Tag Archives: curation

God’s Work

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Today over tea, Laura picked from my head with uncanny intuition the question most bothering me this week: “why do you write about games?” She didn’t need to clarify the peculiar thing about my writing about games, specifically that I only write about games. I don’t write about books or movies or cats even though I also enjoy these things, even though I am probably fully capable to that end. If cornered I call myself a media critic—sheepishly, because people expect it’s a euphemism—but the truth is, I don’t write broadly enough to encompass the generality implied. I write about one specific type of media.

I don’t know why, I said half-honestly. I could write about films, but I don’t want to. I like to talk about films the way I write about games, but that’s as far as it goes. I hope someday to actually sit down and write that article on Return to Oz that’s been in my head since 1986. I don’t exactly know why I relegate my writing to just games other than I enjoy writing about games.

The best proper answer I can come up with is that when I was very, very young, my Dad confided in me the secret cause of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s huge arms was from having played so many videogames (which he enthusiastically demonstrated with thumb movements). This might also account for my silly interest in Schwarzenegger movies, disproportionate to their quality. I was impressionable, so it was impressed on me that games were wow amazing.[1] Continue reading →

This Week We Read: 02/11/14

Each week I ask a group of peers, colleagues and strangers to share with you some articles they read over the previous seven days, describing in their words what they hope you might get out of their recommended reading. The articles they contribute can be a day old or a year old, they can be highly academic or light as a feather, they can be noteworthy for their originality of perspective or they can be utterly, delightfully derivative – the only criteria is for their pick to be at least faintly relevant to people who might be interested in videogames.

My guest contributors this week are Untimely Gamer, Mark Filipowich and Ian Miles Cheong. If you’d like to volunteer as a contributor for next week’s post, you can of course contact me on twitter @stbeirne. Now, for articles on superficiality in Sunset Overdrive, unification in game analysis, and Anita Sarkeesian’s history with the hobby, on with the latest This Week We Read.

Untimely Gamer, an American academic currently living in the U.K and enjoying the beer here immensely. I’m just a video game hobbyist who is obnoxious on Twitter at @untimelygamer

This piece on Gamergate by Ken White of Popehat really divided my Twitter feed, with people both praising and hating it. For my part I think there are some very sound critiques of the social justice politics Gamergate is aping in this piece. I don’t always agree with White’s assessments of identity politics, but I think they’re valuable for showing how these politics are perceived outside of progressive circles.

Maddy Myers’s essay on why “the male gaze” is inadequate to describe Bayonetta 2 illustrates why she’s my go-to critic on issues of media representation. It’s a smart, well-read, and incisive critique of how “the male gaze” raises more problems than it solves. The second half of the essay, however, is not quite as strong as the opening. To my ears it takes some special pleading, even by Myers’s own arguments, to fit Bayonetta into a feminist mould.

Garret Martin’s review of Sunset Overdrive critiques the hollowness of certain corporate forms of rock and how this shallowness informs the equally hollow humor of the game. Includes the phrase “Hot Topicalypse,” which alone makes this review deserving of a Pulitzer.

Andy Baio crunches the numbers about Gamergate, and finds evidence that there’s very little overlap between Gamergate and its opponents. It also forms an important corrective to Newsweek’s own analysis of the data, as he finds the tweets with the hashtag are overwhelmingly negative (not “neutral,” as claimed by Newsweek).

This essay on kink Twine games by Jetta Rae Doublecakes eloquently describes the emotional needs that BDSM fulfills (sometimes, I would argue, more eloquently than even the games she covers). Rae’s prose is a joy to read by itself, and her analysis of one of the Twine games takes an unexpected turn when it is revealed she is dating the writer and searching for clues in her own Twine game to romance her.

Mark Filipowich, Canada – disappointment; bigtallwords; @MarkFilipowich

The first thing I read this week was Mike Joffe’s reading of the castle in Castlevania:Symphony of the Night as a metaphor for the family dynamics between Dracula and his protagonising son, Alucard. It’s an insightful piece about a generation of videogames that is too quickly dismissed.

