Tumblr-er Flutiebear starts us off with this excellent two part series applying Victoria Lynn Schmidt’s Heroine’s Journey to Disney’s Tangled and Bioware’s Dragon Age 2. These analyses come highly recommended.

From there, we pay a visit to GayGamer where newest writer EccentricTomboy writes on seeing sexism in competitive gaming from two sides:

See, back before transition I would have been that guy: amused by the girl trying to play a man’s game and trying to give her a good experience. It’s the same reflex that prompts my friends to introduce me as a female gamer who is “actually really good at games,” as if this is something that just isn’t possible in our normal gaming life.

Meanwhile, The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers sits down with Rachel Weil, founder of FEMICOM, “a collection of twentieth century games for girls”:

[I]nstead of passing the site by, my eyes lingered over that tagline: The feminine computer museum. “All right, FEMICOM,” I thought, clicking through the links. “Just how are you defining ‘feminine’? Feminine according to who?”

As it turns out, this is exactly the question that FEMICOM wants you to be asking. Failing to explore this site would have been a big mistake on my part. Not only did it lead to one of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve had about gender roles in games, but it made me put my own gaming preferences under the microscope.

On the subject of curation, Venturebeat’s Jeff DiOrio has a fantastic interview up with Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games.

Speaking of history, this week Split-Screen’s Alan Williamson poked fun at developers’ creating a false impression of it through those infamous “Game of the Year” repackagings. As Williamson observes, “Special editions aren’t about specialty. They are mere upselling.”

Quality was also on the mind of Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs this week, as he reminds readers that all these successfully funded Kickstarter games are still hypothetical:

What if the new Wasteland game is released and it’s just kind of crappy?

I feel like there is a lot of pressure on these first rounds of high-profile Kickstarted games to actually do well in release and in the public eye. It’s great that there’s been so much enthusiasm for giving money directly to creators of content, but now the onus is on them to deliver on some of these very big promises they’ve made. To be honest, I think the future of Kickstarter itself actually lies with them.

GUS MASTRAPA, whose name I occasionally write in all-caps just for emphasis, had two articles of note this week. First is his repost of his Kill Screen piece on games and heavy metal. Next, the latest in his Pretension +1 column for Unwinnable is a (rather charming and empathetic, in Mastrapa’s usual fashion) reflection on how games will be the death of him:

Part of my problem is that I let myself get derailed. I’ll make some good habits and frequent the gym for a month or two. And then something like E3 will come up and throw me off. I’ll come back exhausted and start the spiral again. For a while I tried to use videogames as a carrot, but my World of Warcraft workout was short-lived. When I made exercise a requirement for playing the game, I just wound up playing less. That was the path of least resistance. For a while I used Foursquare to kind of gamify gym attendance, but that didn’t work either. Some asshole named Pierre kept snaking me for the mayor prize. I was sure he was cheating somehow.

Josh Bycer has a list of five ways to bring the survival horror genre back from the dead. And Nightmare Mode’s Dylan Holmes appears to find games fatal in another way– namely, the unlock strategies of certain multiplayer games, and how these break the game.

Further on the subject of first-person shooters, Dan Nosowitz expresses his concerns for Sniper Elite V2’s hyperrealistic “KillCam”. Thirdly, and a chief contender for article of the week, is Paolo Pedercini’s editorial for Kotaku on how franchises such as Call of Duty: Black Ops valorize a particularly frightening kind of warfare:

In the Ramboesque universe of Call of Duty, black ops are presented as an elite force type of operations, carried out in secrecy by modern ninjas. But in reality, what makes certain operations “black” is not that they go undetected by enemy forces—after all, most of military engagements are meant to surprise or deceive the opponent. The peculiarity of black operations is of being untraceable and deniable by the very institutions which finance and conduct them. This secrecy is desirable whenever the operations, if done overtly, would cause popular uproar, diplomatic crisis or legal troubles. It allows the perpetrators to bypass public scrutiny, democratic oversight and the Laws of War, a complex system of liability under which the “proper” military must operate.

Real-world black operations are often indistinguishable from terrorism.

Also at Kotaku this week, Mark Serrels takes aim at Ubisoft’s advertising practices and asks “Why are we so willing to become conduits for marketing?” Taking the longer view, Simon Parkin posts his interview with Ubisoft Toronto’s Jade Raymond and the nuances entering into Raymond’s particular high profile in the industry.

From AAA to smaller development, Dennis of Superlevel attempts to put a finer point on the definition of “indie game.” Meanwhile, Unwinnable’s Tim Mucci offers tabletop gamemasters (but really, all game developers) some tips for writing better NPCs.

Another recurring theme this week was the role of difficulty in design practices. First up, and perhaps most controversially among the dev readership, Taekwan Kim takes the position that costing users time through user-unfriendly design is about equivalent with paid unlocking schemes:

Let’s be blunt. Time costs are real. So isn’t it just as manipulative to exploit the fact that the more time you spend, the more expensive and valuable the object necessarily becomes? Is a game that refrains from selling “I win” consumables any less dubious if it forces players to spend inflationary amounts of time? And what else can you call no respec, permadeath, etc. but devices that inflate time costs? More troublesomely, is that actually even a bad thing?

On the player side of the equation, Chris Waldron writes favorably of player-developed, voluntary hardcore challenges in their ability to change the experience of play:

Take, for example, the ‘Nuzlocke Challenge’ of the Pokemon RPGs. In the standard game, Pokemon faint once their hit points are depleted; in a Nuzlocke run, they die, and therefore must be instantly released, never to be seen again; if your whole team falls then I’m afraid it’s game over. [...] the Poke-universe takes on a whole new air of morbidity. It stands to reason that if your Pokemon die upon fainting then, surely, so do your opponent’s. Therefore, hundreds of Pokemon must die in order for yours to prosper, adding a layer of moral ambiguity to an otherwise light-hearted game.

Marcus Pettersson is likewise in favor of more punishing gameplay experiences, though here he argues for harder games on the design level– or in his words, developers need to “design games like a bastard“.

As a little nightcap for you all, several of our readers wrote in this week with some fantastic new/obscure blogs for your perusal: Charlie Wheeler’s The Rules on the Field, focusing on sports and game design, and Pathologistics, a blog dedicated to mapping Russian cult game Pathologic. Both are recommended, although perhaps not the latter if you’re just about to go to bed.

Join us next week for more of the best game critique and commentary across the web! And as always, we welcome your tweets and emails!

To kick us off, Eurogamer’s Rich Stanton has a great retrospective up on the rise and fall of Free Radical Design beginning with its founders’ departure from Rare. Meanwhile, Keith Stuart at Hookshot pays tribute to the ZX Spectrum, now 30 years old, and the indies who developed on it.

But special kudos this week go to Robert Rath’s excellent profile on PlaGMaDA, the Play Generated Map and Document Archive, for The Escapist:

[T]o Hutchings, the Archive isn’t merely a research resource, but also a gallery of aesthetic objects. Hutchings sees the documents in the context of Outsider Art and Folk Art, an interpretation that becomes more intriguing the longer you dig into the Archive. The maps are the most visually striking objects – intricately detailed layouts of castles stormed and dungeons crawled, filled with handwritten notes and illustrations of doorways and items. One map, obviously held by a campaign villain, contains a reminder to “feed prisoners to Turgarum” along with the exuberant notation, “More Gold and Slaves!”

Anyone interested in classical tabletop and the artifacts thereof will definitely find Rath’s article, and PlaGMaDA , very engrossing.

