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narratives

January Roundup

…challenge can also rely on the affective state of the player, such as in horror games or the ‘psychological shooter’ Spec Ops: The Line. Some of the difficulty in Mass Effect comes from the torture of choice (or “die Qual der Wahl” as I heard it in high school), even when the consequences of choice are obvious.

Mark Filipowich sees difficulty as a glue that holds narratives together, whether it’s Luke piloting an X-Wing down the Death Star trench or Link snagging Ganon in the groin with a hookshot. Winning does feel good, and beating a hard challenge feels…

April 14th

…above, Naomi Clark performs a taut formalist reading of Porpentine’s Howling Dogs.

Back on Gamasutra, Taekwan Kim has finished up his Mechanical Narratives series.

Over on Videogame Tourism, our German-language colleagues have stayed busy: Reinhard Zierhofer speculates on a game adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; our own Johannes Köller unpacks how Far Cry 3 failed not only as a satire, but as a critique of violence and millennial zeitgeist; and Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten are engaged in a letter series discussing Year Walk.

KYRIARCHY

Sidney Fussell turned up on Medium Difficulty last week, exploring…

May 12th

…is more subversive than we think.

Jay Barnson muses a bit on using the unknown to co-create with the player:

[M]ight we find ourselves able to construct more powerful narratives if we let the designer and the player take care of the creative heavy lifting? Let the designer imply connections, let the player form and breathe life to those connections, and let the computer just do its thing to provide the tools and mechanics to facilitate this?

Barnson’s examples lean heavily on the horror genre in particular, which segues neatly into our next article from GayGamer’s…

June 9

…about the most wonderful moment in Remember Me.

Research and Development

Nick Degens thinks through some baseline questions in regards to the relationship between players and protagonists.

Shamus Young defends the silent protagonist.

Zack Wood presents a case for the strength of Japanese games’ ability to build worlds with interesting characters.

David Carlton wants the teleological nature of games, and game narratives, to change:

So: I’d like games that are less about saving the world, aspiring to become all-powerful; in fact, I’m curious about games that step away from aspiration completely. Having said

…

June 30th

…in the Middle East – some secular democratic, some Islamist, and many a mixture – are as much a part of the modern story of the War on Terror as Special Forces raids and drones. Where are those stories? Games love to invent narratives like Modern Warfare 2 and Homefront where America spontaneously becomes the underdog, but they’re loath to take on conflicts that are actually being fought against overwhelming tyranny.

A recent piece on The New Inquiry, an interview by Hermione Hoby with Kuwaiti musician Fatima Al Qadiri, who grew up amidst the Gulf War, is also…

July 7th

…incredibly praiseworthy. Rather, it’s the bare minimum that we should expect from our narratives. To shower a game with praise for doing the minimum is to set the bar extremely low.

Elsewhere, on The Guardian, Keith Stuart draws comparisons among several recent titles and conclude that these games of dystopian fatherhood all resound in the same way:

The Last of Us, Bioshock: Infinite and The Walking Dead are all fascinating, brilliant games that do interesting things with the possibilities of interactive narrative storytelling – they present rich and detailed visions of wildly dystopian futures. But they…

August 18th

…the emotional impact Papers Please had on him with regard to one of standard questions he had to ask.

Joe Köller looks at multiple choice narratives in games and how they let us shape our blanks slates.

Bill Coberly of the Ontological Geek compares the ending states of XCom: Enemy Unknown and Pacific Rim.

The Indie Gamer Chick talks about epilepsy and gaming. She asks that you do not user her editorial as a baseline for your own ability to play a game.

And finally, Rob Gallagher at The New Inquiry thinks that video game’s devaluation…

August 25th

…this past week: on the foolishness of being loyal to corporations, especially your employers.

Design Notes

Xander Kish writes about Kane and Lynch 2 as an anti-shooter and a forerunner of Spec Ops: The Line.

Videogame narratives rely too much on the Christ archetype for their protagonists, Richard Clark writes on Christ and Pop Culture. He offers one possible solution to this problem.

Following on this deep analysis of the first Mother on Nightmare Mode, Goblet Grotto co-developer Kat Chastain lays out an excellent thematic reading of Mother 2 (Earthbound) and Mother 3.

On PopMatters,…

April 27th

…Problem Attic developer Liz Ryerson shares a poetic rumination on the darker side of the boyish ‘great outdoors’ narratives of Zelda games. And on a public Pastebin, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman has dropped a great essay comparing Shinji Mikami’s critically dismissed Vanquish with the Wachowski siblings’ Speed Racer, as two works of little-understood, self-contained masterpiece. (He’s absolutely right, at least about Speed Racer.)

Also, on her own site, Katherine Cross has a great piece on religion, the Greek concept of tuche, and how Alpha Centauri avoids defaulting to cliches as it explores an ideological spectrum.

Easy Mode

…

July 20th

…of genres including music and literature. It can also serve as the basis for critical theory around culture and/or race. It is a lens to see alternate realities through a black cultural lens.” And it is particularly prevalent in literature like sci-fi/fantasy novels and comics books, gaming’s geeky cousins.

[…] Adopting the aesthetic could also give games a chance to be at the forefront of black narratives, an area they are currently lagging behind in to say the least.

Switching gears to talk about the more commercial end of current trends in games, at Eurogamer the one and…