This week I’ve also been perusing the dusty halls of what may be my favourite games crit blogs, Medium Difficulty (full disclosure, I moonlit as a writer for them in 2013). Though the publication is now laid to rest, I encourage you to go back and take a look at the great writing featured during its 21 month run. You can start your trip down the rabbit hole, as I did, with this piece from the always brilliant Lana Polansky, arguing that any criticism that favours a game’s pieces over its effect as a whole is incomplete.

One game that is not a complete whole until everything is torn to pieces is Mortal Kombat. This series has a special place in my torn-out, still beating heart and I seem to be in good company based on Aoife Wilson’s retrospective of the series’s early history for Vice.

Related, The Ontological Geek invite Amsel von Spreckelsen of Madness and Play fame to discuss MK‘s fatalities and how they relate to bodily agency for their podcast. It’s a long one, but there’s a lot of great discussion from everyone involved.

Ian Miles Cheong — writer; gameranx.com; @stillgray

Chris Suellentrop’s sharp analysis of Gamergate in the New York Times shines a spotlight on the disheartening campaign that’s taken its toll on game critics, reviewers, and journalists in the industry. He points out that video games—an art form on the verge of mainstream acceptance—may have been dealt a serious blow due to the campaign.

Also in the New York Times, Anita Sarkeesian, popular feminist critic and maker of the Tropes vs. Women in Games series writes about her relationship with the video game medium and why she declines to identify as a “gamer.” Contrary to the view that games belong solely to those who identify as “gamers,” Sarkeesian argues that games belong to everyone and talks about what the future holds for the medium.

No stranger to the Gamergate fiasco, Arthur Chu reflects upon his identity as a geek and how he identifies with the anger demonstrated by supporters of the campaign on Salon. Chu relates his experiences to Felicia Day’s blog post, in which she described the personal consequences of the campaign and how they’ve affected her.

Wrapping up this week’s coverage of the Gamergate topic is a short but insightful piece by Chris Plante in The Verge, who argues that the movement’s agenda—or more clearly, the smokescreen of ‘ethics in game journalism’—is no longer convincing anyone.

Stephen Beirne, Ireland – game critic; NormallyRascal.com; @stbeirne; patreon.com/stephenbeirne

Who Goes There?, a short novel by John W. Campbell, has absolutely nothing to do with videogames but I’m putting it here for two reasons. First, because it’s seasonal. Second, because it was the inspiration for the best horror movie in existence, John Carpenter’s The Thing, so is therefore doubly relevant to anything ever. Actually while we’re at it, check out Graeme Mason’s Eurogamer retrospective from last May where he chats to a couple of the devs of the 2002 licensed spin-off/sequel.

Sticking with horror, Eric Swain’s Non Play Criticism looked towards the paradox of horror as a pursued form of… we’ll say entertainment. Swain leaps off a Philosophy Bites podcast on the paradox of tragedy to call for richer collective interrogation of how we perceive and value horror in the medium of videogames.

Here’s a collection of short reviews by Emily Short on three different Twine games: Terror Above The Speedwell, Her Pound of Flesh, and Lights Out, Please.

And Lindsey Joyce relates an idea of how AI in games might be best considered with the user experience in mind as proposed in ‘Schizophrenia and Narrative in Artificial Agents’ by Phoebe Sengers. As summarized by Joyce, Sengers writes that the plausibility of an AI is perceived via narrative cohesion in the contexts in which it operates, so the trick to making an AI seem believable to a player or audience is in perceiving the artificial agents’ actions as interrelated rather than isolated from one another. It’s a perspective shift from computational to dramatic consideration.

That’s all for this week. Don’t forget that I’ll be looking for contributors for next week’s This Week We Read (you can find me @stbeirne). Hope you enjoyed some of these articles and thanks for reading.

This Week We Read: 26/10/14

Each week I ask a group of peers, colleagues and strangers to share with you some articles they read over the previous seven day as described in their own words. The articles they contribute might be a day old or a year old, they can be highly academic or light as a feather, they can be noteworthy for their originality of perspective or they can be utterly, delightfully derivative – the only criteria is for their pick to be at least faintly relevant to people who might be interested in videogames.