From curation to critique, Kiala Kazebee made a splash on Gameranx this week with this piece satirizing the condescending tone of “girlfriend” articles. You know the ones I mean.

On the subject of formula, Lana Polansky traces the predigital origins of the feminine “helping hand” archetype of game sidekicks. And Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton expounds upon horror film satire Cabin in the Woods to reveal the formulaic imperatives of other genres– like action games.

Over at Play the Past, Roger Travis has embarked on a multipart series on the Mass Effect franchise. In commenting on the series’s interaction with ideas of player agency, Travis (perhaps coincidentally?) echoes the grand dame Janet Murray herself:

[T]he way the game produces its effect is little different than JM Barrie’s famous ludic moment in Peter Pan: choice matters because the player convinces him or herself that it matters; the story can’t proceed unless choice matters, because the story proceeds when the player makes choices.

Following that path, we venture over to Scott Juster’s latest Moving Pixels contribution, “A Segmented Sky“:

I’ve been replaying The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past recently and have found that I can still remember how to walk from the foot of the mountains to the middle of the desert by memory. Because of this, the game still retains its sense of place when I take a shortcut by instantly warping around the map. I may be skipping a lot of obstacles, but I know that they exist, and I know how they connect the world.

This feeling of connectivity is part of what makes the game (as well as many Zelda games) special; the world feels like an ecosystem, one in which fast travel and load screens are concessions to convenience and technical limitations, as opposed to a segmented approach to design. It’s also a feeling that was impossible for me to have in the latest Zelda title, Skyward Sword, a game whose very structure feels like a series of disjointed plane trips over a disconnected world.

Why is that? You’ll just have to read the full article and see.

The next article was clearly written with Ben Abraham’s round-up in mind, but though I don’t enjoy weird as much as Ben does, I felt obligated to include it: Darius Kazemi’s metaphysical dialogue on ontology, Latour, and Jason Rohrer’s Inside a Star-Filled Sky. See? I told you it was a Ben thing.

(The next section bears a trigger warning for ableist language.)

One article which sparked a great number of response posts this week was Taylor Clark’s clarification of his Jonathan Blow profile for The Atlantic: “Most Popular Video Games are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing for Them Now?” Of the response pieces, Matthew Burns’s “The Animal as System,” seems the most cogent reply, arguing for a holistic view:

A game is a whole system; the pieces that we like to dissect are its organs. You can take issue with and maybe even improve the components, but what you really want is a brand new animal, a new system where all the parts work together. By saying that Vanquish is a great game but could benefit from better story and characters, Clark implicitly proposes a mythical beast— the kind with the head of one animal and the body of another.

(End trigger warning section.)

Nightmare Mode’s Alois Wittwer remarks on tall poppy syndrome and our fondness for “elevating” games to films. And Unwinnable’s Jenn Frank provides us with the most delightful non-review-review of indie dev Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters:

Anthropy’s real mission is only this: a more perfect world, one in which everyone can build a videogame. Maybe these games will be unedited and jejune and a little bit broken, as zines themselves often are, but that’s supposed to be the allure. The games will be authentic, these experiential snapshots, the works of diarists instead of artists and computer programmers.

Finally for this week’s roundup: Game Design as Cultural Practice, a blog curated by GA Tech professor Celia Pearce, has been featuring some fantastic student essays in recent weeks (perhaps due to the end of the semester coming up, hmm?). One of which, on the application of New Games philosophy to Alternate Reality Games, comes especially recommended.

May the Sith be with you! Oh, you’re probably dreadfully sick of those jokes by now, aren’t you? Well, nevermind, then. Just be sure to check in with us again next Sunday for more of the best of game blogging from around the web! And don’t forget to send in your recommendations by twitter and email as well– and yes we do welcome a bit of self-promotion! Don’t be shy!

Look, here’s a little secret I’m going to share with you: sometimes writing about videogames is… how do I put this…. not weird enough. I’m going to try and pick out some of the weirder stuff this week.

For instance: At the architectural/landscape/urbanism blog M.ammoth, Rob Holmes regales us with a short anecdote about a student designing a game as part of an investigation into the ramifications of the Mississippi river diverting it’s course:

One of the student projects proposed a kind of abstracted board game which attempted to codify the interactions between the insurance industry, various economic activities in the Atachafalaya Basin (such as gambling), floods, disaster management systems, public space, and citizens of the flood-prone Basin. This project intrigued me greatly — but it did so less because of its resonance with the recent vogue for “gamification” (where I am inclined to agree, for the most part, with Ian Bogost), and more because it helped me articulate a set of problems related to aggregation, complexity, perversity, and misalignment in the design of landscapes.

It’s only a brief little mention amongst a sea of tranquil information-overload, but it’s interesting. It’s weird.

Sufficiently weird enough for me is also Darshana Jayemanne’s ‘Do It Differently’ essay for Killscreen which argues we should stop playing up the ‘uniqueness’ of videogames interactivity. It’s a powerful and unpopular argument, but I think he’s right.

Look around you. Architecture is an art form—you’d be brave indeed to claim the Sistine Chapel or the Patio de los Leones are not art, and only slightly less brave to call them “linear.” Robert Venturi and Fredric Jameson didn’t have to wait for ludology to be invented so they could wrap their heads around the nonlinear spaces of Las Vegas and the Bonaventure Hotel, respectively. Similar observations could be made for sculpture or improvisational music. In these art forms the distinction between linear and nonlinear is just a nonsense. It does not even arise as a problem in the first place.

Go read his whole argument and then tell me you don’t get a sense that Things Could Be Wholly Other about videogame writing and criticism. Weird indeed.

Not entirely sure if this really hits the high point on my ‘weird’ metric, but it’s an interesting piece and it goes well with Jayemanne’s piece above – at Medium Difficulty Kyle Stegerwald discusses whether writers and critics can actually be bad at games and still be good critics. I don’t think he’s wholly right, but neither is he wholly wrong, primarily because games writing could be so, so many things and Stegerwald seems to have just one particular thing in mind. Still – definitely worth reading and thinking about. For Stegerwald:

…skill in games resembles critical understanding in literature, and nobody sneers at someone who advances a well-reasoned opinion of a piece of literature by calling them a “minmaxer.”

Also at Medium Difficulty this week is neat little discussion by Adil Sherwani on ‘The State of Music Games’ (by which it is meant the Rock Band/Guitar Hero style music game). It’s sort of history, really, and History, as anyone who knows anything about it will tell you, is Really Weird.

Oh yes! And this is a sufficiently strange offering from the always-intriguing David Carlton who paid a visit to France’s Musée d’Orsay and took inspiration from the range of nudes and other paintings, sculptures, etc in the museums collection:

A couple of years ago, I took inspiration from musicals and proposed that narrative video games should present themselves as a sequence of set pieces that are as well-crafted as possible, with just enough connective tissue to let you go from set piece to set piece without being jarring. And my experiences in the Musée d’Orsay gave me a new perspective on that argument: each of those set pieces should have the unity and impact of a painting. There should be a vision, a scene, an interaction at the core of each set piece with the rest unfolding from it.

Brilliant stuff. Go read it, if only for all the brilliant images of paintings the Museum holds.

Also brilliant this week was Cara Ellison’s discussion of Christine Love’s ‘Don’t Take It Personally, Babe’ and ‘Being Single in Public’ for the Unwinnable blog:

Playing Don’t Take It Personally, Babe when you’re single, and have been for a while, is an alienating experience. It’s a wonderful shorthand of the messages that are going on around us every day. Couple culture is everywhere – it’s in every televisual soap or drama, it’s in every advertising campaign.

