For starters we have a few new responses to Jesse Schell’s presentation that popped up this week, most notably Jim Rossignol from Rock, Paper Shotgun and duo Annie Wright/Kirk Hamilton from Gamer Melodico.

By far the most talked about game this week was Heavy Rain. Opinions are all over the place and we can only be thankful that it hasn’t gotten bloody. Michael-the Brainy Gamer-Abbott summed up the major conversation points. Brad Gallaway explains the effect spoilers have on the experience. Shoinan from the You Have Lost! blog explores the dichotomies existent in Heavy Rain: the Player vs. Director aspect of the action and the Win or Choose design setup regarding play. Denis Farr of the Vorpal Bunny Ranch explores the major theme of fathers in the game on his own blog and the extraneous character of Madison at The Border House. Kirk Hamilton rages at the game’s faults that irked him to no end, including the controls, while Mitch Krpata defends them in ‘What’s wrong with Heavy Rain’s controls?’ I think, however, I will give the last word to Julian Murdoch from the Gamers with Jobs who states:

A year from now, when the initial bloom is off the rose of this game, and we poke holes at its flaws, I believe designers will look back at these three things and say, “Those were craftsman at the top of their game.”

Two bloggers dust off Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney for examination. Amanda Lange looks at the different design elements and how they are entertaining. Harry Milonas looks to an iconic tune of the courtroom.

Several bloggers advocate looking at video games through a different medium’s critical lens. None of them advocate movies, at least not this week. Lyndon of Digital Kicks looks at game narrative as one would look at narrative in a painterly medium and Jorge Albor examines certain games through the lens of a performance medium. Kirk Hamilton (once again) writes an extension of Chris Dahlen’s proposition of looking at games as if they were music. He ends his post with:

When addressing a medium as immature and constantly fluctuating as games, we would be foolish to focus on any single yardstick. We need a multitude! Music, literature, design, architecture, storytelling, dramatic performance, and yes, cinema – all of those forms have been in existence for far longer than what we now think of as “games.” We simply can’t view games in terms of any one pre-existing form, nor can we pretend that gaming is mature enough to be criticized entirely on its own terms.

Before charting off, our own Ben Abraham posted about the use of postmodern-style unreliability in narrator and narrative in games.

And in a switch Ben sends me a post by Robert Yang on the expressive potential of Half-Life 2 character models and the importance of bridging more than just the visual uncanny valley.

Last week L.B. Jeffries went back to analyzing multiplayer and took a look at the map structure in Modern Warfare 2 while this week he turned his critical eye to video game review ideology.

Jonathan McCalmont from Futurismic.com looks at racial essentialism as an out of date sci-fi genre trope and its use in Mass Effect 2.

Troy Goodfellow takes a gander at some of the literary adaptations video games have tried.

James Madigan over at Gamasutra gives the most thorough and scientific reasoning why it’s best to stick to your friend’s list.

The boys over at the Experience Points podcast discuss the use of examining the history of video game design as lessons for the future.

G. Christopher William over at Popmatters says, “Sorry Dante, but your princess is in another castle.”

Nick from Before Game Design examines Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and explains its view of globalization.

Daniel Bullard Bates from Press Pause to Reflect writes on what type of foundation the inevitable Bioshock 3 will have to stand on based on the efforts of the first two.

Gunthera1 looks at ‘Game difficulty settings.’ This is a post where the discussion in the comments really shines, so check them out.

Grayson Davis looks at Tropico 3 and other management games effect his emotions via the ‘humanizing power of numbers.’

At Vector Poem they look at ‘Lessons from Doom‘.

And finally, in a post that slipped under the radar from a few weeks ago, Spencer Greenwood came back out of the aether, proving he’s still got the writing chops and using them to prove the disingenuous arguments of “an irrelevant reactionary”.

A reminder that for all TWIVGB posts on Critical Distance comments are turned off by default to encourage discussion on the original entries, and we can always be reached via the contact page.

First up this week, Michael Clarkson makes a case for Santa Destroy as a valuable and necessary part of the original No More Heroes, and it’s omission from the sequel is all the more regrettable.

Zeke Virant is a new blogger who wrote in to let us know about a piece on ‘Expanding Sound in Videogame Narratives’ which sounds a lot like the sort of thing I was into with my undergrad thesis from 2008.

Justin Keverne writes about Mass Effect 2 this week in ‘living with your mistakes’; Radek Koncewicz also writes about the game, describing it as ‘A few steps forward and a few steps back’.