My guest contributors this week are Sara Byrella, John M. Osborne and Carli Velocci. If you’d like to volunteer as a contributor for next week’s post, you can contact me on twitter @stbeirne. Now, for articles on ASML Let’s Plays, Alien: Isolation, and bad Final Fantasy fashion, on with the latest This Week We Read.

Sara Byrella, USA - Writer/Layabout; @umbyrella; sarsbyrella.tumblr.com

One of my most enjoyable, moving experiences this year has been Ice Water Games’ Eidolon. Apple Cider Mage explores the escapism she found in its sense of isolation and minimal investment in the player character’s physical being. Meanwhile, Jack de Quidt reflects on the process of coming to grips with its world and the many stories hidden within it, as well the narrative that emerged from his bewildered note-taking.

Emily Short briefly discusses Elegy for a Dead World, which expands upon the richness of de Quidt’s journal-scribbling trek through post-people Washington by asking players to write their own stories with minimal prompting and gorgeous, barren landscapes as their guide. She makes note of Elegy‘s potential limitations as well as the possibilities afforded by Dejobaan’s experimentation with narrative.

Lilith talks about the grimy, beautiful settings of her games, among them Crypt Worlds (referred to lovingly as “the piss game”), and how they came to be. Spurred on by anxieties not unlike those brought up in Apple Cider’s piece, she’s made a home for herself and her creations amid the dirty, unloved margins confining her throughout her life.

Janine Hawkins provides a primer on ASMR Let’s Plays and the ASMR phenomenon in general by engaging some of the scene’s participants. They share their thoughts on the stress-alleviating nature of these videos as well as the negative or confused responses some viewers have to their unorthodox contributions. Also remarked upon is the unprecedented array of video game media options now available.

John M. Osborne, American Expat living in Germany - freelance video editor and writer; @jmarquiso; co-creator of “Late to the Game”; Creator of reddit subreddits /r/cahiersduludica and /r/pocgaming, mod of /r/truegaming

Marshall Sandoval’s Cynicism, Recession, and the Resurgence of Cyberpunk on PopMatters take a look at the return of Cyberpunk as a popular setting in video games, especially indie titles, and makes the case that the current political and economic climate is responsible. Quotes from game devs like Brendon Chung (Quadrilateral Cowboy, Thirty Flights of Loving), and writers like Austin Walker tell the story why the poor, bottom rung hero against the evil corporate conspiracy is so popular.

Cameron Kunzelman takes a critical look at Destiny on The Cage is Worms, arguing that Destiny’s Raid is Interesting Because it’s a Game (whereas Destiny itself is more akin to a slot machine). This grabbed me personally as someone with a gambling compulsion - most ARPGs and Borderlands style shooters are off limits for me as a result. I’m more compelled to play than enjoying the play. Separating the Raid from the rest of Destiny highlights this issue.

On Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Graham Smith recalled his rewarding and exasperating experience bringing a loose guild together in It Takes a Village: Wurm Online and the Value of Tedium. He writes a great ode to teamwork, and how the game inspired it in the loose collection of players in the free server they played on. A server with its own society, history, and even mythology (a large statue of a legendary player character can be found on the island).

Patrick Keplick ponders the player’s role versus the artistic intent of the designer by looking at The Very, Very Large Black Bars of The Evil Within. Aspect ratio may appear to be a small technical detail, but the size of the frame is something in film that a cinematographer would tightly control. So the focus on the black bars themselves brought to my mind how VHS pan and scan would compromise artistic vision for filmmakers - why not game designers? Especially in an age where players ask for multiple display options.

On Eurogamer, Jeffrey Matulef argues that Walking is the New Shooting. He looks at Alien: Isolation not as just survival horror, but also a bold statement about exploration as storytelling in games.

