Good morning! To those who celebrate it, a Happy Easter! Let’s get right underway with This Week in Videogame Blogging!
Systems and Beyond Systems
On First Person Scholar, Gino Grieco has produced a stellar essay on the lenticular design of Nintendo games — and also Magic: The Gathering.
Meanwhile, at Videogame Tourism, Kent Sheely has an interesting piece up on the recent revival of games with rules and conditions mediated by the player. A world away and yet in a strikingly similar vein, we have Eurogamer’s Robert Purchese writing about Eve Online again, namely on why it is Eve‘s metagame of its economy and alliances which make it so much larger than life. It also fits in nicely with this piece by Austin Walker on Clockwork Worlds, about the metagames and in-character/out-of-character dynamics which play considerably into what we often call “immersion.”
Speaking of resuscitations of some fraught game design terms, Roland of 9pp pens a short-and-sweet piece on the medium specificity of games, without invoking a wishy-washy word like “interactivity.” Namely, Roland says, it is about games’ ability to both offer control and depict its loss.
Next we move over to The Guardian where Simon Parkin, in his characteristic style, paints a compelling portrait of Dark Souls and Bloodborne director Hidetaka Miyazaki, whose unconventional entry into the Japanese games industry makes him an unusual success story. And keeping with the focus on Japanese games, on Metopal Nathan Altice offers a fascinating analysis of the time dilation and compression functions of J-RPGs, and in particular Square-Enix’s Bravely Default:
Though many RPGs stretching back to the 80s have a Charge, Wait, or Defend option, I’ve never seen them used as a temporal modifier, nor have I seen their opposite function used as a play mechanic. Strategically using multiple stacked Braves [advance actions] can end battles after one party member’s turn. Effectively, that member’s battle timeline is operating independent of both their combatants’ and allies’ battle timelines, as if they have a time machine transporting future selves to the present in hopes that they will erase a possible future where the enemies are still alive. It’s conceptually mind-bending, but works smoothly in practice.
In the Creases
At Wizard of Radical, Ray Porreca has embarked on a touching letter series on childhood memories of videogames with his incarcerated brother.
World Autism Awareness Day occurred this past week, and at Polygon Joe Parlock surveys several games depicting autistic characters, finding most of them wanting. Going a step further, at Vice, Jake Tucker (who like Parlock is on the autism spectrum himself) relates how L.A. Noire inadvertently created a player-character who seems to share his disability.
Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency has launched the first in a new series highlighting positive, strong, and unique representations of women in games, which is certainly worth a look.
At Video Game Researcher, Wai Yen Tang has drawn up an interesting condensation of several research studies seeking to identify the (manifold) reasons women are not equally represented in STEM fields and game development. Coming at it from a player and industry perspective, Tegiminis responds to the assertion that women “naturally” prefer different games than men, arguing that to treat the push for better representation in the core market as “cultural colonialism” is, at the very least, misguided:
The framing of our new conversation on games as cultural colonialism is appalling on just about every level. Asking for games to mature in their treatment of women and minorities is, and it’s comically absurd that this even needs to be said, not colonialism. […] This isn’t colonialism, it’s maturation. Games aren’t being colonized because everybody who is saying these things was already here.
Defying Gravity
At his development blog, independent designer and games instructor Robert Yang goes into the development process of his game Stick Shift, in which the player participates in erotically stimulating… well, exactly what it says on the tin. It’s a fascinating exploration of both social-political metaphor and alien phenomenology, considering that, as Yang says, “this is arousal on the car’s terms.”
At Hopes and Fears, Joe Bernardi details the lasting impact of Dogma 99, a Scandinavian LARP scene aimed at reducing the artifice and barrier for entry to live action roleplay.
Lastly, at the ever-delightful Offworld, the equally delightful Katherine Cross reviews Gravity Ghost, a small and accessible game best played by letting go:
I stopped trying to tightly control my orbit and instead relaxed into the gravity of the little planet that I’d been fighting this whole time. I stopped seeing Iona as a superheroine battling against an impossible power and yielded to it instead, embodying her trust and turning her into a ghostly moon swinging in the arms of a larger force. […] There was no hurry, no clock to beat but my own. I’d find a way, gravity would find a way. Ultimately, the solution was simple: I had to stop treating Gravity Ghost like every other game I’d played.
Pagan Fertility Rites Et Cetera
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A bit of the usual footer business: the April Blogs of the Round Table is here with the prompt “Palette Swap” which should be promising. Also, we’ve released our March BoRT roundup for “Extended Play,” our latest March This Month in Let’s Plays roundup is live, and we have two new podcast episodes with Anna Anthropy and Polygon’s Danielle Riendeau, respectively! Whew!
Some signal boosting: our friends and colleagues at Five Out of Ten Magazine have released a special collection of features from some of our other friends and colleagues at Haywire Magazine. You should definitely give it a look!
While we’re at it, have we mentioned that Five Out of Ten has switched to a Patreon model? Because it has and we recommend you give it your attention. Likewise, Not Your Mama’s Gamer have also launched a cool new Patreon. If you are an independent games and media publication or writer who has recently launched a crowdfunding campaign, let us know about it!
Critical Distance is proud to be completely funded by our readership. If you like what we do and want to help us continue to expand, consider pledging a small monthly donation of your own! It would help us a lot!
That’s it from me! Now I’m off to watch my favorite Easter film, Wicker Man. Enjoy your Sunday and have a great week to come!