Search Results for:

bioshock

August 1st

…had a rush of nostalgia for it; coincidence?

Roger Travis looks this week at whether Bioshock belongs (in the classical tradition) to the Epic or Tragic genre:

The question I want to consider in this post is whether it’s helpful to think about these ancient genres together in connection with our ongoing attempt to figure out what video games are good for.

I’ll resist the temptation to respond with a Brownian “Absolutely nothing!”

Matthew Armstrong of The Misanthropic Gamer writes about ‘The Pokémon Ego Agenda’, saying

It’s pretty damn easy to point

August 8th

…the game. The player has received these privileges for so many years that not only is there a presumption that these privileges are required, but most players are so comfortable in the current environment that they do not even know such privileges exist. I want to abolish the player’s privileges—or at least challenge the player’s dependency on them.

The phrase ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance’ has been a contentious once ever since it was introduced by Clint Hocking in his famous essay on Bioshock. This week, Corvus Elrod took the phrase to task in a post for his Semionaut’s Notebook [dead…

September 19th

…talks about ‘Nier – More than just a fishing mini-game’ [mirror]:

Nier is a game about games, a pastiche of the action-adventure/RPG genre and often more besides. To really appreciate what it has to offer you’ve got to be aware of at least some of the clichés it addresses, games it pays homage to and tropes it twists and borrows.

Also discussing Nier this week is Jeff Feeser of Spectacle Rock, who alludes to a line from Bioshock in his piece titled ‘A Slave Cannot Disobey’ [mirror].

At the PopMatters Moving Pixels blog, Kris Ligman…

September 26th

…The Last Airbender. All of these made-up worlds aspire to the same complexity, the same drama and the same importance as this single, several-year conflict.

At Pop Matters, LB Jeffries takes on the world building subject in ‘Filling in the Details in Video Games’ and Andy Johnson writes about ‘Tribal Spirituality in ‘Populous: The Beginning‘’.

Steve Gaynor closed his consistently excellent Fullbright workblog this week, going out with a bit of reflection on the success of the Minerva’s Den DLC for Bioshock 2 that he headed up.

Nels Anderson also spent some time reflecting on a…

October 17th

…Right looking at Grace Holloway [mirror] from Bioshock 2.

Extra Credits has a great introductory video on the need for ‘Diversity‘ in video games, promising future episodes exploring different types. Also this week at Before Game Design is a heavily annotated post about diversity [updated link] not only in games but in our cultural mindset.

This week Matthew Armstrong does a close reading of the Maiden Astraea encounter in Demon’s Souls and exactly how it affected him and why. Richard Castles at The Age also does what amounts to a close reading of the iPhone game Angry Birds…

November 7th

…of menus may have driven the simplicity of its latest title.

Rob Zacny writes about the powerlessness he felt throughout the first half of BioShock 2 and how his experience in Siren Alley changed his perceptions through empowerment, allowing him to see the narrative through a different lens.

On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander talks about fusing the effort of doing work in real life with playing videogames and how games get us to do normally unfavorable tasks through instant feedback and charted progress.

Cruise Elroy steps into the wayback machine and takes a closer look (sans rose-tinted glasses)…

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

November 21st

…that is where the soul is.

At Bitmob Christian Higley writes about why Mass Effect left him cold while Red Dead Redemption and Bioshock felt like the real frontier [mirror].

Some time ago, I read an article about the molten-diamond oceans of Neptune and Uranus. Imagine that for a moment: entire seas of liquefied diamonds, dotted by solid diamond icebergs. That right there is a case of fact being stranger than fiction. I can’t recall ever seeing something so amazing and unimaginable in a video-game world.

Staying with Bitmob for the moment, Omar Yusuf…

December 5th

…by Scott Juster, who writes about straight-faced games which merely peer over the fourth wall instead of breaking it down. It’s an article that talks about the ludonarrative dissonance in games like BioShock and the Uncharted series and how these games address incongruancies.

Adam Ruch has written the second part of his “Metanarrative of Videogames” article on the FlickeringColours blog. He questions the industry’s focus on the “win state” in games [mirror], and asks why they can’t strive to evoke a wider variety of emotions from players beyond that.

Salman Rushdie weighs in on videogames and the future…

February 13th

…of the posthuman.

Scott Juster talks about ‘Race in Rapture: Black Characters in BioShock 2 and Minerva’s Den‘.

The blog Play The Past has been firing on all cylinders recently, and Mark Sample injects more fuel into the blog-engine this week with a piece on ‘Containing the Past With Virtual Prisons’.

This disappearance of institutional sites of imprisonment and interrogation in videogames, replaced by on-the-spot interrogation is an example of what Ian Bogost calls procedural rhetoric, the implicit or explicit argument a computer model makes. In the case of videogames set in the war on…

March 27th

…had at GDC, itself masquerading as a review of the full-body-action game Ninja. Even the piece is in a Ninja disguise!

Another duo this week, but from the PopMatters Moving Pixels blog. Scott Juster grasps at the meaning behind Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star Filled Sky, and Kris Ligman regales us with tales of ‘The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsless Rogue: ‘Dragon Age II”s Isabela’.

At GayGamer, Denis Farr gets in touch with Irrational’s Ken Levine to talk to him about the flamboyant character of Sander Cohen in Bioshock:

…as Levine confided, “If you asked Sander