Search Results for:

sound

March 20th

…Machine’s thoughts of consumption, Matt Sayer over at Talk Amongst Yourselves speaks about not playing games. After all, as it’s said in the article, “Loving a game you’ve never played might sound antithetical, but the medium is more than just interaction.”

On other shores, PopMatters and Nick Dinicola take a look at travel, and how the hazards of exploring space make the space more validating for its travelers. “When I say travel should be difficult, I don’t just mean that we should always be under the threat of death, just that travel should require more thought than simply holding…

April 24th

…| Gamechurch.com (Audio, no transcript) Jonathan R. Clauson discusses game design as social history with the creator of 1979 Revolution.

  • The joys of taking a shower and sipping coffee in Indigo Prophecy | Kill Screen David Chandler addresses the director’s gaze in David Cage’s early project.
  • Heart attacks and doggy treats: the PS2’s most bizarre horror game | Kill Screen Zach Budgor details the dysmorphic terror of Haunting Ground

    • “by removing player agency at critical moments, Haunting Ground commits to Fiona’s subjectivity. The formal elements of the game—sound, image, control—bend to her psychological state, rather…

    New website! Part 1: search

    …origin page to be tracked). This finally gets close to solving a problem that we’ve had for years, whereby any user researching a topic had to constantly re-do their search in-browser in order to isolate the relevant part of each TWIVGB roundup. Now the relevant sections stand out, highlighted in orange.

    Try it now with a search for the term “sound“.

    Preview snippets

    I wanted browsing Critical Distance to be similar to browsing a title in Google Books. The Relevansii plugin has allowed me to achieve that. Instead of seeing the same standard excerpt for a post…

    November 6th

    …and even what love is. Can something that’s not human truly consent? Can you separate consciousness and identity from something like sexuality?”

    Kinesthetic Discovery

    Finally, let’s get meta! First, a couple of selections from the new issue of the Game Studies Journal. I don’t always include academic writing here, but these pieces are open access and bring up some approaches and issues that are important to thinking about games outside of formal research environments.

    • Game Sound in the Mechanical Arcades: An Audio Archaeology | Game Studies Karen Collins attempts to excavate and analyse the sounds…

    August 21st

    …culture.

    • Critiquing Witcher 3’s Wonky, Sexist Fashion | The Mary Sue Megan Patterson argues that fashion is an essential part of world building and character building, deserving of care and research.
    • Female Protagonist Videogame Masterpost. | I Need Diverse Games. This living document listing games with female protagonists as the default option could be a useful resource for many readers here.
    • Visual disabilities and sound in media: how sonic technologies can improve everyone’s life Wilfried Nass compares the role of audio narration in movies to games, exploring the hints of possibility for audio-oriented gameplay.
    • Bodies

    …

    January 29th

    …that you cannot meaningfully take a comprehensive view of accessibility without addressing the sociological and economic factors within which people operate.”

    Who’s topping?

    Examining how relationships are experienced within games, two writers thinking about how care dynamics are nurtured in quite different ways.

    • Lost Garden: Game design patterns for building friendships Daniel Cook shares the results of what sounds like a fairly involved, collaborative project to conceptualise game design aimed at player-player relationships.
    • How The Last Guardian Makes You Care About A Bird Dog Heather Alexandra offers an alternative reading of the relationship with…

    June 11th

    …communicates the stages of mourning through its stage design, puzzles and sound, which “demonstrates [that] emotion shouldn’t be suppressed or reveled in alone, but honestly and cathartically expressed.”

  • The Old Man and the Sea: Searching for reason in Rime|Thumbsticks (Spoiler Alert) Josh Wise takes a critical look at Rime through the lens of poetry, art and film in his third discussion on the game, as he sees it invoking the metaphysical by “[blurring] the boundary between realism and magic.”

    • “Rime is like a painting, not just in its visual splendour, but in its narrative. Sparse, beautiful,…

    July 19th

    …on the horizon, and instruct me: “survive”.

    I’d like that.

    Which, I suspect obliquely inspired a conversation on twitter between CLINT HOCKING, Manveer “both humble and amazing” Heir, Soren Johnson, Harvey Smith, David Jaffe, Brenda Brathwaite and others, using the #gamedesign tag. A great visual record of the conversation can be found here courtesy of Mike Watson (known as in_orbit [editor note 2017: dead link] on twitter) from Telltale games.

    Tom Chick (again) links to an interview with Jenova Chen (of Flower, flOw, etc) which contains some really interesting virtual sound-bytes on his unique approach to…

    July 23rd

    …for them to feel a greater ownership and investment in it,” says Zimonja. “If you give them a little bit to imagine, and the space to do it themselves, then they’ve made their own version of that and they now have a little bit of the story already inside their head. They’re no longer just looking at it. They’ve absorbed it, and it’s a part of them now.”

    A line of latitude

    Finally, these three pieces look at different possibilities for criticism itself: speculative fiction, auteur theory, and the use of sound design in video let’s plays.

    …

    Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

    July 30th

    …say that tedium is never meaningful or valuable; I ask only that we dispel the notion that tedium is somehow intrinsic to the anti-shooter.”

    Inhabit the skin of the monstrous

    Four writers this week look at how games portray and respond to mental states; including a piece from Waypoint’s special week on incarceration, that considers the metaphorical prisons of the mind.

    • A Simmering Hum | Unwinnable Levi Rubeck’s analysis of sound design and soundtrack in Momodara’s Reverie is sensitive and illuminating.
    • Burly Men at Sea is a Wes Anderson Videogame | Unwinnable Declan Taggart…