Kotaku goes in search of the Videogame Auteurs whose existence is still hotly debated.

Brendan Keogh, a Brisbane based blogger writes about the old whipping-horse that is the ludology/narratology debate (or stalemate, as Keogh describes it). He suggests, ‘don’t ask what narrative can do for games, but what games can do for narrative.’

Jamie Madigan takes inspiration from Penny Arcade and asks, ‘Why do we love genres so much?’

Joana Caldas writing for The Border House on Local vs Online multiplayer has some of the best use of captioning I’ve ever seen.

I’m sure by now most have heard about or watched the DICE talk given by Jesse Schell but David Sirlin had a response, wondering whether external rewards are as unanimously positive as Schell proposes. Following on from both, Dan Lawrence thinks a bit about the psychology of game design, inspired by both Schell and Sirlin’s comments, in a post titled ‘behaviourist game design’. UK based doctoral researcher Mitu Khandaker also has something to add to the commentary/responses to Schell’s talk, extrapolating some of the previous ideas into a series of possible futures for games. Lastly for this particular discussion, Jesper Juul has some thoughts on Schells’ talk with some excellent concrete examples that problematise a future where every action is tied to some kind of external reward. Juul:

A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and started drawing less.

Also from the recent DICE conference is this piece by Brandon Sheffield covering a panel on racial diversity in games, a talk that will also be given again at GDC in a couple of weeks. It’s a talk that I plan to attend.

The Independent has a take on Heavy Rain comparing it to previous similar efforts in games, such as Facade, and Anthony Burch at Destructoid suggests that, in Heavy Rain’s case at least, Ebert was right.

This week Chris Dahlen made explicit the connections that Leigh Alexander has made previously, namely that games are perhaps more like music than they are like film.

Kirk Hamilton wrote about open world games in ‘When the world changes’.

Coleen Hannon at Gamers With Jobs writes of being ‘Thumbless in Seattle’, which unfortunately involves less Tom Hanks and more disabling injuries.

Lastly, here’s a cool thing and some creative criticism for you – it’s totally possible to use more than just essays to critique games. As ‘Passage in 10 seconds’ shows, you can even use other games.

And now, onto more serious matters, and Eric Swain has continued his tireless efforts of scouring the videogame blogosphere for our collective benefit. In a yin-yang pairing, The Game Overthinker proudly proclaims “I heart Bayonetta”, while Gunthera1 writes at The Borderhouse after having played the demo of the game with some friends and concludes that “the game is the perfect visual example of male gaze”.

Eric Swain also had a reaction to the FFVIII “Squall’s Dead” theory, which I encountered for the first time this week, comparing the idea to a similar reading of Mulholland Drive. (Confession time: I’ve never seen Mulholland Drive.) Swain also asked this week, ‘Where is the last 1/3^rd of Brutal Legend?’

G Christopher Williams brings his best game this week with two pieces at PopMatter’s Moving Pixels blog; “Is Suda 51 the Alfred Hitchcock of Video Games?” as well as ‘How games might challenge the tyranny of authorship’

Jim Rossignol had a remarkably busy week, announcing his follow-up book to 2008’s This Gaming Life. I for one can’t wait for the as-yet untitled work. Rossignol also talked about online communities, the site Rock Paper Shotgun as a community, and a bit about how the infamous Sunday Papers regular feature ties into and reinforces the community.

Kirk Hamilton finds out what it would be like “If my games could talk” with important implications for any backlog of games.

With Bioshock 2 and other sequels having now had time to arrive and settle, sequels in general became a hot topic this week with both Mitch Krpata  and Michael Abbott talking about the proclivity of the industry towards game sequels. Krpata’s piece, ‘Why we need sequels’, appeared just hours before Michael Abbott’s ‘Sequel 101’ so you’d be forgiven for thinking they were working from the same playbook. As always, great minds think alike.

In ‘On my shoulder whispering’ Abbott begins with an exploration of the classical roots of modern tales of heroism and conflict, and ends up talking about how Bioshock 2 resonated with him on the themes of fatherhood.

David Carlton has been thinking about the changing dynamic that spoilers have with respect to shorter, independent games.  It made me rethink my own policy, as it is something that I wrote about earlier this week for my own online diary/blog.

Chris Livingston wrote about Stalker: Call of Pripyat this week, recounting an exciting dynamic and emergent story. I actually had a very similar experience at a similar point in the game, having been playing it this week myself (and it is glorious).

Mike Schiller wrote about ‘Videogames & art as inspired by Autechre’.

