Search Results for:

gamer

February 5th

…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,…

March 18th

…Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs dares to ask the question of players, “Could you be playing it wrong?” and it’s not necessarily such a bad thing to ask.

At the ‘Empty Wallet Gamer’ tumblr, Shawn Trautman ruminates on ‘The future of DLC’, having never actually bought any himself. His point is tied in with game preservation efforts, and discusses how, having just bought 2004’s number 1 shooter Halo 2 (props to Shawn, Halo 2 is a personal favourite), it made him wonders what will happen when DLC becomes unsupported.

At the consistently excellent Play The Past blog,…

July 22nd

…and in gamer culture– but she also notes we should address where the underlying issues of those attitudes lie:

[In] games, as well as comics and other male-dominated nerd arenas, the business model leverages risk aversion against a habituated, narrow audience. It doesn’t favor experimenting to try to give these people newer, smarter things. More importantly, neither do the traditions of geek culture, which is founded in misunderstood people prizing their special escapes from the uninitiated, keeping sacred the spaces that make them feel powerful.

For most people, this is their identity, and if you tell them…

August 26th

Just the facts today, ma’am. It’s time for This Week in Videogame Blogging.

Let’s start at the scene of the crime– war crimes, that is, where Ken Hannahs muses at Gameranx about the ludonarrative dissonance of modern “counter-terrorism” games actually performing the many acts one is supposed to be ideologically opposing:

Perhaps this is what living in a post-9/11 world is for Americans. Perhaps modern military tactics have become so clandestine as to have become impossible to discern from the very thing we are fighting against. These are our military heroes in videogames: men who break

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September 16th

…students from becoming gamers.

My gamer-adjacent students could love games – even become gamers – if videogames taught them how to think critically about violence.

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My students argue that excessive, realistic death and torture will desensitize gamers. While the link between desensitization and mimicry is tenuous at best, I do believe that media affects people. Well-crafted books, films and television shows change how people think and feel. The thoughts and feelings elicited by media alter how people treat one another.

Jeff Wheeldon writes about “The Myth of Redemptive Violence” at Push Select Magazine…

November 11th

…have made such a difference in my own life.

Meanwhile, the Dear Ada blog, in which writers from all backgrounds as gamers, designers and critics write open letters to Ada Lovelace, the world’s first programmer, is still going strong with a new entry from “White Mouse”, a female AAA developer caught between complicity in corporate attitudes and the risks posed by entering indie waters. Great, heartfelt read.

The Shame Game

In a guest piece for Kotaku, Samuel Sattin discusses overcoming a sense of shame associated with the ‘gamer’ label:

I used to be ashamed…

December 2nd

…dreams” it sells the comfortably well-off: “Kickstarter is the absolute poster-child for inequality amongst gamers, based on income.”

MEANWHILE IN LOS ANGELES

Here’s a nice article, courtesy of Kill Screen, profiling the upcoming LA Game Space, games’ “first high-profile residency program.” Predictably, it too has a Kickstarter. (Although arguably, this project better fulfills the intentions of the service as a charity platform than many of the greenlit projects that have gained notoriety in the past.)

IT’S VIDEOGAMES, KIDS

Critical Distance contributor Cameron Kunzelman returns to his own blog to advocate for a more inward-facing style of…

December 9th

…how good men can move from sense and reason to madness and destruction simply because they believe they are in the right. If you believe you’re right, you can convince yourself of anything.

Captain Walker is one of my favorite video game characters. I don’t like him, but he’s found a special place in my gamer’s heart of characters whom I’ll never forget.

Games as a whole have shaped me as a writer – certainly my fiction feels different than it did when I was in college, just starting out as a gamer – and when I see…

This Year In Video Game Blogging 2012

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Michael “brainygamer” Abbott contends Journey is not another retelling of the ‘hero’s journey’, but connects it to the sapta bodhyanga of Buddhist Enlightenment.

Robert Yang writes that Dishonored fails as an immersive sim during its tutorial as it closes off possibilities to learn mechanics.

Tami Baribeau of The Border House says that the portrayal of women in Dishonored flits back and forth between tired stereotype and commentary on a sexist society.

Where many others found a disgusting brutality in Max Payne 3 towards foreigners, Fernando Cordeiro found a certain catharsis in shooting his countrymen with regards

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May 19th

…Paul Haine has a compelling argument: the Wii U is failing because unlike its predecessor, it harbors an antisocial message:

You can see the Wii U being socially divisive with the very first scene in the video; some dick walks into a living room and declares that it’s “time to watch the baseball”, changing the channel without even giving the gamer time to pause and forcing him to carry on his game on the controller’s small screen. It’s a pretty depressing scene; the gamer doesn’t participate in the baseball-watching, nor does baseball-dick care about the videogame. The Wii

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