"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…Wanderer in Where the Water Tastes Like Wine | Videodame – Rachel Watts Rachel Watts feels Where The Water Tastes Like Wine nails the feeling of wandering through a “battered and worn country,” becoming a vessel for stories and ultimately capturing something true through it all.
Shadow of the Colossus (2018)
…of writing reviews before the Holidays?
In late 2009, Ubisoft’s second entry into its fastest-selling new IP, Assassin’s Creed II (AC2), garnered immediate praise from (mostly) all quarters. It was, to some degree, par for the course, since highly-anticipated AAA games typically generate a flurry of writerly activity in the industry press and in mass media in the aftermath of a release. In the year or so following AC2’s release, millions continued to play and enjoy the game, but few people wrote seriously about their experience playing Ubisoft’s shiny new toy. Templar intrigue in 15th century Florence and Venice,…
…follow-up from the game journalists who were able to say “this is actually completely ridiculous argument or accusation!”. And in turn, I mean really honestly like the way that that game was accessible initially was as a dropbox link.
[Laughs]
Elizabeth: Like this was not intended to really go that far. I had hoped for my friends to play it, and family to play it and y’know maybe some wider indigenous communities. And I had also submitted it to Imaginative Film and Media Arts Festival. Which it went on to win best digital media that year. Which is the…
…it’ll surely dominate discussions about game narratives for the foreseeable near future. Most importantly, the player must understand that the story of Alan Wake 2 can only be told through the interactivity of games. But the metanarrative is only fascinating if you’ve never paid attention to these things before, which is hard because the game spells things out for you at every step of the way.”
Let’s keep the horror theme running a bit longer with a calendar-flexible approach to the spooky season and three selections about other games in the genre.
Welcome back readers.
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This Week in Videogame Blogging is a roundup highlighting the most important critical writing on games from the past seven days.
The main games news on the docket this week
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…Valve’s memorial inside Team Fortress 2. For Diana Lilly, May’s widow, an actor herself who wasn’t particularly tech-savvy, Foglesong printed hard copies of everything. “I did have to explain the lists of ‘F, F, F, F,” Foglesong says. He didn’t know the reference was from a Call of Duty game, but he told her it was “like throwing up a heart emoji, or a thumbs up.””
Here we’ve collected reflections on the intersections between play, performance, games, theatre, and film.
…palettes. No art is wholly original; we all create from the inspiration of others. But these copies aren’t simply inspired by their originals. They appropriate the creative work of artists and designers and re-purpose them with mostly cosmetic changes.
At his blog Gaming the System, Tanner Higgin writes about ‘The Trap of Representation’ this week. It’s hard to summarise without violating the integrity of his argument, but essentially he’s suggesting a more sustained and systemic critique of the entire game development ecosystem than is achieved by concentrating only on representations of diversity in games.
N’Gai Croal writing…
Welcome to the first This Week in Videogame Blogging of 2012! It’s been a long time since TWIVGB first came on the scene; I confess, I rather miss the tapestry pictures that graced the earliest episodes. This week’s host is David Carlton: I’ve proofread these not infrequently in the past, but apparently the entire regular roster of editors is still hungover from New Year’s parties (So very true – Ed.), so we’re dipping down into the minor leagues this week and having me do some actual writing this time. (To be more accurate, the other editors are probably still
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…off in subscriptions that forced the game into its free-to-play model. Staff layoffs after the game’s release no doubt compounded the difficulty of this changeover, meaning that Hickman’s claim that the team is swamped seems plausible in context. Moreover, we must remember that BioWare doesn’t own the IP for Star Wars, and I’m guessing that convincing LucasArts/Disney – both of whom are notoriously protective of their brands – to allow gay relationships in their ostensibly family-friendly galaxy was a lengthy process in itself. Given all this, plus BioWare’s history of designing SGRs into both Dragon Age and Mass Effect, I…
…newest post is a little bit about Brendan Keogh’s book, a little bit about Goldeneye, and a lot about Perfect Dark.
Beyond the Mat
(That’s the name of a very good WWF documentary, incidentally. I recommend it!)
Back with Matter’s New York Review of Videogames, author Kerry Howley pens a riveting essay on the complexities of EA Sports: UFC and how it, perhaps inadvertently, rings true of the hardships of its subject matter.
In a stroke of synchronicity, this week also brought us an interesting entry from Kotaku, where editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo has some complicated thoughts…