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aesthetics

March 13th

…is ultimately illusory; your avatar may balloon in stature, hoard all within reach, but you remain unchanged. In our isolation, the illusion constructed by the virtual, while appealing, offers us a hollow prize.”

Getting space

Finally, these last two pieces address space in games in very different ways: one much more formalistic, the other as part of an analysis of aesthetics.

  • Gamasutra: David Stark’s Blog – Grids in Games: Scale and Shape David Stark provides a great overview of how games break down space and time into units.
  • ‘Quadrilateral Cowboy’ Points to a Different…
Geometric image from Nier: Automata

April 2nd

…– Charles Hans Huang – Medium Charles Huang provides a useful list of keywords for game aesthetics and values.

Games can bring forth many kinds of emotions, but there are a few that move beyond the cheap thrills, titillation, and all flash but no substance— there are a few that might speak to (or at least have the ambition to speak to) the core of what it means to be alive. Even if a game doesn’t necessarily bring us something useful per se, it might be able to speak on a level that calls out to our…

Kill Screen archive

…terminator other people

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    • June 11th

    …Philip K. Dick word to describe rubbish, and how Prey weaponizes it.

  • Double Blind|Intermittent Mechanism Ian Bryce Jones comparatively investigates Perception and Beyond Eyes, both of which utilize blindness but varying aesthetics to communicate:

    • “Rejecting Perception‘s ‘tap your cane and you’ll see an accurate picture of the world around you for a moment’ logic, Beyond Eyes posits perception as a kind of hypothesis-testing … Sometimes, Rae makes mistakes. She might hear what she assumes to be linens flapping in the breeze, and the game’s GUI will happily indulge in that assumption, illustrating a laundry line for…

    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    June 18th

    …easy to come by.

  • Yokoo Tarou’s Eternal Recurrence: Transhumanism in NieR: Automata Kastel examines the roles of Shakespeare, Sartre and de Beauvoir in this story about life after gender.

    • “the Shakespeare play in Automata, while ridiculous, must have meant something to the machines who watched it. A machine spectator says it is beautiful. Surely, our aesthetics don’t match with that machine — but it must be something.”

    Gender options

    Further discussions on gender and sexuality in games this week concerned social progress in the industry and enthusiast communities.

    • E3 games feature…

    July 16th

    …external aesthetics are genuinely representative of an internal structure that whose priorities and techniques are expressly feminine […] My working definition of feminine game design is this: design that intentionally evokes feelings of grace and harmony, often through qualitative and relational incentives.”

    Boyfriend-wannabes

    Romantic relationships provided fertile ground for discussions about psychological pain in games this week.

    • The $5,000 decision to get rid of my past – Polygon Ben Kuchera tells the story of how he lost, or relinquished, his games collection.
    • “Wolfenstein: The New Order’s Train Car Test,” by Ed Smith – Bullet…

    August 6th

    …Mae is infamously known for beating up a boy for seemingly no reason when she was in high school. At the time, she was reacting to an episode of depersonalization that caused her to see the world in “shapes” and disconnect from reality.”

    Context clues

    From the cultural to historical, these writers explore the connections between play and aestheticism, abstraction and subversion.

    • The Poetics of Form and the Politics of Identity in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation | Kinephanos Soraya Murray discusses cultural context and aesthetics in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation and how the character of…

    November 12th

    …Invisible Walls | Problem Machine problemmachine reflects on some of the disconnects between game design and real-world social systems.

  • Bad Images | Midboss (Em) – Medium Emilie Reed looks to pattern making for the origins, and fundamental structure, of computing, and suggests that we should look to pattern forms for gaming’s aesthetics.

    • “If we accept that “gameplay” as an abstraction is made up of loops and repeated parts and this is in part because of how computers work, it’s nonsensical to also ignore the implications this has for everything else about the form.”

    Reaching…

    January 7th

    …confront the empty reality of millennial capitalism, and calls for games that can help us to imagine an alternative.

  • The Vaporwave Aesthetic of Broken Reality | Unwinnable Khee Hoon Chan addresses the millennial loss of purpose via nostalgic superflat glitch aesthetics in this mid-development title.

    • “This system of gathering as much social media currency as possible, only for a vague sense of reward, reminds me of the pervasiveness numbness that comes with consumerism.”

    Normal apocalyptic

    Three critics highlight games that challenge received genre conventions relating to zombies and the apocalypse.

    • An…

    January 21st

    …Game Protagonists And The Ultimate Modernist Man – Sneaky Bastards – YouTube Daniel Hindes reads a 2012 essay by James Patton on the modernist aesthetics of stealth and the fantasy of achieving tactical mastery within a complex system.

  • Unreal: How a Survivor Parody Explores the Artificiality of Games and Reality TV :: Games :: Features :: Survivor :: Paste Dante Douglas examines the rhetoric of a game that reflects contemporary media issues around participation and spectatorship.
  • How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s – Waypoint (Content warning: racism) Robert Zacny reports…