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September 30th

…as a little reminder that the much-discussed OUYA console is hardly the first of its kind.

Yannick LeJacq turned up on the Wall Street Journal again this week to offer a second opinion on Borderlands 2. It’s a not-so-subtle pointed rebuke of the review by Adam Najberg the Journal ran last week, but it’s also a valuable bit of FPS retrospective. Have a taste:

To reconcile the discrepancy between its androcentric cultural aesthetic as a manshooter and its “nerdy” internal mechanisms as an RPG, Borderlands 2 bridges the gap the same way it does everything: in the

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October 14th

…High.

Other games have gotten a fair bit of critical play, like thechineseroom’s Dear Esther, but new perspectives and critical takes are always popping up. Take this piece from our own Eric Swain:

Dear Esther isn’t your traditional horror story because it isn’t within the work itself that the scares reside. It’s what you bring out of this ghost story into the real world that scares the most.

Meanwhile, Adam Bishop offers up a point of view we don’t often consider with respect to Dear Esther: how game-breaking bugs or other flaws ruined the experience…

October 21st

…lens of Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces.

Second for the philosophy majors: Stephen Beirne unearths some interesting connections between action-horror franchise Resident Evil and German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Third for the science majors: Daniel Accardi explores the twisty little passages of quantum mechanics and The Elder Scrolls.

DEFINE: GAME

Adam Maresca advocates for a taxonomy for games:

Some voice concerns over worries that improving our vocabulary will work solely towards exclusionary ends; they fear the power to call something “not a game” belittles creators and robs them of their merit like pulling

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October 28th

…on time and place and person and context. Just as the experience of a game does.

We lack the vocabulary for videogame experiences. They are so strange and diverse and fugitive. But we must dare to reach beyond our grasp and wrestle with these experiences we can barely articulate. Mystery is a dialogue, and insatiable.

[…]

I hope games do not arrive soon. I hope we are not satisfied with what we have. I hope videogames push us into deeper contact with the world, and ourselves.

This is a theme Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Adam Smith touches…

November 25th

…film or books. And a rabbi, a rabbit and a robot walk into a bar in Jonas Kyratzes’ conversational discussion on stories in games.

At Medium Difficulty, Adam Maresca does “A Thoroughly Modern Reading of Revolution X” a game featuring Aerosmith from the SNES. Supposedly. Maybe. Moving on. Medium Difficulty also gave us “An Ode to Stanley & Esther” by Miguel Penabella. Due to the similar structures of The Stanley Parable and Dear Esther, I’m surprised nobody has written a piece of comparative criticism before.

Our David Carlton wrote a lengthy piece going point by point everything Dragon…

April 14th

…discussion, responding to Koster’s letter with one of his own in which he lays out the reasons for some of the original post’s negative reception. “[With personal games], game design is not physics, engineering, or science — rather, it’s political science, it’s history. Maybe we could approach our criticism of these games more like those fields?”

The comment thread on Yang’s post, starting with some thoughtful remarks by Jesper Juul, are also very much worth reading.

Reacting to all the dust-up caused by these posts, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman appeared on Polygon, opining that mutual respect and openness…

May 5th

…Weidman calls for a resurgence in analysis about Antichamber and makes lots of interesting points about lateral thinking. Scott Juster finds the banality of evil in Papers, Please. Adam Biessener pleads with the designers of videogame morality systems: “stop making me kick puppies to shoot lightning.”

Nathan Altice (who only writes golden articles of wonderment) analyzes basically everything about Super Mario Bros. through vectors and how they work. Go learn.

Random Things That Are Good So Go Read Them

Andrew Vanden Bossche gives us magic. Roger Travis gets to the heart of immersion in Papo & Yo….

August 11th

…his recently controversial game, The Castle Doctrine.

On Edge, Craig Owens provides us with look inside Experiment 12, a game created by 12 independent developers.

BUY MY ART

Liz Ryerson has a few notes on Corrypt developer Michael Brough’s oeuvre and how market saturation is crowding out unique titles.

Canabalt creator Adam Saltsman offers up a semi-response to Ryerson, on putting together a personal game design spectrum between ‘craft’ and ‘art.’

Raph Koster, meanwhile, puts the discussion thusly:

You can choose an art style that is broadly accessible, or not. You can have

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August-September Roundup

…they’re both successful stories through execution. Shafer goes on to discuss “foldback” story structures and how unravelling plot threads can be problematic by a story’s conclusion, but again – is this why Mass Effect 3’s ending was bad, or rather because the fault was in the telling rather than the tale?

Over on Medium – “That Place Words Go For Some Reason™” – Adam Boffa talks about the storytelling nuance of recent games Gone Home and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons. I haven’t played either yet – the hyperbole surrounding Gone Home had its usual effect of puttting…

December 1st

…of interviewers with great energy, Kris Ligman dives into a Saint’s Row IV expansion and gets some great stuff out of the developers. Kris is great. Someone should give Kris a job doing this sort of thing.

design dot edu

J. Parish has a bunch of long-running series dissecting the design of various games. Right now they’re running through the Game Boy classic Metroid 2. Over at RPS, Adam Smith has a great conversation about the detailed simulations of Football Manager (it’s called SOCCER), including a great tidbit about how global warming has forced the team to update…