Search Results for “call of duty” – Page 5

March 13th

…back: to force me to watch your scenes, play out your script, follow your high-school reading level plot.

Tanner Higgin writing this week for his personal blog, aimed at the more academic sections of the audience, on the topic of ‘videogames as critical race pedagogy’ has this to say:

We need to not only create new games that educate, but reflect back on games of all kinds that have already been created. There’s a lot to be learned about our culture from Call of Duty. The problem is that this learning often takes place without basic…

July 10th

…but it’s another to make players feel that those girls are human.

Keeping the focus on players, J.P. Grant at Infinite Lag likens the Call of Duty franchise to Saw as a form of death porn. Taking this obsession with violence a step further, a recent feature at Edge explores its pervasiveness in games and tackles some of the conventionally held wisdom.

Keeping with the same publication but switching gears from players to designers, Clint Hocking has a new column up at Edge in which he contends that the “Viking” culture of game development needs desperate modification….

August 28th

…for Hamlet himself. If it were ‘us’ that this were happening to it would be nigh impossible to have the kind of cool, dispassionate view required to appreciate the full scope of the tale. Contra videogames, in which there is no distance – we are Hamlet. Instead,

…there is a certain thrill that I get when riding on a rollercoaster that is quite similar to moments that I have had when playing Call of Duty. I don’t think that either of these “thrills” are aesthetic responses, and in that sense I can see a detractors point in not

…

September 18th

…in other words, pure fiction.

This week Simon Parkin wrote about his experiences with the Call of Duty convention for Eurogamer. It’s top stuff and conveys the very real ‘out of place’ feeling that Parkin had at the conference. Do go read ‘COD XP: The Bug and the Windscreen’:

There are other fan events based around single games, of course; both QuakeCon and BlizzCon command significant attendance. But COD: XP is not an event requested by the fans. Rather, it’s an endlessly lavish production put on for their benefit by a company eager to… to give…

October 9th

…game. Still, however eager a critic I am, and however difficult it is for me to be nice, sometimes one can learn just as much from things that are done well as from things which are done poorly.

That’s nice then. It’s always good when we can get along. Speaking of nice things – at McSweeney’s, Wil Buchanan writes about a couple of levels of Call of Duty: Postmodern Warfare. Stunning.

And lastly in this slightly shorter-than-usual entry, Tom Auxier at Nightmare Mode writes about his ‘Radical Gaming Blues’ in response to some musings by Tadhg Kelly…

October 16th

…willing submission that closely resembles the mind-set required to survive in a system dead-set on grinding you into the dust.

Meanwhile at Joystick Division, James Hawkins tackles the military shooter genre and airs his reservations, pointing out that generally “stories about war have to be about something much more than combat to be widely accepted as fair, legitimate works of art.” Hawkins doesn’t find that to be the case in videogames, and wonders why:

Black Ops never once portrayed the Vietnamese as living, breathing people. In the storied history of the Call of Duty franchise, or…

November 6th

…blog writes on aim-assist and other filters game designers place between the players raw input and their in-world actions:

Sitting down to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with a friend in split-screen, it often feels as if there’s a third presence in the room – an invisible game designer sitting between the controller and the television, who anticipates my own movements, says “oh, you want to shoot the guy on the left? I see, let me get that for you!” and pulls my crosshair in the right direction. Actually winning in such a scenario feels less

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January 29th

…Kane and Call of Duty, is actually just a way to legitimize power of one group over another. And this works in ways beyond class. Taste distinctions are also formed around categories of gender, race, and age, among others.

No, says Rowan Kaiser, the future will not care for our culture or community; they’ll care about our games.

Yes, the business of gaming matters in terms of making more games. Yes, review scores matter in terms of encouraging more honest discussion of video games and possibly making them better. Yes, issues of inclusion on fan…

UPDATED: Blogs of the Round Table: January ’12 Roundup

…describe what it feels like to be a powerful man, but I think playing Assassin’s Creed helped me see why it’s a fantasy for some people.”

At Digital Ephemera, Dan Cox wrote about ‘One Soldier in a War‘ and the distinction between first and third person perspective, the value of ‘life’ and what happens when he stands around looking at butterflies in Call of Duty.

The Arcadian Rhythms blog has a double-header, with thoughts from the sites’ bloggers AJ and Shaun. AJ didn’t find he identified with many game protagonists, and talked about Dead Rising‘s Frank West as…

May 27th

…narcotic properties of game stories.

One of the cuter little curios of the week, 1Up has curated a series of “alternate history” speculative articles on where gaming might be today had history gone down differently. And you’re going to love this series of game character illustrations by deviantArt artist PaperBeatsScissors of the stuff they learned from games.

Lastly, a tip of the hat is due to two particularly stand-out bloggers who went far beyond the call of duty this week. Michael Walbridge of Snackbar Games found and played every Molyjam he could get his hands on, and Superlevel’s…