As a young man who has spent the vast, vast majority of his life within the kingdom of singledom I know exactly what Ellison is talking about, and it can be a very, very weird place.

Also from Unwinnable this week is Kate Williams piece on Dear Esther, describing it as “a sudden heartbeat in a flatlining relationship”.

G. Christopher Williams writing for PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog this week thinks Ms Pacman is the Platonic form of games. That’s kind of a strange argument, but that’s kind of the point. More strange please!

Mattie Brice writing for Paste Magazine this week asks ‘Who’s the bad guy?‘ and discusses being a demographic actively excluded from videogame marketing and taste-appeal (which would be a very weird feeling).

Jeffrey Wilson at 2D-X has a cool little anecdote about ‘The Night Castlevania and Wu Tang Clan owned NYC’ and the hunt for a Castlevania sample heard (imagined? Auditory hallucination?!) in a 90s hip-hop track.

And here’s another weird little thing from BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh who has a little think about some game-applications for MIT’s distributed robotics’ ‘Smart Sand’:

…perhaps in some future game brought to you by BLDGBLOG and Big Robot—you have to battle your way forward through infinite sandstone buildings that rise up, one after the other, like endless violent waves rolling as far as the eye can see, a desert of shapes lurching and unbuilding themselves toward you, forever. You jump through doors, up stairways, over walls, never advancing forward more than a few feet at a time, blinded by clouds of sand crashing on all sides, always another building ready to rise up out of the moving dunes and block you.

At Sneaky Bastards (possibly the best named videogame blog on the internet) James Patton has words about the Maltese Falcon and Games and Society and stuff. The piece describes itself (blogs these days! They do all your work for you!) as “Examining the stealth genre’s depictions of society and culture, as seen through the stark, shadowy lens of The Maltese Falcon.”

Vying for the ‘best videogame blog name’ competition is Full Glass, Empty Clip (I’m surprised that I’ve not stumbled upon this site before), where blogger ‘Stavros the Wonder Chicken’ aka Christopher Kovacs talks about ‘Living in First Person’:

Part of growing up isolated and insulated, for me at least, was burning curiosity about Other Places. Ever since I could remember, every new thing I learned about the world out there filled me with ever greater desire to see it for myself.

And here’s a funny new tumblblog ‘Postplay’:

POSTPLAY is a project founded on the fundamental principle that a video game is only as relevant as the contemplations or debates it provokes may be equally worthy of note; that the most significant games are, by definition, those which are capable of stimulating an edifying discussion and different degrees of contemplation. This, however, does not insinuate that a widely discussed title is, by definition, pertinent; quite the contrary, for this same criterion presupposes that the character and corollaries of the dialogue it incites provide an authentic intimation of its veritable merit.

Oh and I very nearly forgot – Michael Abbott at the Brainy Gamer blog, inspired by Taylor Clarke’s essay/profile of Jon Blow in The Atlantic, has started a crowd sourced catalogue of “Smart Games” to counteract the notion that games are only Hollywood dumb. Go check it out, it’s a weird lest (yes!) and it can get weirder if you choose to add stuff to it. Go forth and submit strange and eclectic games!

Hmm, so that’s the week in weird videogame writing, but it could always be weirder, more eclectic, more ambitious. Take that under consideration.

Here, one final parting curio: a mind-blowingly beautiful Vietnamese Café. Think about that and level design. Lets see that in a game.

I hope you enjoyed some of the weirdness. As always, we rely on your submissions to make it through the week. Send them via twitter or email, if you please!

First, a bit of history. BulletMagnet over on Racketboy writes up an illustrative history of shoot-em-ups. Meanwhile, Stephen E. Dinehart sits down with game writing veteran Susan O’Connor as part of his Game Writers in the Trenches series.

Next up, the always-engaging Matthew Weise at Outside Your Heaven traces the decline in anti-Americanism in the Metal Gear franchise, a trend he sees beginning with the departure of one of its key writers and an uptick in the series’s fascination with its own mythology: “Questions like ‘who are The Patriots?’ and ‘was Big Boss good or evil?’ are really only interesting if they aren’t answered.”

Drawing upon more contemporary history, Julian Benson traces some connections between the serious game Sweatshop, the financial MMO EVE Online, and the 2008 financial crisis. Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker, on the other hand, rips straight from the headlines– and spits on them, critiquing the shoddy journalism that has gone into connecting Norwegian bomber Anders Breivik with videogames.

Responding to the now-infamous Atlantic profile on Braid developer Jonathan Blow, Cameron Kunzelman takes aim at the myth of the game (or film) auteur:

Let me be clear: the actual political economy of film did not change [following the classic Hollywood studio system]. Films were still vetted by execs, funded by studios, and ran by unions. What really occurred during the shift toward the auteur was that the public had a name and face to attach to a movie. Directors were names attached to bodies. That was just an illusion, though. No matter how much I liked Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, the lesson that I got from the book was that power will never rest in the hands of a creator who will not play the studio game–every famous director is a puppet. That’s the reason Coppola decided to open up a vineyard.

Another iconoclast, Richard Dillio, has some strong words for the Mass Effect 3 ending fiasco, an article which really comes into its own in the final third:

If you were a big cheese over at EA, you be laughing at the sheer genius of the current situation: your studio made a game with a crappy ending, but still sold millions of units. The ending was so crappy, and people were so pissed, that they demanded a new ending, which you can charge them for. No matter what, you’re making shitloads of cash. You’d be the fucking Mr. Burns of video games. In what other industry do people willingly pay a creative team more money to redo something they should’ve gotten right in the first place? I can’t think of a single one.

Speaking of downer endings you wouldn’t think to patch, Scott Juster has been reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and he muses on the book’s connections to other, non-Mass Effect down notes. Attending instead to the journalistic question of gaming toward endings, Kill Screen staff writer Michael Thomsen and founder Jamin Warren debate the need to reach an ending at all.

Patricia Hernandez’s latest piece for Kotaku is an interesting indictment of games as making us aspire to a middle-class, homogenous lifestyle: “Skyrim promised me the oft-peddled and largely untrue myth of being able to pull myself up by my bootstraps, and while it delivered on that promise, what I found myself doing was often depressingly meaningless and rote.”

Rob Zacny directs a similar challenge, not to developers, but players of strategy games, suggesting that quicksaving is harming the genre by making these tidy wins easy.

Not all articles about the intersection of players and design are so somber this week, however. On Nightmare Mode, Alois Wittwer takes us on a cute jaunt through the confusing tiers of agency in Hot Shots Golf. And darting back into late March for a second, we have Tom Chick hating Journey in his typically witty way.

On the subject of Journey, Rachel Helps draws upon her own religious upbringing to unearth connections with the game as religious ritual. And while we’re on the subject of religious themes in games, John Brindle has a new post up historicizing L’Abbaye des Morts, proving once again how dangerously hard it is to put a Brindle article down.

On the academic front, Andrew K Przybylski and his team have published their interesting study on using games to act out “the ideal self” in the Journal for Psychological Science.

Jason Tocci has a new feature up on Gamasutra regarding the five forms of game appeal. Lastly, Luke Maciak looks forward to Notch’s next gaming venture as a call back to an inspirational golden age for hackers and programmers.

Join us next week as we deliver some more hot-and-cold top picks from the ludodecahedron! Want to keep Critical Distance from getting lukewarm? Send in your links via Twitter or email today!

