What a week, eh? Let’s get straight to the links. It’s This Week in Videogame Blogging!
A Look Back to Look Forward
We kick things off with Austin Walker and Cameron Kunzelman, who over at Paste have offered up a productive postmortem of IndiE3, the counter-E3 “unconference” which took place several weeks ago.
Also at Paste, Cara Ellison pens a letter to dear ol’ mum on the palatability of games among the mainstream — including what makes a game, and why Google’s Star Trek doodle may prove an excellent example of how to make games ready and accessible.
At Abnormal Mapping, Jackson Tyler takes a look back at the Uncharted franchise and decides that its hero Nathan Drake is caught between “a wide-eyed naivete and violent paternalism”:
The universe visibly contorts to ensure Drake’s triumphant survival, as he freefalls out of a plane (the plane is exploding, but in this series that is always implicit), before somehow catching a parachute in mid-air, and landing safely on the ground. Drake is permanently accompanied by a literal Deus Ex Machina, the grinding of its gears louder than all the bombast and destruction it choreographs, and yet the camera angles, the soundtrack and pacing are all and perfectly designed to help the player buy into the lie and ratchet up the false tension.
That’s because the fantasy of Uncharted is not to be able to catch the parachute, the fantasy is to fall and pretend for a moment that you were ever in danger at all.
At Midnight Resistance, Owen Grieve animatedly challenges the idea that public criticism of game design is tantamount to censorship of game developers. Meanwhile, on Gamasutra’s Member Blogs, TownCraft developer Leigh Harris suggests a small and easy way developers can fight against the male-as-default problem of game avatars.
You Keep Using That Word
The ever-delightful Brendan Keogh shares some excellent thoughts on the underrated Final Fantasy XII, even if he defines (my old archnemesis) “ludonarrative dissonance” incorrectly. Sorry, Brendan. But also, for shame, Brendan.
On the contrary, this week’s Errant Signal video (by Chris Franklin) expertly captures the real meaning of ludonarrative dissonance as it applies to Entwined: when a game’s “big picture” themes and ideology are at odds with its systems.
Interviews
The good folks at Idle Thumbs have released their newest podcast interviewing Netrunner co-designer Damon Stone.
At First Person Scholar, Meghan Blythe Adams interviews LIM and Space/Off developer Merritt Kopas:
I think there is a push among, I guess, critical consumers of games towards this politics of representation, of wanting images that reflect who we are and that’s important and that’s really valuable, but I think that the risk there is that we come to believe that if we just have perfect representation, everything will be fine and that’s the end goal. It reminds me of the ways that the politics of inclusion manifest in other spaces, so things like the acronym LGBTQ–whatever, it’s this idea that if we just get the right combination of letters, everyone will be included. And you can’t possibly, that’s a fantasy. And in ways, that’s one of the promises of or impetuses behind words like queer, it’s this word that in ways encompasses things but also leaves a lot of room. I think abstraction [in game design] does the same thing.
And the Machine is Bleeding to Death
This week saw, as Rowan Kaiser put it, “several simmering pots boiling over concurrently,”* as a number of frustrated freelance and part time game writers came forward regarding the state of their field.
The first inciting incidents came via industry veterans Jenn Frank and Rowan Kaiser, who have both joined the growing ranks of game critics/journalists with Patreon accounts (Critical Distance is itself largely supported by similar pledges).
At issue here is not that scores of writers are out of work or struggling, but that their unemployment is posed as a moral or professional failing. The fact is that if even considerably qualified writers like Kaiser and Frank are turning to crowdfunding solutions like Patreon, any supposed meritocratic system is busted.
Paste associate editor and fellow industry veteran Maddy Myers puts it quite well in a personal blog post, in which she calls out, though not by name, the hurdles and invisible inequalities that make the ‘game’ of game journalism often not worth playing:
I began to realize, in that moment, that maybe I am just bad at this. And by “bad at this” I don’t even mean pitching, or writing, or editing, because I think I am good at those. […] But I’m bad at “playing the game,” and “hustling,” and writing the “right” stories (a.k.a. don’t rock the boat with all the “gender issues”???) for the “right” publications (you know the ones) until I get my prize of a Staff Writer Position, which I may or may not ever get, no matter how hard I work.
If you’re lost at this juncture, Mary Hamilton sums up the aired-grievances-thus-far.
On the other side of the fence, Kotaku UK editor-in-chief Keza MacDonald turns to Gamasutra’s Member Blogs to reflect on how the landscape of writing about games has changed dramatically within the last couple decades — and even in the last seven years.
Seasoned columnist and scholar Samantha Allen, meanwhile, laments the emotional and psychological toll being placed on the provocative writers who don’t “make it” yet are expected to keep agitating for change. And fellow scholar Daniel Joseph contends that perhaps for this kind of writing to survive, it may need to divorce itself from capitalism:
Maybe the problem is that if games “journalism” wants to become Criticism or Journalism it needs to detach itself from the corporate publishers entirely, which structure and regulate its existence in relation to advertising revenue. If journalism is about truth and democracy and the fundamental importance of the Speech Act it can’t hitch itself to a horse like [web publishers] Vox or Gawker.
Moreover, as Maddy Myers also highlighted this week, written journalism and criticism is a dying medium, something she suggests is no better exemplified than through Youtube celebrity PewDiePie.
*For the sake of transparency I should acknowledge that I, too, was one of those pots who boiled over. I haven’t included those writings here for the sake of avoiding self-promotion. Besides, my points are well-covered by the others here.
Incidentally, if you want to help fund these or other writers, Critical Distance’s own Mattie Brice has compiled a page of many of them.
+1 Signal Boost
On Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Porpentine’s column of curated free indie games has come to an end, so it’s quite worth it to page through the archives for its many gems.
This site turned up in our inbox this week and may be worth a watch.
Soha Kareem and several others have started up a tumblr advocating for intersectionality at conference panels.
And last but certainly not least, the newest issue of Zoya Street’s Memory Insufficient zine is now live, covering the topic of gender and sexuality. Great stuff!
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