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call of duty

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…

July 1st

…it’s my birthday, because even he went above and beyond the call of duty this week, peeling back the narrative layers of Max Payne 3 to get at its historical and racial subtext. Meanwhile, Patrick Garratt paints a portrait of Tomb Raider as ‘business as usual’ in an industry tailored entirely for one kind of consumer.

(The next section bears trigger warnings for discussion of rape, misogyny, homophobia and child abuse.)

And while every article which appears in these roundups is truly a gift, my thanks especially have to go out to those writers who go places others…

October 28th

…mission report and all video data went to some classified server somewhere; nothing to see, nothing to confirm. This doesn’t bother me as much as it raises questions about the status and effects of the future warfighter.

Am I the product of 20 years of desensitization? With the decrease in infantrymen and the increase in bomb-dropping drones, am I the model killer the military wants–or needs? It strikes me that the first generation to grow up not knowing a world without Call Of Duty or Battlefield is now coming of enlistment age, right as the military shifts to a…

November 4th

…and the amount of playtime and polygons and 3D. The sort of stuff that’s good to know, but which isn’t why games actually matter.

Do you want to know the reason that Call of Duty hasn’t had a new idea in five years? It’s because it hasn’t needed one.

Oh well! Lets just power through it and get all the way back to the sweet, sweet 1980s (I’m told the 1980s air was much more fresh!).

Hotline Miami has made a lot of people excited since it was released. Kyle Carpenter makes the comparison with Drive…

December 16th

…Rivas get together to discuss Canadian-produced Assassin’s Creed 3‘s take on the American Revolution.

Meanwhile, on his own blog, Jordan Rivas relates how Call of Duty reminds him of a Katy Perry song.

KEEPING GATES

We catch up with John Brindle again back over on Nightmare Mode, where Brindle outlines a pretty compelling critique of gamer elitism:

[Jim Rossignol wrote that] we shouldn’t worry about what non-gamers think of games, because “in this instance,” he wrote, “we are the highly educated elite.”

It’s a good point. It arouses in me the instant desire to defend…

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2012

…looks at how drone warfare is represented in three very different 2012 releases: Spec Op: The Line, Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Unmanned.

Helen Lewis gave John Brindle the floor at her column at the New Statesman to explain how text-based games are examining war in ways that traditional games either choose not to or simply can’t.

Jordan Rivas explains how Splinter Cell is the true post-9/11 game for him and his brother. The word has changed in the decade since and so has the series.

Our own Kris Ligman calls Analogue: A Hate Story…

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January 6th

…Firaxis.

Next up is an article by John Brindle on Gameranx who probes the sexual politics of the Hitman franchise and its latest execution, Hitman Absolution. The article “reveals the secret sexual urges of the bald penis-head assassin,” said Brindle in his e-mail to us.

Also on Gameranx is Phil Owen, who takes a closer look at the narrative structure and storytelling of Treyarch’s latest foray into the Call of Duty franchise, Black Ops 2.

Concluding the trio of entries from Gameranx this week is an article by Declan Skews, who tried to get his mother into…

January 20th

…who try and come up with all the different ways to kill people in Bulletstorm, who praise Call of Duty for the ways it makes killing feel exciting and rewarding. We are the ones who bought, and clamored for, games in which women are sexy nuns that we are then able to systematically eliminated.

It was us – all of us. It was me. We are all, every one of us, totally depraved. None is righteous. No, not one. It’s a system we are invested and take part in.

I’ll give the final word to the matter…

February Roundup

…better than Heavy Rain”. And you know what? I’m so sleepy I’m just going to leave it at that.

What’s the modern equivalent of “stop the presses!” “Edit the WordPress post!”, I guess. Joseph Miller has a detailed look at realities within games. I liked the section on ‘magic objects’: in Call of Duty only certain objects are interactive, while in Super Mario World more or less everything is interactive, which heightens its relative realism. Perhaps this explains why bugs can be infuriating, or even comical.

And… that’s it! That’s all we’ve got this month. Unless I missed…

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November 3rd

…online game devs in Turkey, about the different attitudes towards their products in islamic culture.

Over on Paidia, Tobias Unterhuber talked to Matthias Kempke of the adventure devs Daedalic about literature, intertextuality, art and all that jazz.

Martina Schwerdtfeger shared her experience playing shooters as a woman with Femgeeks.

On Kleiner Drei, Fionna discusses the appeal and community of cosplay.

Continuing familiar teasing, Marcus Dittmar has written a text from the perspective of the Call of Duty Dog for Superlevel, wondering why all those hoomans seem to be easily conditioned towards manshooting.

Meanwhile, Ciprian David…