On The Game Critique, Eric Swain tries to Define Gaming’s Arthouse in his Non Play Criticism series. Using Kyle Kallgren’s “Brows Held High” - a film criticism video channel - as a jumping off point, Swain argues that what gaming needs isn’t better criticism, but a better understanding of basic criticism.

Carli Velocci, USA - freelance writer; founder of postmortemmag.com; carlivelocci.wordpress.com; @revierypone

The horror genre is one of the best at conveying the subtle characteristics of mental illness and Daniel Link’s article at Topless Robot on Alien: Isolation captures that in a very straight-forward way. Not only does he talk about his anxiety disorder (and as a sufferer myself, I like to support those who, in a way, “come out” about their experiences), but it also talks about symptoms in terms of that horror and wraps them all together.

Gita Jackson once again does a great job being one of the few people to talk about fashion and games in the same article. Her latest at Paste Magazine does a close reading of Yuna in Final Fantasy X-2 and how her outfit transition from one game to the next might be problematic (as if Square Enix’s outfit choices have never been questionable before). Jackson uses humor and her knowledge of the fashion industry to craft a truly unique piece that raises questions about artist intent and short skirts.

One of the most infuriating complaints coming from the movement that must not be named is the idea of keeping politics out of games. To answer those who agree, it’s impossible to keep politics and personal experience out of games. You can either listen to me or read this piece by Krish Raghav over at the Arcade Review. Not only does it provide an extensive history into Singapore’s political sphere, but it also seeks to raise an important point about politics in games: even the smallest artistic additions can in themselves be political statements.

Stephen Beirne, Ireland - game critic; NormallyRascal.com; @stbeirne; patreon.com/stephenbeirne

I was gently struck by Charles Beckett’s short and sweet post about the importance of a piece of art to comment on the relationship between the audience (/reader/player/etc.) and the world around them. Beckett’s angle is since we live highly digitized lives the art we currently make and enjoy ought to reflect the impact technology continues to have on our… well, he doesn’t get into specifics, but I imagine he might mean our self-perceptions, our ability to communicate and form interpersonal connections, our adjusted concept of being and reality and time, and on and on…. and that art that fails to approach these crucial subject matters risks death.

On Shut Up and Sit Down, Brendan Caldwell’s review of Dog Eat Dog is a fantastic read for anyone interested in ludonarrative directed towards social critique, in this case to showcase how colonialism ingrains insidious power dynamics in the social sphere to degrade and reinstitute the very soul of a community. It’s probably obvious that I had a strong reaction to Caldwell’s write-up on a game about colonialism; he grew up in the North of Ireland and I in the south, so although his is a far more severe and present experience of British imperialism, much of what he relates about lost Irish heritage still applies in large parts of the Republic.

And lastly, Mattie Brice rebuked the community at large for paying attention to women only when they are victims of personal harassment or systemic prejudice, and seldom if ever demonstrating an interest in engaging with their art outside of capitalizing on it. Brice remarks on the reality TV aspect of heeding women in games as idols soon to become martyrs for the benefit of public entertainment (or, the bloodsport of seeing women used as frontline infantry while our community ‘progresses’ towards a feminist future). Certainly there is a deeply ingrained capitalistic current that sees women as little more than solutions to fulfil the market niche of ‘diversity’ in our community, an exploitative packaging and assimilation of their art and identities which marks the prevalent disregard for the work of women outside of activism. Brice recommends some ways we can cease to keep women and their work at arm’s length, and thereby fulfil our claims to welcome them into the fold as people, rather than as political pawns.

This Week We Read: 19/10/14

this week we read 2

Each week I ask a group of peers, colleagues and strangers to share with you, in their own words, some of the articles they read over the previous seven day. The articles they contribute might be a day old or a year old, they can be highly academic or a nice light read, they can be noteworthy for their originality of perspective or they can be utterly, delightfully derivative – the only criteria for contributors is for their pick to be at least faintly related to videogames.

Our guest contributors this week are Corey Milne, Lana Polansky and John Kilhefner. If you’d like to volunteer as a contributor for next week’s post, you can contact me on twitter @stbeirne. Now, on with the latest This Week We Read.

