"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…the nature of abuse are too often cast aside in favour of traditional narrative structures in works such as The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit.
“It’s a major problem with these narratives that they don’t seem to properly consider the feelings of the victim or the long-term repercussions of familial abuse. […T]he people genuinely affected by it are sidelined in order to tell a traditional tragedy.”
Plugs
…narratives in games most resemble those of soap operas, and that more writers should embrace the appeal of melodrama.
Everything old becomes new again. Three pieces this week look at games that try to shake old conventions: Something Familiar
…and what tools they have to work out a solution. Mark Brown of Game Maker’s Toolkit distilled Jonathan Blow’s 2011 GDC presentation about Braid’s rewind mechanic into an eight minute video demonstrating how exploring implemented rules lead to the puzzles in Blow’s design philosophy.
https://youtu.be/2zK8ItePe3Y
Sam Hughes of qntm explored the mechanical notions of time travel and time distortion as represented in Braid, and pondered how the shifting rules of each game world could be applied to science-fiction narratives.
In a 2012 paper to the Canadian Game Studies Association, Luke Arnott describes how Braid‘s puzzles work as…
…anti-interaction ideals that evoke walking sims.
“There’s a sense of mockery that comes from living in the shadow of a sea of highrises. Glimpses of a more comfortable life can be seen through the tangled web of cables and exposed machinery that drape…
…game about cooking.
“If Cage and Quantic Dreams knew what was good for them, they’d thank these fans for the free advertising. Unfortunately for them, this fandom doesn’t seem to care about Cage at all.” Three writers look at videogame narratives, spanning cartoonish portrayals, absurdist interpersonal dynamics, and sensitive reflections of real-world pain. …
Anti-love lovers
…Butterfly Soup‘s diverse and nuanced depiction of growing up Asian-American.
“In…
…regular readers that my principal preoccupation with the big shiny cowboy simulator of the moment is the developing conversation on the labour that went into its production. These three articles, I think, highlight separate but equally important beats in that conversation, and I encourage you to take a look at them each.
…
…not limit ourselves to the past that existed but instead to the past we choose to remember?”
Have I used that subtitle before? Quite possibly. I’m always keenly interested in critical writing exploring and/or critiquing the role affect plays in game experiences, and these four examples offer some top-notch interrogations.
…storytelling, and the recent bump in attention seen by interactive fiction. Here are three of the finest articles this week threading the needle of narratives in and adjacent to games.
…
…the legitimacy of heroic war narratives, Revengeance is focused heavily on the question of violence itself in a video-game context.”
In our accelerating era of digital distribution, always-online, and, ugh, live services, it’s easy to forget that games are made out of stuff. I don’t just mean cabinets and coltan, but also the very material conditions of their development and production. Two authors this week engage in archaeology and art criticism, respectively, to unearth secrets of how games are, and how they come to be.