The man I usurped to get this gig, Ben Abraham, is back again this week with a compelling video essay in which he questions our fondness for the term immersion. This follows on a theme in recent weeks in respect to Jenova Chen’s master thesis, and is also echoed in Tony Ventrice’s feature on Gamasutra on flow in mobile media.

Also hailing from Gamasutra, Ara Shirinian investigates how we might use psychology to design intuitive graphical user interfaces. And Jorge Albor takes the subject to the dark side in ruminating on the use of psychology to develop alienating structures and creatures:

[T]he same visceral reaction that we have to Giger’s work or the synthetic/organic husks of Mass Effect 3 mirrors a reaction that future generations are intended to have when they meet the WIPP’s warning markers. There is horror found in artificial yet unreadable architecture.

Responding to John Walker’s essay on the perceived runniness, shall we say, of games’ subject matter, Joseph Hilgard contends that we’re looking in the wrong places for gaming subject matter we can sink our teeth into:

If we want our games to provide us with real nourishment, I would argue that the last thing we need is last year’s shooter wrapped in some awkward story about love and loss, or yet another indie platformer about the inevitability of mortality. We don’t need superficially serious themes. We need new and interesting games which provide novel and challenging forms of play.

Ed Smith also voices misgivings in a critique of last year’s Catherine, where systems fail the nuance about relationships it aspires to. Meanwhile, Kyle Chayka says we can find the art in games from a more unconventional place– perhaps in reading Cooking Mama as performance art?

There’s a satisfaction in the rhythmic nature of the different tasks that have to be performed, and there’s always the goal of pleasing Mama and besting your previous score. But there’s also the abstract satisfaction of having created something, or the simulation of something, that someone else is going to consume. Like Tiravanija’s curry, the gyoza or omelets that we make in Cooking Mama aren’t composed for ourselves; they’re created for the mystery person on the other side of the theoretical table, whomever we choose to fill that space with.

Also daring to be unconventional, Jim Ralph proposes that Skyrim is in fact a place we inhabit:

Despite the impossibility of encountering another human being in Skyrim, its players all occupy the same imagined terrain through their shared experience. In this way, Skyrim does have that population of 10 million Dragonborn. Sure, we’ll never come face to face in our different Skyrims, but I’ll probably never come face to face with 99.9% of the rest of England’s population either. That doesn’t stop England being a nation. Our experience of any community is built from a mix of individual isolation and the impression of interpersonal links. In this way, Skyrim is a nation in its own right.

From Skyrim to Tanelorn, Patrick Holleman profiles the rich community space of a Minecraft roleplaying server named for the work of fantasy novelist Michael Moorcock. Meanwhile, Krystian Majewski compares the worlds and gameplay of Suikoden and Mass Effect and discovers some interesting parallels.

Speaking of Mass Effect– you know we couldn’t go one week without touching upon the ending controversy. In fulfilling that cosmically-ordained quota, Paul Tassi sits down with the people of the Retake Mass Effect campaign, presumably so that you don’t have to. It really is a very authentic look at a dissenting section of the Mass Effect fanbase, whatever you might think of the whole issue.

Meanwhile, as we’re on the subject of big pictures, Chris Kohler digs a little deeper into some of the underlying logic of the much-maligned Consumerist reader poll which named Electronic Arts the worst company in America. While not fully satisfying a rationale, it does paint a picture of a Consumerist readership interested in far more than unsatisfactory endings and LGBT characters.

Much of the Ludodecahedron swarmed PAX East last week. Robert Yang demonstrates that his impressions of the convention roughly match up with mine of E3, then ups the ante significantly: “How the worst part of the game industry uses PAX East to teabag your entire face with its cancerous scrotum.” And that’s just the title.

More soberingly, the beautiful Mattie Brice is back at The Border House this week with a heartfelt essay on cis- and heteronormative pressures which inform not just her self-presentation as a game journalist, but her everyday life. In it, she also discusses the Vox hiring controversy and persisting obstacles to diversity hiring in the industry. A must-read.

With that, this week’s roundup comes to a close. I have to go bundle up and take some more cough medicine. Join us next week, and be sure to tweet and email us your favorites!

Links, I mean, not cough medicines. Although those would be appreciated as well.

We kick things off with an essay from Shay Pierce, the lone Omgpop employee holdout who made news this week by refusing to join his company’s merger with social game giant Zynga:

When an entity exists in an ecosystem, and acts within that ecosystem in a way that is short-sighted, behaving in a way that is actively destructive to the healthy functioning of that ecosystem and the other entities in it (including, in the long term, themselves) — yes, I believe that that is evil. And I believe that Zynga does exactly that.

Also blogging against the grain, Harold Goldberg takes the Smithsonian game art exhibit to task for groupsourcing its selections by popular vote. And Joel Goodwin parodies the lack of nuance games exhibit in trying to model complex human behavior, like parenthood.

Meanwhile, Evan Narcisse digs deep into why representation and gamer culture matter to him personally in “Why I’m Worried About My Daughter’s Video Game Future“:

It’s not enough to just make a protagonist—or worse, a sidekick—black. Why? Because of the Hunger. The Hunger is the angry growling in the pit of a black nerd’s soul that asks constantly, “where are we in the big picture?” It manifests differently for everybody. Nevertheless, I don’t want to pass on The Hunger to my daughter. I want the video games of the future to make her feel welcome.

Two articles took an unusual approach to design criticism this week. First we have Tom Francis in his tribute to Proteus,

a first-person exploration game in which the components of the music you hear depend on what you’re standing near to. And the time of day, and what’s going on in the rest of the music, and probably some other factors.

Meanwhile, Zach Alexander wonders if we can consider saving and saved games a part of the gameplay.

Our good frenemy Eric Lockaby is at it with his latest installment of “How You Got Videogames Wrong,” in which he explicates how the fundamentals of design (old media and new) go much deeper than we’re used to discussing them.

As the discussion on Mass Effect 3 plows onward, we’re still seeing some noteworthy and original response articles popping up. Top marks this week go to Patricia Hernandez, who writes in Gameranx about the racial problematic of the krogan.

[G]ames like Mass Effect indulge in a power fantasy related to control and influence. [...] To indulge on the power fantasy where we have utter control over other people’s lives is to assume whiteness, typically male whiteness.

As Mass Effect conversations start to cool, however, discussions on Journey are still heating up. Simon Parkin kicks things off with a stellar interview with Journey auteur Jenova Chen. Meanwhile, referring to Chen’s MFA thesis on “flow,” Michael Abbott investigates whether Journey faithfully represents its underlying concepts.

Ian Bogost also refers to Chen’s thesis in his thoughtful analysis of the young developer’s oeuvre, lending a structuralist perspective only he can:

In videogames, it’s far less common to see a creator’s work evolve in this way. In part, this is because game makers tend to have less longevity than other sorts of artists. In part, it’s because games are more highly industrialized even than film, and aesthetic headway is often curtailed by commercial necessity. And in part, it’s because games are so tightly coupled to consumer electronics that technical progress outstrips aesthetic progress in the public imagination. […] Thatgamecompany’s work thus offers us an unusual window into the creative evolution of a game maker, one in which the transition from green students to venerable artists took place before our very eyes over a short half-decade on a single and very public videogame platform.

Lastly, Jason Killingsworth has a theory on the source of Journey’s aesthetic power: the jumping.

Our real-world bodies are dense with fat, sinew and muscle. Gravity pins us down no less gingerly than André the Giant once flattened his poor opponents to the wrestling mat. When we step inside an avatar, however, the game doesn’t just hand us a new suit of clothes, it hands us a new sense of physical weight, which the game’s developer has licence to assign. Journey’s pilgrim is covered in cloth robes, but its hard to imagine there being any flesh beneath that tunic. She’s too light. The only weight she carries appears to be that of the fabric in which her spirit is wrapped. To play Journey is to feel like a soul freed of its corporeal baggage.

