in Duke Nukem’s world than its own. Duke’s been stranded on that alien planet for so long and he’s killed entire populations of alien scum that he’s no longer satisfied with just killing them. This isn’t about survival or saving the world and the girl. It’s something more…