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bioshock

February 3

…“life” of Bioshockand how it operates in the critical and academic assemblages.

Self promotion station: I think that video game writers could learn a lot about their own critical community by looking at early cinema criticism.

Sparky Clarkson wrote a review of Hotline Miami in Twine.

Aaron Gotzon writes about reading Super Mario Bros. as a surrealist, psychoanalytic event that processes the self.

Jill Scharr writes on The Legend of Zelda and how it gave her a sense of wonder as a kid. Brendan Keogh hones that feeling down to a fine edge, tracing the development…

…plot, Commander Ligman discovers a mighty entity that must be destroyed before it consumes another race of synthetics: the Bit Creature! It’s already claimed Gavin Craig, who this week turns his gaze on a particular scene in Heavy Rain which not only misdirects the player but breaks the rules of the gameplay (and possibly space-time) entirely:

We’re used to and know how to read unreliable narrators in books and film. We’re even familiar with unreliable characters in games. The “would you kindly” revelation in BioShock is jarring, but it’s also frequently discussed as a high point in game

…

April 2013 – ‘VINPCs’

…or even love interests.

This month, we’d like you to talk about a memorable experience with an NPC. It can be a good or bad one, as long as it’s worth talking about! Alternatively, if you can’t think of any memorable experiences, what aspect of a game’s systems get in the way of good NPCs?”

If you’d like some inspiration for this month’s topic, I’d recommend reading ‘Plus Five to Diplomacy’ by Bill Coberly in Five out of Ten #1. Otherwise, just go play Bioshock Infinite. If you just want to laugh at something, here’s a clip…

April 2013 Roundup

…off if you steal from him. He also mentions Fable III, which is an interesting comparison because I thought its crowds demonstrated both and best and worst of the modern NPC: reactive and multi-faceted, yet also repetitive to the extreme and obviously fake.

Finally, some Irish guy wrote about Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite and whether her relationship with the player is a convincing one. I think people are going to be talking about Infinite for years, but perhaps not in the way Irrational intended.

And that’s us for the month! Join us early next week for another instalment…

June 9

…online needs and how they excludes massive numbers of people in rural America and abroad.

Specific Games and the People Who Think Very Hard About Them

Austin Walker writes about the various loves he has for State of Decay.

Jason Rice reflects on the mechanics of the second installment of Kentucky Route Zero.

Kaitlin Tremblay writes on Bioshock 2, Borderlands 2, and Baldur’s Gate to try to get at the heart of abject subjectivity in games.

Jorge Albor works out why the decision making in Quandary hits in a particularly hard manner.

I wrote…

June 23rd

…theme of hope.

Our own Cameron Kunzelman believes the theme doesn’t totally stack up: “Children of Men is about a man dying so that the world can live on. The Road is about a man trapped so far inside of himself that he can’t see the world for how it is.”

Stu Horvath came down with a nasty ailment recently and ended up reflecting how the game doesn’t successfully communicate the ‘frailty’ it appears to be going for.

Elsewhere and auf Deutsch, Rainer Sigl compares day-one reception of The Last of Us with BioShock: Infinite and has…

July 7th

…incredibly praiseworthy. Rather, it’s the bare minimum that we should expect from our narratives. To shower a game with praise for doing the minimum is to set the bar extremely low.

Elsewhere, on The Guardian, Keith Stuart draws comparisons among several recent titles and conclude that these games of dystopian fatherhood all resound in the same way:

The Last of Us, Bioshock: Infinite and The Walking Dead are all fascinating, brilliant games that do interesting things with the possibilities of interactive narrative storytelling – they present rich and detailed visions of wildly dystopian futures. But they…

August 11th

…Unwinnable, on the cult-like nature of videogame power fantasies.

On Game Church, Mark Filipowich has a look into the complexities of Final Fantasy Tactics‘s monotheism.

On Haptic Feedback, Austin Howe continues his analysis of the Metal Gear franchise and directs his gaze particularly towards the franchise’s damselization of Meryl and Emma.

Corey Milne approaches BioShock Infinite as an Irishman and a historian, questioning the game’s rather nuance-free portrayals of ethnic minorities — including the Irish.

On Ontological Geek, Aaron Gotzon praises the actually quite nuanced portrayal of weight issues through the character of Ellie in Borderlands…

August 25th

…G. Christopher Williams discusses Rogue Legacy and the so-called “irony” of playing a game about generational succession in the midst of the current social climate of aging Baby Boomers.

Two interesting articles come via Play the Past this week. The first from David R. Hussey discusses how video informed our understanding of the Gulf War — and in turn how that understanding fed into contemporary videogames. The second, from Zach Whalen, takes a magnifying glass to some of the implicit storytelling in the original BioShock.

Mike Joffe pens an interesting essay on the “game” of kabuki theatre, as…

December 22nd

…spaces that cannot exist, not as an expression of the possibilities of video game space when unshackled by the constraints of the real world, but as an outright rejection of the common standard of video game spaces.

New Voices, New Faces

Confused about what this hubhub about ‘diversity lounges’ is all about? Gamasutra editor-at-large Leigh Alexander puts it all into context and speaks with diversity advocates for their thoughts on the initiative.

You may have also heard, recently, that a white supremacist group in all seriousness adopted imagery from BioShock Infinite (without Irrational or 2K’s involvement)…