"Where is all the good writing about games?"
This week on the CDC Podcast we discuss Bioshock and narrative dissonance. Join us as we attempt to wrap our heads around the subject and come up with the definitive answer to the question “How do we define narrative dissonance?” You don’t…
Recently, Amazon.com purchased one of the larger game portals, Reflexive Arcade. As part of the integration, Amazon chose to lower the prices on all the casual arcade games to $9.99. This angered publishers , causing PopCap and others to pull their games…
This Week in Videogame Blogging, 65 die in a tragic Tetris accident in NYC, and Hard-casual also get the scoop on the Fallout: New Vegas protagonist! In slightly less tongue-in-cheek happenings, Jim Rossignol, one quarter of Rock, Paper, Shotgun, noted that “Locked…
Chris at The Artful Gamer writes about the recently released browser-based game ‘Legends of Zork’. He examines it from the perspective of someone who played the original as well as stepping into the shoes of a newcomer to the ‘Zork’ universe and…
Darius Kazemi, of Tiny Subversions, recently posted his transcription of a GDX talk given by Ian Schreiber on “Duchamp, Pollock, Rohrer: Games as the Next Avant-Garde”. In it Schreiber posits that a greater understanding of the twists and turns underlying Art History would benefit those game…
Welcome to Episode 1 of the Critical Distance Confab. The CDC podcast is a weekly discussion with a cast drawn from an irregular pool of videogame bloggers and contributors to the Critical Distance website. We discuss issues of design, culture, art, and…
Since Braid was recently released on PC, now is a wonderful time to organize the discussion that took place last fall following the game’s initial release on XBLA. Organizing the dispersed conversation and criticism that surrounded Braid will allow those experiencing it for the first time to catch up and add their own thoughts, as well as encourage others to take a second look at the game with the added benefit that, ahem, a bit of critical distance affords.
Rob Hale’s discussion of a Damnation making-of video raises a very interesting point. The top down diagram that most levels emerge from does not lend itself particularly well to creating rich vertical spaces. It’s possible to create verticality after the fact, but rarely…
Daniel Rehn, an artist and designer in Southern California, is collaborating with Jeremy Douglass, a postdoctoral fellow at UCSD, on a research project they call the Video Gameplay Database. Noting influences from people like Ben Fry and John Maeda (among others), the…
A post over at Bot Junkie points out a Popular Mechanics piece detailing the Defense Department’s development of the Vigilante unmanned helicopter, an unmanned device that carries an on-board shotgun and is controlled with a familiar input device: The rifle currently mounted…