Is it any wonder critics have hailed Journey as a religious experience? Jenova Chen and his colleagues at Thatgamecompany aim for transcendence and they do so by taking the word at face value. To transcend is simply to rise up, which is exactly what happens in Journey every time you press the X button.

But not every essay of the week was devoted to the aesthetic high points of the medium. Writing for KillScreen, Emily Flynn-Jones pays tribute to the unironic love of kusoge, or “shit games”, which are games so functionally broken they have developed a cult fan following:

Kusoge doesn’t seem to be about bad taste or irony, but the experience of playing a truly terrible game. What I mean is that kusoge can be awesome—yes, in the “rad,” “cool,” and “amazing” sense, but also in the other. A really bad game can evoke genuine awe, a sense of “fearful wonderment,” as it is defined. Awe is a pleasing combination of terror, dread, and astonishment; bad games are capable of provoking this feeling in a way that a so-called good game cannot match.

This fascination with badness is certainly at the center of a lot of internet memes, something which our own Ben Abraham observes this week as well when he profiles MLG fragvid parodies, whose over-the-top, “trashy” designs lampoon the hypermasculine, stoner “thug” culture of Major League Gaming. I am probably not explaining this well, so you had best go take a look for yourself.

But Ben isn’t the only one to indulge in a bit of weirdness this week, as evidenced by John Brindle’s newest post on Metal Gear Solid 3 as analogous Pac Man in a more literal sense, in which eating is a form of revenge:

Imagine a game where the player character was a cannibal serial killer, escaped from a remote Appalachian penitentiary into a mountainous wilderness. The introductory areas see him happen upon a clutch of hippy campers and prey on them, horror movie style. But the game proper begins when he finds a survivalist compound. Right-wing nuts with hunting rifles patrol the woods, self-sufficient, smug and secure. Then and there, our Nietzschean hero decides that by whatever method – by trap, by snare, by spike pit, by strangling – he is going to kill and eat every single one of them. Not because he needs to, not because he is hungry, but because he is a terrible person and he wants to.

I’m not quite sure at what point I started down this Brindle-shaped rabbit hole, but it does sound like something for next year’s Molyjam.

Are we done? Whew, we’re done. Is it me, or was this week a bit more depraved than usual? I’m going to assume it’s a response to PAX East going on, because I hate to contemplate the alternative.

See you all next week! As usual, we depend on your tweeted and emailed recommendations to make each TWIVGB the best it can possibly be, so keep them coming!

Taking to the streets in the harsh, yet surprisingly squishy world of investigative journalism, Ashcraft tackles the home-made buttocks of gaming mousepads and their impact on Japan’s post-Fukushima re-narrativization.

Addressing his feminist readership, Ashcraft asks us to reimagine Japanese RPG villains as women and the complex sexual politics which would result from such a nuanced recapitulation.

Even the biggest blogging trends of the West did not escape Ashcraft’s eye, lending his own commentary on the Mass Effect 3 narrative and some of the costume DLC we might look forward to. Still, Ashcraft made time for some thoughtful insights into review practices as well.

Far from focusing solely on critical practice and fan culture, however, Ashcraft also treats us to an insider’s look of the industrial side to games, with a high-brow art critique of three-dimensional mammarification in Senran Kagura. But, as we might remember when referring back to one of Ashcraft’s landmark contributions to game journalism last year, aesthetic trends can be a hard thing to predict. Moreover, as Ashcraft warns in a separate and more recent article, is the world really ready for semen count gamification?

This and more we are left to ponder as we follow the blog posts of this enigmatic and even mystifying Capote of our time. Brian Ashcraft is proof that the outside world is not prepared for the awesomeosity of game criticism. Shine on, Bashcraft. Shine on.

Join us next week, as we count down our ten favorite hard-hitting GameInformer previews!

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I’m sorry. I really am.

Anyway, without further ado, here is the real This Week in Videogame Blogging.

We begin with a discussion of representation, both industrially and in game content. Evan Narcisse appeals to videogames to develop black characters which don’t make him cringe:

Every black superhero face I saw growing up was another signpost that said “Hey, you’re welcome here. You can be larger-than-life, too.” The absence of such characters [in games] doesn’t make fictional constructs hostile; it makes them indifferent, which can be far worse.

G4TV profiles some of the most influential Japanese women in game development. And Shelley Du pays tribute to Final Fantasy XIII character Vanille’s accent as a comment on identity and diaspora.

Kotaku head honcho Stephen Totilo looks to high-profile women designers both inside and outside of AAA development and asks a pointed question: “What if the Next Generation Thinks Video Games are Stupid?“, citing games’ struggles to reflect nuanced contemporary issues.

Meanwhile, at Play the Past, Mark Sample implies that social relevance is something games have struggled with for a while. In playing through an open source copy of the original Sim City, Sample observes:

Crime is out of control. There are mobs. There is looting. The National Guard may soon appear. But what’s not there is race. The riots in my 1974 version of Detroit are virtually whitewashed. They are riots in the abstract. There are no people involved. Only algorithmically-determined mobs. If one could wish for an idealized riot—devoid of the race and class tensions that have historically been at the root of American civil disturbances—then the riot in my 1974 Detroit is it.

Identity was also a theme for several other writers this week, all of whom were responding to this poorly-received Forbes article by Tara Tiger Brown. Deirdra Kiai writes a personal story of embracing the “geek” label as a child to identify herself, and how easily that lends itself to jealously guarding said label, as the Forbes article does. Leigh Alexander dislikes the “geek” label and argues that the term means nothing anymore. While agreeing with many of Alexander’s concluding points, Gus Mastrapa differs by saying he embraces the label because it is a group identity he chose for himself.

Over on IndieGames, John Polson profiles Anna Anthropy aka Auntie Pixelante, her role in the independent game scene, and her recent dys4ia as a game by which she shares a personal journey.

Another independent game developer, Pippin Barr (The Artist is Present) submitted himself and the Missus to the Painstation, and writes about how the experience brings participants together. And Randy Kalista offers up a fantastic textual reading of the Biblical undercurrents of independent un-game Dear Esther.

Thatgamecompany’s Journey continues to inspire thoughtful and impassioned responses. One of my favorites for the week comes from the blog Persona Matters, describing how the game’s visual rewards system also serves a mythic purpose within the game text. Everyone’s favorite woobie Brendan Keogh writes about how companionship makes the game feel lonelier.

Showing his professorial side, Michael Abbott offers up an analysis of Journey’s Eastern spiritual aesthetics:

Perhaps Bogost is right when he contends “surely every sect and creed will be able to read their favorite meaning onto the game.” […] Thematic ambiguity invites interpretation, but when I play Journey, I see specificity. From where I sit, Journey is the most vivid and succinct expression of dharma and its underlying philosophy of liberation that I’ve encountered in popular culture. More specifically, Journey elegantly conveys sapta bodhyanga, or the Seven Factors of Enlightenment in Buddhist philosophy.

If you’re still craving more, Kyle Carpenter has curated a collection of Journey travelogues at Medium Difficulty. And then there is Journey Stories, a tumblr dedicated to written and visual fan tributes to the game.

Speaking of fan tributes, Mike Kayatta has gone ahead and penned a complete Mass Effect fanfiction for The Escapist– in Choose Your Own Adventure style.

