"Where is all the good writing about games?"
According to my working document naming convention this is the 70th TWIVGB I’ve assembled. That’s somewhat mind boggling, and so is the number of posts this week!
Greg J. Smith at Serial Consign usually blogs about architecture, and occasionally, we are blessed with an essay like this one
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…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
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…There are seven possibilities, and seven endings. Obviously, this left the writers ofMorrowind with something of a quandry – which ending to call canon, and write into the history books of Tamriel? The answer, which came to be known as “the Warp in the West”, was: all of them.
At The Artful Gamer, Chris Lepine tries to figure out how mastering a game is its own enjoyment, written as a response to Jamie Madigan’s article at Psychology of Video Games on how gaming can be good for your mental health. Lepine writes:
I see the “poetic…
…can’t wait for more.
Evan Stubbs of RedKingsDream is making his kids play games [dead link, no mirror available]. Why? Because Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer found his class of college students struggled to play some ‘classic games’ and Stubbs doesn’t want those skills lost:
To me, their reactions are a sad indictment on how games have been progressively moving from an intellectual challenge to what my parents were always concerned they were – a timewaster. Growing up with these games taught me stuff, damn it; games were more than mere mechanics, they were personal and
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…he’s shared the text of that talk on the Killscreen Magazine website [mirror]. I’m on the same page with this one. It’s an important thing:
What videogames lack is a vernacular. A native tongue that all who play games can converse in openly. The lack of this common narrative culture frightens me as we are moving out of a world where people ask, “Are you a gamer?” and moving into a world where we ask, “What games do you play?” We are finally crossing that precipice, but when we finally find our voice, we will have nothing to
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…PhD thesis about GTA:IV in which he’ll be talking to gamers and finding out what they think about the game as they play it:
The voice of the ‘gamer’ is largely missing from games academia. Certainly there are examples of ethnographic research with players out there, but most of them seem to have been conducted by people who don’t actually play the games themselves.
At the Spectacle Rock blog Joel Haddock pokes his metaphorical fingers in the metaphorical cracks that are the logical inconsistencies present in many games. Haddock is focussing this time on why it…
I can’t keep putting it off – assembling the best and brightest pieces of writing, blogging, opinion and criticism of videogames from the week is not going to happen by itself. Let’s see what we’ve got here…
First up this week, Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer looks at the ‘Clone Wars’ currently raging on the iPad/iPhone platform. He singles out one publisher – Gameloft – for churning out ersatz version of AAA titles. The cheek! The nerve!
Gameloft’s clones are whole cloth derivatives of aesthetic elements like character design, art style, user-interface, and even color
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Amanda Lange at her Second Truth blog takes a look at “What’s Social in ‘Social Games’?” She looks at the common complaints of the genre and see if they are true from the player’s standpoint.
“How should we judge indie games?” asks Northernlion at the Saving Progress blog by checking out three titles and the criticisms lodged at theme by reviewers.
Indiana Hamilton-Brown has a short interview with RPS critic and author Jon Rossignol about space and architecture in their roles in games.
Michael “Brainy Gamer” Abbott works on a reading of games as an existential
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Hello! Welcome to another episode of This Week In Videogame Blogging, it’s been a busy week for the blogosphere, which has seen some heated but reasonably productive discussion. But we’ll get to that.
First, the loveliest thing I’ve read all week (indeed, the loveliest for some time longer) is ‘Games Saved My Life’ which is a collection of essays and stories organised by Ashley Burch (of ‘Hey Ash Whatchya Playing’ fame). They tell tales of salvation through games, featuring stories like this one in which “Morgan McCormick, a transgender gamer, talks about how video games were an essential
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…but Kotaku doesn’t see me as a gamer. No, instead I’m a multi-racial transgender who-knows-sexual possibly-feminist woman gamer. A boogie monster. Someone who uses too many –isms and –ists in their daily tweets to actually enjoy anything. I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone ask what it’s like to be me in this pocket of society.
You know that invisible ink in detective movies? If you could get an internet lighter, you’d find “This site is for heterosexual white American men gamers.”
It’s a highly evocative piece and I most certainly recommend reading it in full.
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