Jamin Brophy-Warren editor of Killscreen Magazine wrote at Killscreen on Good about how games are one of the worst media industries for accessibility.

I want to know when The Atlantic gained such a stable of excellent bloggers that talk about videogames. This week A. Serwer wrote an entry called ‘Welcome To Rapture’ and Evan Narcisse hit a homerun with “Wrex in Effect, or, Deep Space and the Negro/Injun/Krogan Problem” (thanks to Kate Simpson for the latter article).

A reminder that for all TWIVGB posts on Critical Distance comments are turned off by default to encourage discussion on the original entries, and we can always be reached via the contact page.

As a response to some of the things that came out of the conference, Corvus Elrod talks about how dictating what games aren’t through manifestos, etc, can only reduce their cultural relevance. But if you’re looking for a more satirical take, you really can’t go past Matthew Burns’ “The new debate on games as ert” (sic). In the same week he also comes back to finish his series for Edge Online about QA testing ‘In the Dungeon’ with parts two, three and four.

Another new blog began its life this week, by one Amanda Cosmos, and her first post talks about the Global Game Jam and her team’s game ‘Quest for Stick’.

Michael Abbott writes about Mass Effect 2 and what it says about the evolving nature of videogame genres. Abbott:

Bioware knows what we who write about games ought to know better. Genre classifications are essentially meaningless, and it’s time to drop them and move on.

It’s a sentiment echoed to some degree by Jim Rossignol in Rock Paper Shotgun’s latest podcast, episode 38, and it includes a great contextualised discussion of game genres throughout history.

Gus Mastrapa at Wired’s GameLife blog says ‘21st-Century Shooters Are No Country for Old Men.’ At a mere 23, I think even I count as old in this scenario.

Via fellow blogosphere overviewer and synthesiser Erik Hanson comes a tale of ‘Myst as mythology of the hyperlink’.

LB Jeffries adds to the previous week’s discussion of No More Heroes 2, picking out some of its problems. Also on NMH2, Chris Dahlen writes for his Edge column that what the sequel is missing is really ‘the loser mechanic’ from the original.

Denis Farr this week examined the rather baffling choice Bioware made with regard to male-male relationships in Mass Effect 2. Farr highlights a quote from executive producer Ray Muzyka in which he explains the choice to limit any and all Male commander Shepard’s to an essentially straight male role. As Farr notes,

This tells me that I can create my Shepard, but he or she isn’t mine, actually.

Grayson Davis uses a discussion of Uncharted 2 to argue quite convincingly that our vocabulary for discussing videogame graphics remains an ephemeral, hard-to-pin-down thing. Davis wonders,

…why can I quote decade-old reviews of a game that’s only distantly comparable to Uncharted 2 and find the exact same statements, almost verbatim, that I find in today’s criticism? These statements aren’t wrong, but they’re shamefully insufficient.

Peter Kirn at CDM runs down the new music based game ‘Chime’ that I’ve been hearing good things about. The game is also part of a charity based collective that aims to raise funds for children in need.

After a negative gamer piece early in the week explaining how difficult the Bioshock 2 hacking mini-game is for people with colourblindness, Dan Griliopoulos (who is colourblind himself) writes about the issue for Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

And lastly, Nicholas Shurson formerly of the Form8 blog has started The Game Journal, hoping to attract a mature audience interested in reading about and talking about videogames. This week he’s written about the The Beatles: Rock Band in ‘Come Together’, the second post named for a Beatles song we’ve mentioned in as many weeks.

This week Evan Stubbs finishes his three part series of musings on online digital distribution for games.

Daniel Bullard-Bates at Press Pause to Reflect discusses the open world genre in ‘If this is an open world why are all the doors closed?’ Its title reminded me of an older post by Alec Meer at Rock Paper Shotgun, his ode to a “Locked Door”.

At a brand new videogame blog called Post-Hype, Chris Breault asserts that the oft applied metaphor for comparisons with Uncharted 2, that is that it’s like a film, is inaccurate. In fact, he says, ‘Don’t call Uncharted 2 a film’ at all.

David Carlton has been thinking about children’s and adolescent literature and comparing/contrasting the features of that genre with videogames aimed at children and teens. Like his previous application of the fiction/non-fiction literary categories to videogames, The Beatles: Rock Band in particualar, I found Carlton’s line of reasoning both illuminating and persuasive.

