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narratives

May 1st

…its ability to play with time” which seems like an oversimplification, but let’s see where he goes with it. He mentions numerous examples in other media that also plays with time, seemingly contra to his assertion, from painting to cinema to literature that but says that,

Video games, however, are rather uniquely suited to “plays” with time. Unlike the static images in many of the visual arts or the comforting linearity of textual and cinematic narratives, games have always included temporal disruptions and events that are essentially “do overs”.

And lastly, William French writing at Bitmob…

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July 3rd

…Adam Ruch writes about Saboteur and how the world failed to convey the story it wanted to tell. He ruminates on a few encounters and how they were or at least could have been more meaningful than the story missions.

Perhaps if Pandemic, and other studios with similar designs, were to trust their worlds rather than their narratives, I would have saved those civilians. I would have, if I thought that it would matter.

Vanya at split/screen co-op, when discussing on war games and the effect it has on our thinking rather than our actions, says…

August 14th

…doesn’t take gender or sex into account in any way.

Over on PopMatters, Scott Juster writes about getting to know Zelda as a character rather than an archetype. And Maggie Greene’s recent play with Okamiden has led her to write about Chinese literature, games, and the necessity of some narratives to be fuzzy at the edges.

And these three pieces on design may prove of interest. The first comes from Patrick Hollerman of The Game Design Forum about learning curves in casual and hardcore games. The second arrives to us from Critical Missive as an extensive look…

September 4th

…funny, or when the occasion clearly calls for the player character to participate in the action. In a sense, Balthier was what I expected from the protagonist of a Final Fantasy game, and Vaan was more of a… I don’t know, a viewpoint?

In the first of two contributions from Pop Matters this week, Jorge Albor examines the way puzzle-platformer The End handles the topic of mortality.

And next, in ‘Thematic Confusion in the Branching Narratives of Video Games‘, Nick Dinicola explores the branching plots of games such as Mass Effect 2, Dead Space: Ignition and Heavy…

October 23rd

…the restrictions of what it means to be a game.

If you’re reading this, of course, chances are you already play videogames, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading Lee Kelly’s Ambient Challenge blog, where he hopes to illustrate his love for videogames to non-gamers in a language that’s easy to comprehend. First up his an article that both praises and disparages Crysis for its virtues and flaws. Crysis, he says, offers a strong emergent storytelling component that’s weakened by the forced storyline its creators forced upon the player.

Kelly also writes about the dual narratives of Red…

March 25th

…up their views, placing the game in the context of older media. Valdes begins by discerning between “primary” and “secondary” epics and how Mass Effect 3 fulfills the description of a primary epic in the classical sense. Meanwhile, Cox likens the story to mythology in the broad sense and Christian narratives in particular, suggesting the ending has frustrated players because it cannot be interpreted in the same literal fashion as the rest of the franchise:

[T]hat it is where we find Shepard in the end: on the plane of mythology, removed from the plane of men. And that is…

May 27th

…Hernandez, you may recall she is also editor in chief of Nightmare Mode, which also pulled together a remarkably strong week. Newcomer contributor and Split-Screen vet Alan Williamson muses on how we can make death matter in games, while Bill Coberly pays tribute to Digital: A Love Story‘s reinvention of the silent protagonist.

Also on Nightmare Mode, Nolan McBride performs a deep reading on the player-character identification in The Darkness II. And Nightmare Mode co-editor Tom Auxier makes an aggressive case for how games have fallen out of touch with the narratives of our daily lives:

In

September 9th

…that games are not the best medium to tell stories and yet developers keep telling stories in their games and game critics keep pointing out when game narratives contradict their mechanics. And now with Papo & Yo, we have a game whose systems coincide with and add depth to its narrative structure and we can’t stop complaining about how it’s too easy.

Along those lines, we hear a lot about how to “fix” games journalism and criticism but VG Revolution’s Marc Price does us one better. He offers up some specifics which go beyond simply the journalists themselves:

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December 23rd

…process of Tourette Quest, a game in which the player can “explore what it’s like to have Tourette’s Syndrome through the lens of game mechanics.”

Meanwhile at Polygon, Patrick Stafford takes a peek inside the world of faith-based gaming.

And at VG Revolution, Clayton launches into an essay on the importance of characterization in game narratives, with particular attention paid to characters in the .hack franchise.

S/HE WORE GREENSLEEVES

On Medium Difficulty, Kaitlin Tremblay poses the interesting argument that the first-person perspective can have a way of sidestepping the male gaze.

On the flip side,…

January 13th

…an interview with its project lead Henrik Fåhraeus.

On the topic of excellent Gamasutra features, Christian Nutt has a great one up as well on Virtue’s Last Reward and its director, Kotaro Uchikoshi.

Touching off on a 2011 piece by Kirk Battle about content degradation, Joseph Leray suggests RPGs’ narratives have a unique staying power because, rather than being completely dissonant from their mechanics, their story universes are meaningfully interwoven with them.

Most of [the Final Fantasy franchise’s] systems are diagetic: the Materia system of Final Fantasy VII occurs in a world in which materia is