"Where is all the good writing about games?"
…Emily Short discusses a sensual text game with multiple layers of meaning, highlighting the challenges keeping all layers legible while weaving together sexuality and trauma.
“In stories featuring benevolent AI, this seems to be the role they commonly play: of caretaker, friend and, sometimes, lover. Like any relationship, that’s when things get messy. It makes us question what makes a relationship tick, how to relate to another being,…
…the aesthetic of a game’s design, and describes a project that explores games with a deliberately constrained “life space”.
“Rather than a specific method or gap in knowledge that could be perfectly filled, what I think…
…that they have already translated.
…the idea you can do anything you want with no consequences, when in all actuality, virtual actions like sexual harassment, stalking, abuse, prejudice in all of its forms—racism, sexism, transphobia, or all of the above—do have consequences.
[…]
The real issue is a lack of accountability, fostered by the idea that what happens online does not have “real world” consequences. Whether people write their hate using a pseudonym or with a real name and picture attached, they’re culturally supported in doing so because “it’s just a game.” But one’s avatar or screen name can be a vehicle of accountability…
…More studies are always being called for, so Jody Macgregor decided to see how those studies worked and what they actually had to say about behavior.
Micheal “brainygamer” Abbot makes the humble case that in aggregate what we are consuming in our medium cannot be healthy for us and we must examine ourselves.
Ian Williams describes the cycle of exploitation in the industry that is the de facto norm.
“Keep Your Politics Out of My Video Games” Chris Franklin undermines, as he explains that such a contention is not really possible.
Related, Aevee Bee uses Penny…
…uniquely possible in the emergence of social life.
Community engagement can give way to a purposeful existence; a community can provide an individual with the means through which to materialize sustainability, security, agency, and autonomy. While communities can also undermine our ability to exist in other communities, they are a means through which we circulate power in ways that emphasize and marginalize some forms over others. What bites, though, is that communities are inherently self-interested entities. They are not necessarily greedy, but they are exclusionary by design. Communities are not inherently capable of sharing limited resources; communities forced to…
…past destructive cycles, and modes of thought, about different game experiences Nathalie Lawhead wrote another post on the reception of Everything Is Going To Be OK, with some thoughts about why games culture is so at odds with the goals of art.
“These are all GUIs from a time before widespread internet use, when digital life was more solitary but also less stressful.” The value of personal perspectives and the impossibility…
Consequences
…but mostly fictional, thinking about their own girlhood. They’re personal, they’re a little bit more intimate in that sense. One of them is free as well, so these aren’t commercial games necessarily. But it’s shifting between representation to self-representation, from both the developers’ perspectives, thematically the two girls in this final chapter are cultural producers expressing themselves through their desktop and their online websites. And then the player too can also contribute and part of the actual gameplay is creating those websites or writing fanfictions or dressing up dolls. So, the creators – sorry the players, can also play around…
…again. But you also can’t just be indie because it’s super precarious, it’s very difficult to grow, every student just starts their own company and makes the same mistakes as the last student, everyone leaves when they hit thirty and suddenly have back pain and mortgages because you can’t sustain it when you’re not young unless you’re rich, and so you kind of need both. You need the large studios that can suck up graduates, give them some skills, give them some actual professional experience but then you also need to support indie studios so that those graduates five years…
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I’ve been thrilled this week to see examinations of who has power in the social and cultural spaces around games and how power is portrayed in design.
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