It’s getting rather dark and rather chilly around here. Another week, another list of links for This Week In Video Game Blogging.
Video Games Both Great and Small
Horror month continues a little past October with Zachary McAnally looking at Slender: The Arrival‘s horror design and Soha El-Saaawi explaining the journey of Year Walk.
Emanuel Maiberg at Kill Screen looks at the new Call of Duty and how the campaign ends up turning you unintentionally into a terrorist and a Nazi. While E.T. Brooking at The Escapist explores the real world space faring weaponry that has and could exist.
Becky Chambers of The Mary Sue relates her experience with Papers, Please from both sides of the customs booth, both in the game and in real life. Levi Fowler wrote ‘What AntiChamber Teaches Us About The Nature of Religious Texts’ for GameChurch.
Bendan Vance talks about intrinsic and extrinsic features of a work and how Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic is an example of a game fully designed with intrinsic meaning instead of “paying lip service to aesthetics.”
Ethan Gach asks “What is Final Fantasy?” in the respect that the games have always changed and mutated over their many iterations and looks at the core of what makes a quote/unquote Final Fantasy game.
Nathan of Metopal.com compares Baseball to Spelunky in regards to their various levels of play and the deceptively simple descriptions of how they play.
Eric Swain at PopMatters explains how most games that claim to be cinematic fail to take advantage of the techniques of film and how Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons was a game that incorporated such techniques into its camera.
Stephen Beirne wrote a piece at Gameranx claiming that BioShock Infinite‘s combat design was a step backwards from BioShock 2.
Alisha Karabinus at Not Your Mama’s Gamer explored how thanks to her age and our journey with her in Season One, that taking control of Clementine in The Walking Dead Season Two could be path to a new empathy to girls’ and women’s situations in trying circumstances.
State of Things Orbiting the Medium
Bob Chipman explains the changes that happened to criticism in the public sphere over the last century and how it wasn’t always consumer oriented, but theory oriented in his latest Big Picture Show episode.
Cameron Kunezlman looks at the complex relationships indies and AAA industries have with one another, especially the workers of each. Speaking of which, Ian Williams looks at the distressing reality of Video Games and Labor.
Emanuel Maiberg now shows the other side of the debate in ‘what big data can’t teach us about video games.’
At the Monochroma development blog, Burak Tezate?er looks at the expressionism art style and its relationship to video games.
Gender and Race Tied Up With Lace
In her Edge column, Leigh Alexander explains how those fans that get defensive of their favorite games over criticism end up displaying the same sensitivity they vilify in others who are not explicitly catered to.
Sindey Fussell explains why the main answer towards equality in the medium is in the end another silencing tactic in favor of the status quo.
At The Border House, Mark Filipowich explores how the relationship between sex and politics is presented in three different games.
PBS Game/Show asks the question ‘Are Games Racist?’ answering yes, though not for the reason one might think.
See You Next Week
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