lana%20polansky

…everywhere. It’s global.

A Personal Look

At Sufficiently Human, our own Lana Polansky profiles the work of indie developer, Strangethink. Polansky describes the aesthetic commonalities from one game to the next. As Polansky summarizes,

Strangethink’s games have many aesthetic and conceptual calling cards. They’re all pink and blue and made in Unity. They’re all on some level preoccupied with player exploration of space, with designed, virtual space as architecture, and with architecture as guiding not just naked interaction but also the internal work of interpretation. They tend toward a tension between “magic”, the metaphysical and…

…arcade’s image and clientele. I have some issues with the delivery of this article — it could benefit quite a lot from including a bibliography at the end — but it does cast a spotlight on the fighting game community’s efforts to improve its image.

And shifting from real-world money matters to the digital, at Fiery Screens, Yussef Cole has been dispatching military deserters in The Witcher 3, noting how humans are, paradoxically, often the greatest source of cash for the game’s titular supernatural exterminator.

Against the Stream

Writing for her own website, Critical Distance’s own Lana…

…five-foot-eight, 36 inches around the chest, and a worldclass rockface dangler/militia combatant/tarzan impersonator: these things speak to an ignorance of bodies, and the bitterly foolish choice to define them anyway.

Happily, as Napier notes, rebooted Lara Croft has not had so much attention paid to her proportions — outside of fan speculation, at least.

Systems and History

At Sufficiently Human, our own Lana Polansky offers as a more elegant alternative to ludonarrative dissonance the terms “coherence” and “incoherence,” describing the ways a game’s design succeeds or fails at reinforcing its themes:

Dissonance is a…

…some controversy over the previous game in the series, Kane and Lynch 2: Dog Days did not receive much critical examination, and Miguel Penabella at Thumbsticks wants to remedy that, featuring the game’s usage of ludonarrative dissonance to prove a point.

On Gamasutra’s Expert Blogs, E. McNeill ties history and videogames together, arguing that a contradiction in veracity cheapens the experience for both.

(Critical Distance alumna Lana Polansky already came up with a much better term and approach for all this, by the way. -ed)

For All Your Representation Needs

Another cluster of games writing aims…