Dan Bruno discusses at length why Mass Effect 3’s conclusion is unsatisfactory. Et tu, Bruno?

Segueing back to the part of the internet not dedicated to effecting masses, Tommy Rousse writes on the relationship between “the miniature” and the player:

The RTS is a fetishization of cybernetic control. It is a simulacra of the modern Western military paradigm of command and control; sometimes a more efficient one, sometimes less. It almost always privileges positions of management and control over the autonomy of the individual.

John Carter McKnight reveals how the concept of “the magic circle” is now outmoded and problematic, creating situations in which game rules trump real world decency. Lana Polansky tries a hand at defining the value of game criticism. And Jason Johnson laments how hard gaming life is out there for an ichthyophobe.

Two great interviews also popped up this week. Simon Carless sat down with Eric Caoili and JC Fletcher while John Walker strapped Jim Rossignol to a torture chair and submitted him to questioning:

RPS: How many DRMs will your game include?

Rossignol: When we’ve worked out what the most controversial DRM solution is, we’ll use that. I was thinking some kind of red hot robotic desktop hook that removes the eyes of legitimate users, but leaves pirates unscathed?

Lastly, this week also sees the conclusion (for now) to Brendan Keogh’s Minecraft permadeath experience, Towards Dawn. Go on, try to read the last entry without getting a bit misty-eyed.

That is all for this week’s roundup. And if you have made it this far, then you are a real trooper. Join us next week where I promise we won’t actually be doing a GameInformer countdown. That is, unless you don’t tweet and email us your recommendations, because then we’ll have no choice.

We start off by checking in with our friend Sebastian Alvarado, who is onto the second installment of his Gamasutra blog series on nanotechnology in videogames.

Articles on Dear Esther are still trickling in, but Tommy Rousse came out on top this week with a strong critique of the “walk’em up”’s shortcomings: “While Dear Esther does a superb job of conveying a sense of place on the island, it makes very little effort to create a sense of embodiment.”

Meanwhile, thatgamecompany’s latest PSN release, Journey, has garnered some interesting responses for its singular aesthetic and themes. Jamie Love praises the game’s unique take on multiplayer:

Journey cuts [...] to the raw source of motivation and hope we find in others, to the fact that our existence on its own is not enough to necessitate that we continue for our own sake. Certainly we live for ourselves to project strength and obey the demands of our DNA, but beneath that skin, we always hope for others to connect and share the journey with, strangers that we’ll never really know, but who when you strip external constructions away, are perhaps exactly the same as us.

Over at Moving Pixels, Scott Juster echoes Love’s sentiments, saying the game gave him “a fleeting glimpse at a kinder, more optimistic side of random matchmaking [...] It was a short, but refreshing trip that left me with a pleasant thought: given the right context, gamers (and people in general) aren’t all that bad.”

Bart Simon is more wary, suggesting the game’s design –and the words of its lead designer– reveal a dangerously paternalistic attitude:

If players have a yen to slaughter rather than help each other then it is not because the ludic abstraction makes us a blank slate of stimulus-response (psychologists rankle me more than moralistic game designers I think) but because we have cultural predispositions for what to do with these machines and these virtual worlds that have been building up layer by layer over many years… the goal of design should not be to somehow get underneath, or behind or above these dispositions but to meet them head on… to reflect them perhaps, or to make them an object of conversation and reflection. But to deny them? To only allow them to perform warm fuzzies and group hugs? That’s SoCal New Agism for you… but it’s also a Clockwork Orange.

If you have been steadfastly avoiding game publications these last few weeks, you may have missed the growing torrent of discussion regarding Mass Effect 3’s controversial endings. The Mary Sue’s Becky Chambers has a fairly spoiler-free primer if you wish to better understand the fan perspective.

And two other talented writers, Valerie Valdes and Kate Cox, offered up their views, placing the game in the context of older media. Valdes begins by discerning between “primary” and “secondary” epics and how Mass Effect 3 fulfills the description of a primary epic in the classical sense. Meanwhile, Cox likens the story to mythology in the broad sense and Christian narratives in particular, suggesting the ending has frustrated players because it cannot be interpreted in the same literal fashion as the rest of the franchise:

[T]hat it is where we find Shepard in the end: on the plane of mythology, removed from the plane of men. And that is also where many players feel they lose Mass Effect, because until the final moment, the plane of men has been the only ground the game knows.

Lastly on the subject of Mass Effect, I don’t know who this pretty lady is, but a few of you wrote in recommending this link as a capstone to the discussion: “In which Squaresoft wrote a Bioware game.”

While most of the ludodecahedron spent the week effecting masses and taking journeys, a few more interesting discussion topics sneaked in. Jamin Warren sat down with Jesper Juul on the subject of failure in games. Nightmare Mode’s Johnny Kilhefner took a trip to the Smithsonian Art of Games exhibit. And Radiator’s Robert Yang attended Sleep No More in New York City and wrote at length how the interactive experience relates itself to games.

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen me refer to myself as the Fourth Horsewoman of the Ludodecahedronpocalypse. I’m not sure who the first or third ones are, but the second is Maggie Greene, Kotaku veteran and academic, who responds to Christian Higley and Brendan Keogh’s noteworthy posts from the week with some much-needed perspective on the subject of “making it” as a game journalist (or in any field). Highly recommended for any apocalypse you are attempting to bring about.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s offerings as much as I have! Remember that recommending your own or another writer’s work here on TWIVGB is only a tweet or an email away. Seriously, your submissions are our sustenance. Feed me, Skinner!

At the GameChurch blog, Drew Dixon talks about the ‘idealistic world of videogame pacifists’ and ends up discussing those who play games in strange, alternative ways.

Speaking of weird alternative ways to play, Sean Sands at Gamers With Jobs dares to ask the question of players, “Could you be playing it wrong?” and it’s not necessarily such a bad thing to ask.

At the ‘Empty Wallet Gamer’ tumblr, Shawn Trautman ruminates on  ‘The future of DLC’, having never actually bought any himself. His point is tied in with game preservation efforts, and discusses how, having just bought 2004’s number 1 shooter Halo 2 (props to Shawn, Halo 2 is a personal favourite), it made him wonders what will happen when DLC becomes unsupported.

At the consistently excellent Play The Past blog, Rebecca Mir talks ‘Guns, Germs and Horses’, looking at Civilization: Colonisation and “how cultural influence and exchange is (and isn’t) represented in the game.”

Our newest addition to the stable, Johnny Kilhefner wrote this week for Nightmare Mode about something he calls ‘Darwinian Difficulty in Metal Gear Solid 3’. It’s a theory about the relationship between the player and the character, one based on torture and difficulty, and well worth reading.

Also one of our own, Eric Swain at The Game Critique has been writing a ton about Genre this week. The introduction to his series is here, and he really needs to make an index page for them all, or something.

Chris Lepine of The Artful Gamer wrote a little piece this week, provoked by the Independent Games Festival that ran throughout GDC. It’s called ‘The Indie Ethics Problem’:

Fez precipitated a major ethical crisis at the GDC this year, when Phil Fish entered his game for a second time into the same competition purely out of self-interest (Note: I am not singling out Phil Fish – he seems like a decent enough guy, I’m just using this as a recent example). His appearance in Indie Game: The Movie similarly reveals the indie games’ industry’s sad history of shameless self-promotion, endless navel gazing and cult-of-the-celebritization.

