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aesthetics

October 2nd

…an insightful look at Robot Unicorn Attack’s aesthetics, which John argues shouldn’t be overlooked in favor of analyzing its rudimentary game mechanics.

Next up is a piece by Leigh Alexander in Edge Magazine, in which she proposes gamers should keep level heads and get upset about the right things:

…gamers might have suffered for years feeling like second-class citizens, but now they’ve grown extremely invested in ideas of what they are owed from both sides, highly precise about what they deserve, and vocal when they feel they are not receiving it.

Last, but not least…

January 8th

…“An Escape of One’s Own” on The Border House, pointing out similar problems, in particular that “games aren’t an escape for everyone looking for one”. And that post also led to a response, this time by Dan Cox of Digital Ephemera, musing on what it mean that, in Dragon Age: Origins, “Desire demons are female“.

It’s slightly older news (it took me a while to get around to listening to it), but Frank Lantz spoke in an MIT Comparative Media Studies podcast about “The Aesthetics of Games“, and it’s well worth an hour and a half of your time….

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April 1st

…responses. One of my favorites for the week comes from the blog Persona Matters, describing how the game’s visual rewards system also serves a mythic purpose within the game text. Everyone’s favorite woobie Brendan Keogh writes about how companionship makes the game feel lonelier.

Showing his professorial side, Michael Abbott offers up an analysis of Journey‘s Eastern spiritual aesthetics:

Perhaps Bogost is right when he contends “surely every sect and creed will be able to read their favorite meaning onto the game.” […] Thematic ambiguity invites interpretation, but when I play Journey, I see specificity. From where

September 8th

aesthetics of the New Sincerity and are instead continually mired in last-generation irony — which has repercussions when it comes to representing certain unsavory subjects, like the treatment of women.

The aptly-named Snake Link Sonic reflects on the recent outcry concerning Metal Gear Solid 5, and places it in the context of the franchise’s history.

On Play the Past, Christopher Sawula looks at Assassin’s Creed‘s problematic relationship with history. Elsewhere on the same publication, Peter Christiansen chats what is actually being represented through tech trees in Civilization.

Identity Reconstruction in Progress

On Kill Screen, Jason Johnson…

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November 3rd

…Superlevel, wondering why all those hoomans seem to be easily conditioned towards manshooting.

Meanwhile, Ciprian David and Rainer Sigl wonder if it could not be said that Universal Soldier – Day of Reckoning borrows heavily from videogame aesthetics.

Happy reading, fellow bon-vivants!

As always we greatly value your contributions, and we encourage you to submit links to us via Twitter mention or our email submissions form.

(Also, if you haven’t yet, please check out Ghosts in the Machine, a fantastic anthology of creative work edited by this week’s wonderful curator! –K.L.)

See you next week!

November 10th

…and could exist.

Becky Chambers of The Mary Sue relates her experience with Papers, Please from both sides of the customs booth, both in the game and in real life. Levi Fowler wrote ‘What AntiChamber Teaches Us About The Nature of Religious Texts’ for GameChurch.

Bendan Vance talks about intrinsic and extrinsic features of a work and how Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic is an example of a game fully designed with intrinsic meaning instead of “paying lip service to aesthetics.”

Ethan Gach asks “What is Final Fantasy?” in the respect that the games have always changed and…

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December 22nd

…few gameplay reviews and Let’s Plays. Gamer Law’s Jas Purewal provides a useful primer on where this puts video reviewers and LPers on the platform right now.

New Aesthetics

Back on PopMatters, our own Eric Swain explores Kentucky Route Zero‘s rejection of a ‘Platonic Ideal’ of game-ness:

While Kentucky Route Zero does ostensibly exist within a video game space, it is more interested in the function of spaces within that space. It is based on the expressive forms of experimental theater, installation art and modernist literature, not on the ideal of the holodeck. It creates non-Euclidean

January 19th

…Universal Omnisociety of Structural Analysis Weekly Update

Raph Koster talks about how he analyzes a game. Of course, his way is far from the only way. Filipe Salgado talks about the structure of the Fjordsss and the SHARECART.

On PopMatters, Jorge Albor talks about Systems and Activism in Papers, Please. Elsewhere, Rui Craveirinha points out that Papers, Please is a great piece of propaganda but never turns its critical gaze away from Soviet-style aesthetics towards, for instance, American immigration practices, which are often just as bizarre and restrictive.

Writing for Polygon, Chris Dahlen reminds us that you…

February 16th

…set aside to research connections between videogames and gun violence?

Our Mobile Lives

UK-based writer Leigh Harrison suggests that microtransactions can, themselves, be a game mechanic: “I’d like to posit that, instead of implementing the looming shadow of microtransactions to gouge players of cash, developers are simply using the threat of having to pay for something as a means of heightening tension within their otherwise risk-free games.”

Aesthetes are We

On Exeunt Magazine, A.E. Dobson explores interactivity and the returned gaze. Meanwhile, at Game Manifesto, Joel Jordon posits that like as not, the aesthetics of triple-A…

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March 9th

…bravery in swimming against the current of accepted videogame design. It fearlessly deconstructs the prevailing notion that videogames must not only constantly strive to look better, but also appear more naturalistic as the medium and its technology advances. As The Bureau progresses, it subtly strips away the layers of peripheral aesthetics normally seen as a necessity in modern games, until at its end it is visually little more than a VR mission from Metal Gear Solid; an experience completely defined by its mechanics alone, uninterested in anything threatening to overcomplicate the purity of its experience.

Half-Assing on the…