One hour. That’s how much time elapsed between the BoRT Returns post and the first submission. It took me two hours to write that introductory post! I’m getting too old for this. If you haven’t submitted an entry for BoRT yet, you’ve got until the end of September. Get writing! Email me your submissions or tweet @critdistance or @AGBear.
Amanda Lange argues that new genres rely on new means of interaction i.e. new input devices, and that gamers need to be developed with those new inputs in mind- something that will become apparent when the Wii U is released. By the way, does anyone want to buy my Kinect?
Nate Andrews talks about how games should include troughs of banality to complement the peaks of action, referring to how a future open-world Hitman game could play out. Although I’m not sure if I want to play as Agent 47 cleaning his bathroom and buying groceries, there are some obvious parallels with Léon here, which is never a bad thing.
Mike Schiller says that instead of looking for a Citizen Kane of gaming, we should be looking for its Taxi Driver instead. I think we need a new word instead of ‘game’. How about we call them ‘digics’ or something? Can I make up a word just like that?
Peter Shafer also wants new methods of input and feedback to make games (digics) less of a “one-sided conversation”. He argues that while digics are good at communicating, they’re not great at listening. They are that blustering guy in the pub.
Cha Holland favours “pulling the wings off fairies”, demystifying the digic development process and humanising digic creators. She also calls for a wider range of niche perspectives in criticism and development- you could perhaps call it ‘The Anthropy Principle’.
Trent Shaw uses the prevalence of violence in the modern digic as a springboard for talking about how mechanical limitations and character relationships that only occur relative to the player limit the possibilities for sincere connections.
Thanks to all of our participants so far: I’ll be updating this post later in the month with more entries. I also promise I’ll stop using the word ‘digic’. Special thanks to Darius Kazemi, whose BoRT Linkomatic 5000 can be added to your blog to link to the other entries. Just embed the following code on your blog’s page:
<iframe type="text/html" width="600" height="20" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=September12" frameborder="0"></iframe>
And you’ll get this:
If you have trouble embedding the Linkomatic 5000, let me know on Twitter and I’ll try my best to help.