Tom Francis (who I had the pleasure and good fortune of meeting at GDC) reproduces his short talk from the Independents Games Summit on ‘How To Explain Your Game To An Asshole’, and there’s good stuff in there for writers, players, critics and anyone who wants to explain games to people:

“This isn’t really about indie versus mainstream, or arthouse versus commercial. It’s just about communicating efficiently enough that everyone who would like your game ends up playing it. I think it’s a shame when that doesn’t happen.”

The penultimate piece, and certainly the most creative this week, is this beautiful pictorial review of Journey by Games.on.net’s Tim Colwill. Indescribable.

And lastly for the week (I did say it was TWIVGB lite!) is from Dan Golding’s incredible Game On blog, which has lately been churning out fascinating and insightful pieces. This week Golding scoured the Australian Parliament Hansard Record to tease out what Aussie politicians think and say about games. But it’s not what you think – it’s actually quite surprising.

And that’s a wrap! I’m off to go and enjoy the rapidly diminishing remains of my weekend as much as I can while trying to avoid the harsh rays of a cruel sun.

It’s been called visually stunning, a revelation in character writing and the greatest movie ever played. Regardless, the real meat of the Uncharted 2: Among Thieves experience isn’t in the game at all, but in the writing surrounding it.

In “Naughty Dog’s Lemarchand Defines Uncharted’s Heritage,” Leigh Alexander examined Naughty Dog’s desire to “capture and reinvent the spirit of the pulp action genre;” the same well from which Indiana Jones sprang. What they ended up with was a game with a story we’ve all seen in one shape or another: Treasure hunter searches for mythical treasure through a revolving door of double-crosses and ancient landscapes. No biggie. In fact, the story of Among Thieves is neither remarkable nor does it try to be. Alexander’s piece sheds light on Among Thieves writer Amy Henning’s prep work involving classic pulp fiction stories and established conventions such as “running, jumping, bare-fisted brawls and chases.”

As Michael “Brainy Gamer” Abbott sees it in “Long Live the Author“, Uncharted 2 “isn’t a question of core design, but a question of quality,” insisting that making a game relying on “’30s serial action adventure movie tropes” must be done with “plenty of style, panache and Hollywood production values to carry you over all the obvious pitfalls.” Additionally, the characters have to feature naturally smart dialogue, gameplay directly connected to the story and, above all, enjoyable play mechanics. “If this all sounds terribly formulaic, that’s because it is,” said Abbott.

Formula can be the paint-by-numbers template that makes your project look wholly derivative, or it can be the sturdy container that holds something special. You’d be hard pressed to identify a single genuinely original aspect of Micheal Curtiz’s Casablanca. Dozens of movies have told similar stories with similar characters. What elevates Casablanca is the way each of its elements: cinematography, music, performances, screenplay — so clearly surpasses the pedestrian work of other similar films.

Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat also spoke with Richard Lemarchand about the research undertaken for Among Thieves, where Lemarchand looked to classic heroes like Robert Louis Stevenson, Robinson Crusoe, Doc Savage and Tintin for inspiration. In some ways it’s this classic sense of heroics that makes Nathan Drake instantly appealing. But, “Dude Raider he is not,” says Ian Miles Cheong in his piece for Hellmode, “Ancient Temples to Ice Caves: Discovering Uncharted“. “Unlike Lara Croft, Nathan Drake is a multidimensional character — one full of personality,” Cheong says. Drake is questionably moral, undeniably heroic and absolutely relatable. Love him or hate him, we can all agree that Nate and his adventures if nothing else. “More than just a simple treasure hunter,” says Cheong, “Drake was apparently gifted with the skills of an assassin (albeit a slightly clumsy one) who could have given Batman a run for his money; he didn’t have to resort to stupid tricks or a tool-belt full of toys. When his fists weren’t enough to do the talking, a gun could open diplomatic channels.”

Between the classic adventure elements, everyman quality of Nathan Drake and cinematically executed gameplay, Among Thieves Uncharted 2 positioned itself as the definitive bargaining chip for PS3 owners, one that didn’t begin with “Metal Gear” or end with “Solid.” Metacritic named Among Thieves the most critically acclaimed game of 2009 with a score of 96 out of 100; IGN gave it game of the year and a near perfect score of 9.5; and most every publication you could think of drooled over its blockbuster production values. But beneath the surface there were more interesting opinions bubbling, with some critics unafraid to toss the critical fat on in the fire.

The Little Things

It’s “The Little Things” that intrigue Michael Abbott: from the subtle changes in “Nate’s Theme” from first to second game, nods to classic serial adventure tropes, naturalistic facial expressions, witty banter and character chemistry. Similarly, in Alex Raymond’s review for Game Critics, she cites the attention to detail as key to propelling the game to “masterpiece” status. Trains creak before crashing down and stones and bridges wobble and then crumble, all serving to move the game forward at a “breathless pace.”

In “The Minimalism of Uncharted 2,” however, Mitch Krpata attributes the notes that aren’t played as the reason for Among Thieves‘ success. The intuitive analog stick to run control scheme, the lack of a crouch button and the subtle auto-assist when climbing are a few of the small things Krpata feels helped rather than hindered the game. Naughty Dog’s ability to leave out exceptional but unnecessary components is a rare quality in all art forms, let alone video games. He likens this to an imagined developer who makes an awesome water effect and decides to “put water freaking everywhere.” Uncharted 2 is different. It doesn’t milk its golden moments dry, but practices minimalism over obnoxiousness.

Chris Breault fails to find Krpata’s minimalism, speculating in “Don’t Call Uncharted 2 a Film” that “maybe Uncharted is aimed at Alzheimer’s patients.” Blowing up trucks? Yawn. Falling off cliffs? “It’s the Uncharted handshake.” When it comes to the little things like planning, choreography and stunt work that give action films their blockbuster quality, “Uncharted 2 has all the charm of an assembly line.” Tristan Kalogeropoulos’s “Beyond Cinematic,” however, congratulates the marriage of cutscene and gameplay as “a cohesive mix of passive and active storytelling.” The in-game characters agree with the cutscene characters without the “dissonance” often observed from cutscene to game.

What’s In a Character?

Alex Raymond writes that “characterization is one of the areas where Among Thieves is head and shoulders above nearly every other major game out there.” “If everything comes together just right, Nathan Drake could very well be heading into the upper echelons of videogame character fame,” says Sinan ’shoinan’ Kubba in “Drake, The Icon.” He makes an interesting point of Nate’s “everyman” quality, pointing out traditional video game icons such as Link, Solid Snake and Lara Croft, each of whom standout by their silhouette alone. Nathan Drake doesn’t standout at all. He’s just some guy. Several notable games journos had polarized takes on the character of Nathan Drake. In his article “Extra Punctuation: Uncharted 2,” Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw sheds light on Drake’s motivations of greed, his depravity and the “no prisoners” attitude he showed his enemies by comparing him to the ideal Indiana Jones. In his 300 Word Review, Charles J. Pratt points out that “There’s a reason that Indiana Jones uses a whip: it is very hard to feel for the plucky, underdog hero if he spends most of his time mowing people down with an automatic weapon.” Nate’s film counterpart, Indiana Jones, relinquishes vital bits of character through sequences showing him flustered at a particularly striking student’s advances, condescending to authority and fumbling over writing on the chalkboard in front of his class.

Meanwhile, Snake Link Sonic finds Drake’s adventure more National Treasure than Indiana Jones, going so far as to say relating Among Thieves to Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones is “just the game becoming self-victimizing.” Breault thinks Nate merely spends “a lot of time commenting on women’s asses as they go up ladders.”. Banter during the adventure and action segments allows the player to get to know the characters and portrays a sense of camaraderie (or rivalry) as appropriate. And Kalogeropoulos feels that “spending time” with the characters reveals a great deal of their past relationships and personalities. Cheong believes that while Drake is “in it for the loot,” his appeal is that of a regular guy rather than a Superman.

