What a week. I’d make a joke about secretly being cast as the Twelfth Doctor, but I imagine that would get me angry letters in my inbox. Let’s stick to what we know, shall we? And what we know is the very best in games writing on the internet. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!
ONLY CONNECT
No less than Janet Murray herself has weighed in on the conclusion of Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity, with a few ideas on why it was such a draw anyway.
Porpentine and Merritt Kopas come together in a tangle of radical game dev limbs with a co-written essay toward an erotics of videogames, and play as political, subversive act. (Content warning: abstract nude figures, sexual subject matter.)
I desire living play:
Play that collaborates across artforms, across bodies.
Play intended to “provoke admiration” of other humans.
Play for human, not for capitalist death machine.
The goal isn’t to replace one corrupted form of play with some recovered, true one. Instead: exploration, acknowledgment of difference. Explosion of the lie that there are right/wrong ways to touch, to fuck, to create, to play.
CHEW ON THIS XBONE
It’s unusual for something like NeoGAF to feature on these roundups, but this reply from faceless007 in a discussion on Xbox One’s potential effects on the used game market is a whammy.
If this industry can’t find a way to make money off the primary market — even with DLC and exclusive pre-order content and HD re-releases and map packs and online passes and annualized sequels and “expanding the audience” and AAA advertising and forced multiplayer — then, if I may be so blunt, fuck it. It doesn’t deserve our money in the first place. If an entire industry has its head so far up its ass, is so focused on short-term gains, and has embraced such a catastrophically stupid blockbuster business model in the pursuit of a stagnant market of hardcore 18-34 dudebros that it thinks it has no choice but to take away our first-sale rights as its last chance of maybe, finally, creating a sustainable stream of profits, then it can go to hell.
On PopMatters Moving Pixels, Scott Juster opines that the Xbox One addresses the living situation of only a global privileged minority– a “first world problem,” as the kids call it (note: don’t call it that).
Meanwhile, on Kotaku, Leigh Alexander presents us with a satirical take on the Xbone’s dead paradigm.
DESIGN MATTERS
On the original and still very best Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott offers some much-needed perspective on the so-called creatively limiting trappings of genre. Specifically, that genre can also be a format by which to creatively flourish.
The second Tropes vs Women in Games video is out, continuing Anita Sarkeesian’s analysis of the Damsel in Distress trope. On Medium, Jenn Frank expounds on Sarkeesian’s statement that we can still enjoy problematic media, talking schlocky games, slasher films, and still being a feminist.
And over on Gamasutra’s member blogs, JJ Wang throws in their own two cents about the Tropes vs Women in Games series, to whit: even if you totally, utterly disagree with Sarkeesian’s charges of sexism, these tropes are still lazy and a sign of bad writing.
Jordan Rivas has been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic and noted some unfortunate implications with shortcuts taken in the worldbuilding:
On multiple planets in the game, across varying class storylines, both Republic and Imperial characters are asked to occasionally kill enemies labeled “anarchist”. Finally, on a planet called Belsavis […] I was continually asked to kill anarchists simply because they were in prison and trying to get out.
[…]It made me pause. Why is being an anarchist a crime? Is that their only crime? What else could they have done, besides adhering to a political philosophy, that caused them to be imprisoned. […] [D]oes the Republic jail political dissidents?
On GameInformer, Liz Lanier takes a look back at Grandia‘s End of the World.
Responding to the Mises Institute article we linked last week, Craig Bamford maintains that often enough, game economies like Diablo 3 aren’t meant to function like real-world economies:
Even if real-world economies behaved that way, games arent supposed to be completely free and open in the first place. Games are systems of rules and restrictions. The economies of games are about those rules and restrictions and the enjoyment that the player gets from operating within that space. The whole reason why Diablo 3‘s economy was a miserable failure, and why the PS3/PS4 version of the game won’t have an auction house at all, is because Blizzard forgot that.
Problem Machine answers the question: what’s the difference between rules and mechanics? And UnSubject offers up a bit of chartporn analysis on how Metacritic’s weighted metascore differs from unweighted averages.
ALL TOGETHER NOW
Back on Gamasutra’s blogs, developer Jen Whitson points to one way in which developers continually select for a particular kind of work culture (read: bro culture).
Also in the Gama blogs, I Get This Call Every Day dev David Gallant argues for a more inclusive independent scene as well.
AUF DEUTSCH
On Videogametourism, Robert Glashüttner takes a look at erratic horror.
And Sebastian Standke and Christian Huberts have put out a bilingual (German/English) call for interviews on the subject of atmospheric games.
MISCELLANY
David Surman has put together a collection of work from one of Christian McCrea’s classes, showing off conceptual hard case covers for thatgamecompany’s Journey.
I don’t often list my own work here, but this is one subject I can get pretty passionate about: on Let’s Plays, their history, and why they’re worth preserving.
I’ve saved the best for last, of course, and this roundup’s sign-off goes to David Sirlin, who has announced his exciting new game, Chess 2!
LAST ONE OUT GET THE LIGHTS
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See you all next week for our exclusive pre-E3 coverage (note: there won’t be any).