Corey Milne, Scotland - Freelance Writer; coreymilne.WordPress.com; @Corey_Milne

With Gamergate’s bloated carcass still spoiling my view I thought I’d share this interesting little piece by Maria Popova on how Kierkegaard explained the psychology of bullying long before internet trolls existed.

Alex D. Jones talks about the surreal dreamlike pleasures of driving at night by comparing how both Glitchhikers and Euro Truck Simulator 2 evoke a feeling of “sonder”.

Ed Smith seems to be as enamoured with Alien Isolation as I am. He explores how the innate level of detail given to the world’s portrayal of cold utilitarian technology, makes it seem like a real living space. He’s bang on the money.

Aevee Bee talks about loss, pain and if there was anything you would remove from your being, given the chance?

Finally being a wee bit of a historian, this piece by Peter C. Earle comparing the inflation in Diablo 3 and the Weimar Republic is super stuff. This piece stuck with me a while ago because it actually made economics kind of interesting.

Lana Polansky, Canada - Art critic and designer; SufficientlyHuman.com; @mechapoetic; patreon.com/LanaPolansky

Liz Ryerson published a revised version of her IndieCade talk on her blog, in which she takes cues from Videodrome and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology to discuss confronting ideology in games with her typically incisive prose.

Austin C. Howe deconstructs certain assertions implied in the dismissal of meta-games like Spec Ops and The Stanley Parable and takes a moment to discuss the importance of intertextuality to games criticism.

Jack King-Spooner identifies the infantilization and irony of games as a post-modern crisis and suggests some philosophical alternatives.

John Kilhefner, USA - Freelance Writer; jkilhefner.contently.com; @jkilhefner

In the realm of play, Brendan Keogh played Alien: Isolation and was often struck by its emergence and lack of “gamer-friendly” content.

One of our contributors this week, Lana Polansky, explored interactivity in a medium often viewed as impenetrable- poetry.

Over on Tubmlr, Secret Gamer Girl collects accounts of harrassment, and the results are telling:

“Almost none of these stories are things any of these women are willing to discuss publicly, because they know a sobering truth. The sort of harassment I’m about to get into never goes away, for anyone. It just dies down for a while.”

Stephen Beirne, Ireland - game critic; NormallyRascal.com; @stbeirne; patreon.com/stephenbeirne

This brief article Jennifer Justice wrote on grief and escapism is well worth a couple of your minutes, if only as a reminder that using games as a distraction can be dangerous to our wellbeing and limit our relationship with the world if not practised with care. I suppose a similar sentiment lies in Ian Bogost’s ‘Why Anything But Games Matters‘, a transcript of his recent Indiecade talk, albeit through a different, interpersonal scope: Bogost warns against isolationism in gaming as a cultural and creative space, advocating instead that we pursue interdisciplinary crafts and identities.

On The Psychology of Video Games, Jamie Madigan laid out the psychology behind two aspects of Destiny‘s loot system - one good and one bad.

Justin Keverne looked into the character of Vincent Brooks from Catherine and saw a frightful reflection of his own subconscious sexism, ingrained from 30-odd years’ worth of being fed the cultural idolization of masculinity.

Mattie Brice wrote about instrumentality in contrast to interpretation in terms of how mechanics take representational forms within the confines of a game. Using the examples of playing card, the five of hearts, versus a tarot card, the five of cups, she dissolves the often-touted line between functionality and symbolism to illustrate the limitations many games place upon themselves as an entertainment medium.

This Week We Read: 12/10/14

Each week, I ask a group of peers, colleagues and strangers to share with you some articles they read over the previous seven days. The articles they find noteworthy may directly or indirectly relate to games, they might be a day old or a year old, they can be highly academic or make for nice light reading - the only criteria for contributors is that they found their articles to be relevant and noteworthy.