Scott Juster’s take on Drake in the first Uncharted still holds true for the second. In “Nathan Drake in: The Curse of Ludonarrative Dissonance!” Juster contends the gameplay–Drake who slaughters hundreds throughout the game–is at odds with the cutscene–Drake, an “everyman” hero.

In “The Fallacy of Choice” Justin Keverne puts “everyman” Drake under the microscope: “A real ‘everyman’ would have fallen to his death within the first few minutes,” he sayd, commenting on the audience’s longing for a relatable hero but a hero nonetheless. It’s precisely this paradox that make Nathan Drake the character he is, and the game makes no bones about it.

Borut Pfeifer’s “The Spatially Driven Story” concludes that the flow of the game’s locations is symbolic of Drake’s internal struggles–rather than making Drake simply a character that “is,” the developers Naughty Dog made his internal conflict visible through external motivators. Pfeifer points out that “the purpose the other characters serve isn’t to bring you to a specific location, it’s to change Drake’s motivation for going somewhere.” He doesn’t just do things because the game needs him to; he does them because he is manipulated into doing so, whether for the right or wrong reasons. “Story elements that at first glance seem like they are there to superficially highlight exotic locales serve a deeper purpose to communicate internal character motivation.” Regardless of his internal and external conflicts, the classic hero in Nate always comes out of a predicament unaffected, whether it’s his ex and current fling facing execution right in front of his eyes or a mythical beast stalking him. These events don’t show the emotional weight we saw, say, Snake take on when Meryl was picked apart by Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid. Though Uncharted is precisely the kind of game that calls for this kind of impenetrability, Croshaw “want[s] to see more of Nathan Drake than a wisecracking bubble that grunts a lot.”

Uncommon Women

Perhaps it’s this same sentiment applied to the Lara Crofts of gaming that prompted Naughty Dog to approach the female leads in a less cliché way than other games. Raymond highlights the characters of Elena and Chloe as two examples of remarkable writing of independent female characters who don’t stoop to stereotypes so present in game portrayals of women. Brinstar, writing for the Border House, examines the “interesting, believable, three-dimensional personalities” of Elena and Chloe. Rather than plot devices designed to push the player forward, they have their own motivations which intermingle and entice/intrigue/mystify a curious Drake. On the other hand, Snake Link Sonic acknowledges the strong female characterization but felt that “the game would have functioned just fine without [Chloe].” G. Christopher Williams’s “Sorry, But Our Princess Wants To Be in Another Castle” likens Chloe to the more provocative side which Elena lacks, using sex to play the game from Nate to Flynn as her assets allow — an effective way to piss off the player with an emotional connection to Drake. At first seeing her as a princess in need of rescue, Williams found surprisingly found Chloe “is one ‘princess’ that has no interest in being saved.”

Playing a Movie: The Cinematic Action Genre

Practically every critic has gushed over the game’s visual production values. “You’ll spend much of your time playing Uncharted 2 with mouth agape, staring slack jawed at the glorious vistas spread out before you,” said Susan Arendt in her review for The Escapist Magazine. Former Editor-in-Chief of Kotaku Brian Crecente commented that “More than most games Uncharted 2 looks like a movie.” In “How We Talk About Games: Graphics,” Grayson Davis reveals how in-the-rut our collective descriptive vehicle is when it comes to discussing visuals. Picking apart the Among Thieves reviews from IGN, 1UP, Giant Bomb and Eurogamer, Davis concludes that graphic writing still “sound[s] like they’re writing for the back of the box.”

Snake Link Sonic wrote his piece without even playing the game, but instead by watching a complete YouTube play through. In “Values and Characteristics of the Cinematic Action Genre” Michael Clarkson attempts to define the values found in such interactive films or as he puts it, “Cinematic Action” games. Cinematic action characteristics include filmic realism, seamlessness, a developer-controlled narrative and emotional engagement. “Uncharted represents not a new kind of game unto itself but an exemplary actualization of certain values in game design,” game design that the HD generation is capable of producing effectively and possibly on-par with motion pictures. According to Jorge Albor, the Hitchcockian use of set pieces inch it along the gap between game and film.

“If a game features a well defined protagonist then the notion of including the option to behave in a way that goes against the nature of that protagonist is foolish,” says Keverne. “The very appeal of such a character is that they are already defined, often as a heroic character. Why introduce the seconding guessing and evaluating that comes from the inclusion of choice?”

Like the characterization, the gameplay also polarizes people who either feel immersed or disengaged by it. Snake Link Sonic perceives the comparison to Tomb Raider as an unfair one representative of the lack of games of its kind, and that Among Thieves more closely resembles Prince of Persia in terms of its linearity. Williams, meanwhile, finds the dissonance from Tomb Raider jarring, particularly the laid-on thick gunplay in favor of exploration. This same gunplay Pratt finds “unimaginative” and lacking the strategy of other third-person shooters like Gears of War: “It’s the mix of the movie and the game that makes Uncharted a little unsettling.” On a similar note, Brad Galloway’s Game Critics review penalized Among Thieves for being “a jack-of-all-trades and master of none.” While Galloway concedes that the production values are top-notch and if the player is in the mood for a pot-boiler it alone would suffice, he feels the all too often gunfights, lack of direction and simplistic puzzles bring the game down.

“Nearly anyone playing Uncharted 2 wasn’t in it for the shooting,” says Gameranx writer Matthew Stewart in his article “Uncharted Series: The Gameplay Gets in the Way of the Story.” Instead of the gameplay serving the story, Stewart feels it did the opposite: “The obstacles in the game can be like someone who knocks the book I’m engrossed with out of my hands.” He illustrates his point with comparisons to games such as Ninja Gaiden, Quake 3 and World of Warcraft in which the story is created by the player rather than pre-determined by the developer. Crecente talks about the narrative pushing the ludic qualities of Among Thieves the way a good book makes you rush to the next page.

Daniel Bullard-Bates calls Uncharted 2 the “best movie-based video game of all time.” Breault, however, challenges these highly regarded movie qualities: “as much as Uncharted 2 imitates the movie aesthetic, it remains a game; if you judge it on the same terms you would a film’s narrative, it comes up short.” Hammering the point, Breault compares two similar chase sequences in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Among Thieves. In the former, he notes how the editing breaks up the action by alternating perspectives among all parties involved, giving the cannon fodder a touch of humanity and allowing for some hilarious gags. Among Thieves‘ chase sequence, however, simply sees Drake trading gunfire with depersonalized moving targets, blowing up trucks until the entire scene becomes an exercise in redundancy.

Abbott’s “On Pace” article uses his stage director experience as a lens through which to gauge the pacing of Uncharted 2. “Pacing in games is an intricate balancing act,” says Abbott; “And Uncharted 2 manages it better than any narrative game I can think of.” Abbott notes a “dynamic control” of pacing not seen in theater or film by allowing the character the freedom to slow down the pace or engage the game at full-throttle.

“…Uncharted 2 is a successful game because it doesn’t try to box outside its weight,” Abbott writes. “It’s a ripping adventure that makes good on its wisely limited ambitions….[Among Thieves] functions beautifully as both story and storyteller. It’s quite possible to see this distinguishing feature of games as no less compelling than their ability to immerse us in an emergent play-driven narrative.” And isn’t that why we play videogames in the first place?