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July 19th

…cover these next two pieces is to link to LB Jeffries meta-editorialising about a few pieces from elsewhere. Looking at the ‘Games for Girls‘ piece at Wired, which examines what these games are purportedly teaching girls and whether they could actually be worse (or just more insidious) than the GTA et al.’s, as well as Tom Chick’s response which includes his perspective as the father of a young girl. Jeffries sums up both quite nicely.

Jim Rossignol at Rock Paper Shotgun wrote about Open World Games this week, talking about what works and what doesn’t in games like STALKER,…

Pixel Vixen 707, Part 1

…neutral depth, became famous for his hilarious travel books and satires. In Europe, the pseudonym was often a way for women to get more sal*]}*es while men used them to post scandalous jokes. George Eliot, who wrote the long (but worth it) masterpiece Middlemarch, is no more real a person than Mark Twain. Nor is George Orwell, Artemus Ward, or countless other fake names that have been used to produce great writing.

Often these fake names were such wild and vulgar characters that they slowly began to have little to do with their authors. Samuel Clemens had an incredibly…

February 21st

…Abbott talking about the proclivity of the industry towards game sequels. Krpata’s piece, ‘Why we need sequels’, appeared just hours before Michael Abbott’s ‘Sequel 101’ so you’d be forgiven for thinking they were working from the same playbook. As always, great minds think alike.

In ‘On my shoulder whispering’ Abbott begins with an exploration of the classical roots of modern tal*]}*es of heroism and conflict, and ends up talking about how Bioshock 2 resonated with him on the themes of fatherhood.

David Carlton has been thinking about the changing dynamic that spoilers have with respect to shorter, independent…

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

May 9th

…reliance on game PR. His conclusions, while hardly new to anyone familiar with the occasionally too-cosy relationship between journalists and PR [dead link, no mirror available], nevertheless strike an important contemporary note. Says, Orland, ‘The next time you wonder why game journalism is often seen as just an extension of video game PR, remember “events” like this.’

“It’s Never Just A Game” [mirror] is a series by James Vonder Haar currently running at The Border House blog, and in the first instalment he looks at why escapism in service of entertainment is no excuse to uncritically accept negative or…

February 20th

…game’s challenges – but only once they’ve earned it. as in all consensual masochism, though, there is the everpresent issue of trust.

M. Suliman newly of the blog Mending the Wall, formerly of Bergsonian Critique, wrote this week about ‘The Two Voices of Isaac Clarke’ [mirror]:

when Visceral Games decided to give the mechanical engineer Isaac Clarke a voice in Dead Space 2, who has remained practically mute in the original Dead Space, they also had to give him a new personality to go along with it. Because, as it turns out, it is inevitably difficult…

May 29th

…we wish to recapture, is fearlessness. And this is what strikes me as timely in this girl designer and her Ponycorn Adventure: their innocent, vibrant lack of concern with seeming silly or derivative. Lemon enemies (lemonies?) don’t need to make sense to make satisfyingly sour foes. The Ponycorns are hardly original or even a proper hybrid, per se, but Cassie don’t care. Likewise, ask her if she gives a toot that she heard some of these phrases—“How do you like them apples??”—elsewhere (if she even remembers.) Just try and suggest that such prose stylings belong to popped-collared, thumbs-flashing dudes and…

January 15th

…own “This Gaymer’s Story” and the reception it has garnered. He concludes: “Boys may be boys, but that does not mean boys need be assholes in public.”

Recently, a provocative academic article from Miguel Sicart went live on Espen Aarseth’s online Game Studies journal, arguing against proceduralism. This prompted several thoughtful reaction articles, two of which may be particularly worthy of your attention.

The first comes from Charles Pratt in an article titled “Players Not Included“:

The nature of this inextricable relationship between rules and play in games proves false the claim that a game’s meaning

…

August 5th

…disabled gamer. He says that it’s not about dropping a game’s difficulty, as many of us might believe, and relates his experience of playing Uncharted 2:

I am a disabled gamer and I am determined to keep playing. Sometimes, my disability prevents me from moving my hands fast enough to execute certain sequences in games. For example, one of my favorite games of all time is Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Near the end of the game Drake is in a Tibetan temple, in which there are levers he must crank to open doors. The way the player makes

…

December 9th

…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…

December 16th

…series moves from Payne’s self-interest to a sense of social responsibility.

X-COM

Game Shelf’s Jason McIntosh describes how X-COM: Enemy Unknown games the player into constructing a narrative.

Back on Nightmare Mode, Tom Auxier touches on X-COM as well, in particular asking if strategy games and horror are incompatible. In the course of his essay, Auxier brings up some counter-examples, including a board game, which makes this a nice companion piece for our next section…

BOARD GAMES

On Kill Screen, Jason Johnson interviews Ralph Anspach, designer of Anti-Monopoly.

Meanwhile on Peasant Muse, Jeremy Antley…