Stephen Beirne, Ireland - game critic; normallyrascal.com; @stbeirne

Emily Short’s accessible and eloquent review of The Ascent of the Gothic Tower is a sharp thematic analysis supported by a rundown of developer Ryan Veeder’s authorial voice—the effect is an incisive narrative critique of The Ascent contextualized within Veeder’s work as a whole.

Katherine Cross penned this robust piece on the political underpinnings of Gamergate as a movement filled with internal contradiction, insofar as it lives and breathes by ghastly ideological puritanism while modelling itself on the same caricature of the ‘Social Justice Warrior’ it claims to oppose.

Elsewhere, Jaya Saxena has this wonderful breakdown of dynamics of sociability in Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. More specifically, Saxena illustrates how the game’s energy mechanics can be a useful guide to concepts of introversion and extroversion in the psychology of Carl Jung.

Jackson Tyler, UK - podcast co-host and writer. Follow him on twitter at @Tylea002 or find his work at abnormalmapping.com

A well written, exasperated article by Caroline Petit largely devoid of criticism as the glaring absurdities and problems within Shadow of Mordor (and other such games of its ilk) are so obvious, persistent and saddening that critique is self evident.

Lex Tyler wrote a piece from all the way back in April, which I stumbled upon earlier in the week, simultaneously a damning indictment of the state of the portrayal of queer relationships in games and a love letter to interpretation, on how important and hopeful it is that queer players are able to see themselves in the spaces the designers don’t fill in.

I love this short Amy Dentata article because it’s an encapsulation of a momentary thought, all questions and no answers, of someone going through the process of putting out a game. The ‘hype machine’ is inherently dehumanising, so writing like this about the affect of making yourself a cog within it is vital.

Ethan Gach, USA - currently blogging at Gaming Vulture and elsewhere. See him anticipate the post-human future with gusto on Twitter at @ethangach

As more videogame developers leap over one another to include multiplayer modes in all of their creations, no matter the genre of fundamental structure of the game itself, what saddens me isn’t that multiplayer driven games like Destiny or Dota 2 will become more prevalent but that, in time, they will come to monopolize the scene altogether. Michael Thomsen’s analysis of the nature of online play helps explain why.

Oniadh writes a somewhat esoteric but extremely thorough post that contrasts how the Fallout and Tomb Raider series approached norms of sexuality in games. It’s worthwhile reading for anyone interested in how games can play off of and subvert existing normative expectations in videogames that are otherwise constrained by the expectations which accompany larger development budgets.

With the release of another Borderlands just around the corner, it’s worth reconsidering a number of the controversial character portrayals from the second game. Earlier last month, Todd Harper expanded at length on how the game tries (and sometimes fails) to eschew conventional, idealize representations in the context of over the top comedy.

Zoya Street, UK - freelance historian and journalist; zoyastreet.com; @rupazero

Early this week I was reading some fan analyses of Star Trek‘s utopian image of the future. Is a future with no money, where people simply pursue interesting activities in order to better themselves and others, necessarily communist or socialist? I started at this wiki page, and then Raph Koster forwarded me to these two more detailed articles on the subject: The Economics of Star Trek and That Star Trek economy thing.

Speaking of less utopian worlds, Rob Fahey (full disclosure: a colleague of mine at Gamesbrief, though we didn’t collude in this article at all) wrote an excellent piece in which he points out that corruption is a flow of power or money that cannot come from people are largely powerless and impoverished, such as indie developers and games critics.

This interview with Marcus Novak in 1995 gives us a way into thinking about digital media in general and cyberspace in particular as “liquid architectures” - fluid spaces that shift according to their use. The idea had been introduced to me in a conversation with friends about the current state of our online spaces, and I’ve been really excited to explore the idea further.

I also finally started doing some course reading for my PhD this week, and the introduction to quantitative research has ended up being much more closely connected to games than I had expected. The introduction to Chance: An Informal Guide to Probability, Risk and Statistics by Brian Everitt acts as a great overview of the shared history of games and fortune telling, both being numerical ways that world cultures have managed uncertainty with dice and cards. For a few months now I’ve been thinking about how games are closely connected with fortune telling, and it was great to see that so clearly in this book.