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aesthetics

March 16th

…link contains all of the language you might associate with that. [Trigger warning for this: sexual assault described in detail, racial slurs, general sexism.]

CYBERPUNK: IT IS PUNK. CYBERPUNK.

Mark Filipowich writes about the connections between videogames, Philip K. Dick, and Austin Walker’s A(s)century.

Zack Fair pings off of the same game in a piece about time and how cyberpunk as a genre has dealt with the concept.

Red Thumbs reviews Remember Me in a sprawling format, reading aesthetics, play experience, and writing all as one big, ungraspable mass. How cyberpunk.

THINKING ABOUT SPECIFIC GAMES

August 17th

…Hearts sets in conflict. At Videodame, Virginia Roby reflects on The Last of Us‘s seeming subversion of the Damsel in Distress trope.

Justin Keever’s Virtual Narrative blog has a post about the metanarratives of the Civilization games. And Claire Hosking, negotiating the pull between the procedural narrative and the “authored” artistic work, looks at the urban structures of Transistor and the narratives of those structures and aesthetics.

Lastly, a pair from two of Critical Distance’s own. Mark Filipowich looks at several RPGs and their stands on the morals of violence in a two part post. And Lindsey…

October 19th

…game’s treatment of its protagonist, Amanda Ripley, as truly befitting the heroine template exemplified by Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien film series. And from a visual standpoint, PC Gamer’s Andy Kelly shares how the game stacks up next to the aesthetics of the original film in a side-by-side slideshow.

Finally, at Eurogamer, Jeffrey Matulef shares a bit of optimism that Alien: Isolation is but the latest in a broader trend in high-budget, first-person games (including The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite) to offer a more contemplative, sedate experience.

Listen and Believe

As we now enter…

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

This Year in Videogame Blogging: 2014

…severely reductive and ignored so much they actually have to say and denouncing them dangerously results in asserting that games exist in a vacuum.

Touching on the critical reception to Vlambeer’s Luftrausers (with its Nazi-inflected aesthetics), Craig Stern took to task the saying “no interpretation is wrong.” While it may not have been the case here, not all interpretations are valid, he said, especially those that discount and ignore the material in the actual work being discussed.

Brendan Vance delivered a one-two punch on our assumptions regarding games this year in “The Cult of the Peacock” and “Form…

May 17th

…as alternative game mechanics:

The manual becomes, here, another vector for expressing Minkomora’s aesthetics and sensibilities, conveying the game to you as you read it. Simple though it may be, lacking my beloved appendices and subsections, it still effectively conveys a strong sense of what Minkomora is and means, lending character and colour to the game world before you even set foot in it. It also shows a path to digital distribution for cost-conscious developers; you no longer need to expensively print copies of a manual in order for it to perform these functions.

This is

May 31st

(Content warning: sexual discussion and imagery.)

Continuing his series of gay sex games, Robert Yang released the dick pic simulator Cobra Club this week, accompanied by an artist’s statement detailing his intentions to explore both the aesthetics of these images, and concerns over sharing them opposite the game’s fictional dating platform and twist ending.

Patricia Hernandez shared her own experience with the game, and many, many screenshots on Kotaku, while Todd Harper responded on his blog, arguing that the game may accurately represent the weirdness of taking one of these pictures, but that its inconsequential interactions with

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

June 7th

…whose skin color can be chosen by the player. And at RH Reality Check, Shonte Daniels reflects how recent pushback on this topic together with current events have turned videogames from a hobby into a source of distress (Content Warning: discussion of violence, racism, mental health).

Virtual Bodies

At his blog Arms Folded Tight, Daniel Parker muses on the aesthetics of games’ “power fantasies,” many of which go beyond our conventional understanding of the term. In doing so, Parker surveys several recent articles on the subject of avatars and how these writers engage in a “power fantasy” of…

August 9th

…Polansky writes lucidly on why the design philosophy of ‘flow’ acts as “a kind of ideological container”:

“Flow” evokes a certain set of aesthetics — minimalism is readily apparent, but so are certain articulations of soft futurism, New Age-y transcendentalism, and a variety of naturalistic modernist approaches. We think of water. We think of the cosmos. We think of pure mathematics. On the other hand, it works as basically synonymous for the kind of “escapism” offered in so many F2P games, and the kind of intense, aggressive focus (or “immersion”) demanded of many “core” AAA games. Flow works

October 11th

…of their act of playing:

The Beginner’s Guide is a videogame about videogames, then, but not in a cloying you-are-the-monster way or a hey-remember-Mario way. It’s a videogame about the act of engaging with a videogame, both through creation and consumption. It presumes a particular literacy in its audience to recognise certain glitch aesthetics and understand certain things about the Source engine, but this feels less elitist and more assuming the audience’s intelligence. This videogame wants the player to be aware at all times they are exploring, unpacking, and ultimately ruining a videogame work as they trod all

May 22nd

…emotions and aesthetics of DOOM

  • Why is Doom so great? It’s not afraid to be itself. | ZAM Danielle Riendeau surprises herself by thoroughly enjoying the unrelenting thrills of DOOM.
  • “A lot of games fall into a self-important trap. Their creative teams, probably with their hearts in the right place, want their violent AAA games to have rich characters, important stories, a sense of heaviness and drama. And that works beautifully in a game that isn’t explicitly about shooting thousands of enemies in their faces. But in a shooter that isn’t explicitly referencing military tactics and…