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narratives

August 10th

…uses Dwarf Fortress and its allocation of processing power to craft narratives to trace the historical paths computer have taken to be better simulators of physic than creators of story.

Adventure Games

Do you like Adventure Games? Do you know their long and stories history? Leigh Alexander does and her most recent Let’s Play is of the “pure” adventure game, Curse of Crowley Manor.

Speaking of historical adventure games, Emily Rose and Pierce Huxtable talk with Roby Miller about the story and score of one of the most popular adventure games ever: Myst

Let’s Talk About…

August 17th

…Hearts sets in conflict. At Videodame, Virginia Roby reflects on The Last of Us‘s seeming subversion of the Damsel in Distress trope.

Justin Keever’s Virtual Narrative blog has a post about the metanarratives of the Civilization games. And Claire Hosking, negotiating the pull between the procedural narrative and the “authored” artistic work, looks at the urban structures of Transistor and the narratives of those structures and aesthetics.

Lastly, a pair from two of Critical Distance’s own. Mark Filipowich looks at several RPGs and their stands on the morals of violence in a two part post. And Lindsey…

August 31st

…of the kneejerk negativity directed at feminist games criticism, something more fundamental is at play:

A lot of the fear I see about feminism comes from the idea that giving in to feminists means giving in to censorship. For some, that fear takes its shape in nonsensical arguments about threats to masculinity or stealing of power from one group to another […]

Those who fear censorship could read my posts as an argument to “clean up” narratives… to remove sources of conflict in order to avoid disturbing female gamers who play these games. But I believe women

…

September 7th

…Roger Ebert, ludonarrative dissonance and Citizen Kane without awakening the legion of fallen critics, evaluating games like Metal Gear Solid and The Last of Us as narratives cognitively constructed by play to argue how terms like immersion misdirect the real problem with the medium:

Games are a broken because they are stuck in a quagmire of juvenility. They are not being allowed to grow by a commercialised industry obsessed with eternally repackaging Time Crisis for a mass audience. And the problem is exacerbated tenfold by a woefully inadequate mainstream gaming press, which largely identifies the problem as a

…

October 12

Hello everyone! Welcome to a new roundup of This Week in Videogame Blogging.

Such Justice. Very NPC.

Let’s start with Austin Walker at Paste, who writes on Watch Dogs and Shadow of Mordor’s nemesis system. His piece is comprehensive and meaty, moving from Mordor‘s approach to failure, its perpetuation of colonial enslavement narratives, and weaving succinct observations of Watch Dogs and both games’ presentation of NPCs, and the violence we perform onto them.

Eric Swain also writes a piece that laments the superficiality of Watch Dogs, surveying the numerous problems with its themes and structures.

…

March 22nd

…for histories which never were.

And, holy crud, Clint Hocking wrote a thing! Specifically, he responds to Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlanic regarding the alleged limiting nature of narratives and characters in games, arguing that to juxtapose them with the analysis of systems is to create a false dichotomy:

I think we already have numerous, though tentative examples of these kinds of games; games that are both about the journey of an individual, but also about the big ideas of the culture (fictional or otherwise) in which that individual exists. I will admit that along

…

Deadly Premonition

…shocking final revelations about Zach’s ‘other’ identity.

“Cinephilia as Characterization”

Drew Byrd, in his blog entry “Deadly Premonition, Mass Effect 3, Bioshock Infinite: Three Choices, or No Choice?” praises the device as a “satisfying middle ground between choice-driven story development and a focused creative vision” when contrasted against other so-called ‘choice based’ narratives, stating that is in an effective mechanism for directly integrating the player into the events of the game world.

Such enthusiasm was shared by Daniel Weissenberger who put together an extensive 11-part series on Deadly Premonition, celebrating it as GameCritic.com’s Game of the Year…

June 14th

…question the relentless focus on harassment narratives when we talk about women and girls in games. Instead, Peterson argues, we should celebrate the diversity of these stories, and has announced a new series for Fusion dedicated to just that.

The Steam Refundpocalypse

Valve recently introduced system-wide refunds on its industry-dominating distribution platform, Steam. That this also landed around the same time as Steam’s annual summer sale got a lot of developers talking about the economics of Steam and how it helps or harms the business.

One dev, Rob Fearon, is particularly concerned with modern sales practices like…

July 26th

…patch for The Witcher 3, small as it may appear, which undercuts some of the game’s important motifs.

In a similar vein, Giant Bomb’s Austin Walker despairs the depopulated city streets of Batman: Arkham Knight, arguing that the urban throngs of these superhero narratives are central to their themes:

[S]uperheroes symbolically fill the gaps that we fear that our infrastructure, no matter how well designed and managed, cannot. They save us from burning buildings, they protect our museums, they pull us from floods, they prevent the power plant from exploding, they stop ricocheting bullets from killing innocents, they…

August Roundup: ‘Nostalgia’

…the nostalgia of creepy children’s cartoons to restore a childish fear of funny animals:

If T.S. Eliot will show you fear in a handful of dust, [The Night of the Rabbit developer,] Matthias Kempke will show you the fear waiting behind each beautifully painted, seemingly idyllic scene in Mousewood. He’ll remind you how you once saw these things.

At The Joycean, BoRT’s very own Luigi/Tails/Coco Bandicoot, Lindsey Joyce reflects on The Legend of Zelda as the introverted Player 2 to her older sister’s pioneering Player 1 and the narratives that were built out of playing such…