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…player character’s place in Kieron Gillen’s concept of New Games Journalism:

In terms of a game’s narrative, the PC is the entity that kills the monsters, returns the princess to the castle, but also who rampages into innocent villagers’ houses, stealing their possessions and then high-tailing it to the nearest dungeon. The PC is the catastrophic effect the human player has upon the game world. This is in contrast to the Main Character, the in-lore hero who we control. The Main Character is the one reacted to in cutscenes, who never commits any of the ridiculous acts us

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…the wrong word. Replace each instance with ‘jackass’ and it’s much more on the mark.

Joel Jordon from The Game Manifesto believes games are like music. He extols the inherent rhythm to a game’s actions, and sees similar qualities present in games from Dance Dance Revolution to Resident Evil 4 and Rayman Origins.

Alan Williamson of the SplitScreen blog looks at a quick history of cheating in games from the early cheatcode to modern hacking, to the publishers cheating gamers out of legitimately purchased content. To quote Williamson: “It’s hard for the modern gamer to be a cheater,…

…also where many players feel they lose Mass Effect, because until the final moment, the plane of men has been the only ground the game knows.

Lastly on the subject of Mass Effect, I don’t know who this pretty lady is, but a few of you wrote in recommending this link as a capstone to the discussion: “In which Squaresoft wrote a Bioware game.”

While most of the ludodecahedron spent the week effecting masses and taking journeys, a few more interesting discussion topics sneaked in. Jamin Warren sat down with Jesper Juul on the subject of failure…

Oh dear look who left the keys to TWIVGB on the kitchen table for me to find. Yes, in her distracted exam-cramming state, Kris left me in charge of TWIVGB once again. I’m sorry.

Look, here’s a little secret I’m going to share with you: sometimes writing about videogames is… how do I put this…. not weird enough. I’m going to try and pick out some of the weirder stuff this week.

For instance: At the architectural/landscape/urbanism blog M.ammoth, Rob Holmes regales us with a short anecdote about a student designing a game as part of an

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…Further on the subject of first-person shooters, Dan Nosowitz expresses his concerns for Sniper Elite V2‘s hyperrealistic “KillCam”. Thirdly, and a chief contender for article of the week, is Paolo Pedercini’s editorial for Kotaku on how franchises such as Call of Duty: Black Ops valorize a particularly frightening kind of warfare:

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations “black” is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military

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