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fallout

December 9th

…games exploring real world themes – war, history, action and inaction – I pay closer attention.

Has any one game ever done anything to me?

GENTLEMEN, PLEASE! NO LITERARY THEORY IN THE WAR ROOM!

Geraets’s fellow Bit Creaturer Drew Dixon draws a spiritual conclusion from the illusion of choice in The Walking Dead.

On Unwinnable, Jill Scharr gets elbows-deep into the narrative structure of Final Fantasy X.

Over on Ontological Geek, Hannah DuVoix explores the existentialism of Fallout.

On Gameranx, Brendan Keogh has been plumbing the depths of Binary Domain for a while,…

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2012

…on, the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Patricia Hernandez wrote one of the best personal pieces of the year as she explores how Fallout 2 disillusioned her of the American Dream and shaped her life against the more traditional family ideology she grew up in.

Christian Donlan sat down with his father who was a member of the LAPD in the 1940s to see what reaction L.A. Noire would elicit. What he got was a unique method of traveling down memory lane.

Mattie Brice uses Persona 4‘s Naoto to look at gender identity, its presentation and the…

January 6th

…blogosphere, Brett Douville reflects upon his fifteenth anniversary of the day he joined the games industry and made programming his livelihood. It’s an insightful read from one of the minds behind Skyrim and Fallout 3.

Claire Hosking shares her thoughts on Halo 4‘s Cortana, who in contrast with other bloggers, believes that it’s unfair to judge the character based on the size of her breasts. She writes about the ‘fun/worthiness’ dichotomy that’s often invoked against women characters with certain body types, as if attractiveness is an indicator of downmarket design.

The ever prolific Maddy Myers writes about harassment…

June 30th

…the concept of Primordia as a tale of ideological fallout.

On PopMatters Moving Pixels, Mark Filipowich observes that few games have their heroes wrecking the local ecosystem. As if in answer, Ontological Geek’s Sebastian Atay poses that Metroid Prime‘s ‘Ruined Fountain’ area is an illustration of exactly this.

Last before we move beyond the land of textual readings, but Janet Murray brought us a hell of a (welcomed) blast from the past this week: the slides from her 2005 DiGRA keynote, “The Last Word on Ludology v Narratology.”

BEYOND PLAY

Those darn kids, playing with their…

May-June 2013 Roundup

…promised no invisible walls across its wilderness, and Andrew Linder writes about its sense of scale. Unlike say Fallout 3, which was appropriately barren for a post-apocalytic landscape, Skyrim is bursting with life from every valley, river and cave. Yet it still feels big and expansive, which is an important part of enjoying the environment.

Wei Jia writes about the depiction of Tatooine in Knights of the Old Republic. One difference in game depictions of environments is that unlike film or books, your imagination can’t fill in the blanks in the same way. Artists and designers have to…

April 27th

…only person suffering fallout will be you.

On Polygon, Jonathan McIntosh lays out in plain language much the same criticism of male privilege as other articles have done, but using an approach I find quite effective — he unpacks his invisible knapsack.

I want to emphasize that this list is not meant to suggest that everything is always a cakewalk for male gamers. Male critics, developers, and gamers are also at times bullied or subjected to online nastiness, but it is not based on or because of our gender. This is a critical distinction. The pattern…

August – September Roundup: ‘Catharsis’

…Context is queen for Swan, and Lara’s deviation from the norm is a huge relief.

Meghan Blythe Adams invites us to her online home of The Bagatelle to describe the most anxiety-provoking moment she ever experienced in a game: the accidental killing of Ellen, an NPC in Fallout 3. Her experience, though unpleasant, became “something of a watershed moment for my academic practice…the fact remains that I already experienced the worst anxiety and self-doubt my beloved object of study could muster in me.” For what it’s worth, I also felt too bad about what happened in the vault to…

January Roundup: ‘Player’s Choice’

…subgames and what the creation of those subgames reveal about play styles and player types. His analysis covers stealth play and role play. Strik’s analysis also considers what happens when the play styles we once to incorporated ourselves become a part of the game itself. He says:

The more your specific playstyle becomes part of the official game rules, the less it becomes a game within a game.

Commodore Purry’s Cupcake Party contribution also discusses roleplay by musing over self-imposed roleplay in Fallout: New Vegas. Commodore Purry developed a list of constraints to make playing in…

March 29th

…(Content warning: discussion of suicide.)

Joe Parlock, inspired by Laura Kate’s post, tells of how his own feelings blinded him to an option in Fallout 3, and elsewhere, Taylor Hidalgo tackles morality in The Deer God.

Mapping Out Our History

Over at the Ontological Geek, James Hinton wrote about how game maps tend to ignore practical implications for interesting design in land masses, and Brendan Vance’s “The Ghosts of Bioshock” reflects on the Wounded Knee massacre of the Sioux and the framing of history in Bioshock: Infinite:

On one hand I feel [Bioshock: Infinite]

…

June 7th

…Timothy Cain (video) about the development of the first Fallout.

Meanwhile, at Play the Past, Gilles Roy has published an interesting two part interview with developer Jos Hoebe, developer on the recently released World War I-themed game Verdun. From the interview’s first half:

Hoebe: All the studios were mainly driven by a commercial agenda. [You] just take the biggest subject, like World War 2, with a clear narrative of Good versus Evil, which doesn’t exist in World War 1. There are reasons why there have not been World War 1 games made, especially from a first person

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