At the Borderhouse this week, Rho writes about some of the issues you may have never had to worry about when using voice chat in online games, and Alex Horn discusses ‘Racism and Left 4 Dead 2’, accusing it of papering over important post-Katrina issues it should have addressed.

In ‘Proust was… a game designer?’ Mitu Khandaker explains some of her PhD research work on games in the context of a discussion of John Lehrer’s book “Proust was a neuroscientist”, addressing relationships between the arts (humanities) and sciences.

Michael Abbott talked about No More Heroes 2 this week, and resolved that sometimes better is worse. I have a mixed response to this one because he references a post from a few months ago (which he links to in this newest discussion) where he talked up the virtue of iterative design in the context of the Nintendo DS game Mario & Luigi: Bowsers’ Inside Story and states that at the time he was wrong. I think that’s an easy oversimplification and I can’t help but wonder what the real story is, even if Abbott himself can’t explicate it. It seems to me that whenever there’s (apparent) contradiction there’s almost always something interesting going on. On the same subject, Leigh Alexander wonders “if we’ve come to associate creativity with visible flaws?” and if so, that would go some ways to explaining Abbott’s response.

Kirk Hamilton wrote in to let readers know about the new blog he’s started recently with some fellow collaborators. It’s called ‘Gamer melodico’ and his post parodying both Mass Effect 2 and hipster memes gained him some serious popularity. I hope some of the newcomers decide to stick around.

Deirdre Kiai talked this week about a hunch she has that the target audiences for her kickstarter-funded indie game project Life Flashes By and the new apple device the iPad overlap somewhat. She says, “In fact, the intended audience for my game is a lot like the intended audience for the iPad in many ways. I’m not really making a game for gamers.”

Matthew Kaplan relates ‘How videogames helped me talk to my father.’

Matthew Burns-né-Wasteland writes about his time in the dungeon of game testing in which various favourable and not-so-favourable metaphors abound.

Alex Raymond explains what it takes for a game to feel “epic” for her, saying “in order to invoke that sought-after “epic” feeling, a game has to work to show me its scope.”

Jorge and Scott from Experience Points talk about the Halo games in ‘Halo Podcast Evolved‘ and Scott, who has been writing about The Beatles: Rock Band for a while now, talks about the game again in ‘Yesterday’. It’s not too far removed from some of the issues raised in David Carlton’s abovementioned post, discussing the historical aspects of the game.

And lastly, At HardCasual, someone named Greg realises his life has tragically been one long side quest all along.

SnakeLinkSonic wrote last week about the connection between Star Wars and Metal Gear. You didn’t see that one coming did you?

You probably also didn’t see Duncan Fyfe returning to videogame writing, and with a vengeance, with a new series of short stories about games and game culture. High Society is part one and it’s a must read for anyone interested in the development of serious alternative videogame criticism.

The twitter account ‘voracious_shit’ tweets about Sydney based studio “Team Bondi” and the Duke Nukem Forever sound-a-like story of developing the as-yet unreleased LA Noire. True Story: I once applied for a job at Team Bondi. I guess they missed out and by the sound of it I dodged a bullet.

From Matthew Gallant who sent this last week, ‘Love does not exist’, a long treatise on… all sorts of things over ten years of gaming.

Evan Stubbs writes about ‘Mining your habits for fun and profit’, another piece on digital distribution.

Steve Gaynor writes an apologia for the entertainment industries (including gaming) and in the comments has a long discussion with Jonathan Blow.

Daniel Bullard-Bates considers “Dante’s Inferno: A Failure on Two Fronts” and fellow blogger C.T. Hutt takes a rundown of our favourite videogame enemies, saying:

As gamers we want to square off against the most dangerous prey, humanity, but also want to believe that our characters are the good guys. As such, violence in action games is usually directed at enemies which walk and talk and fight like people, but for whom we feel little pity when blowing away en masse…

At The Border House, Cuppycake asks ‘Do Game Designers Have A Social Obligation?’

We have designed our games to be so inherently fit, muscular, white American, that it’s now an exception and a social point to include people outside our comfort zone.

Game Set Watch had an interview with Krystian Majewski this week about his amazing independent photo-based adventure game Trauma.

Chris Lepine at The Artful Gamer releases an interview he did with Jenova Chen at GDC09. I haven’t listened yet so I have no idea if it’s any good, but with people as smart as Lepine and Chen I feel safe recommending it.

In ‘Zompocalypse Now’, Mike Hanus examines the connection between the western film genre and modern apocalypse films (and by extension, games) suggesting that those like Fallout 3 are a continuation of the western genre:

I think that the current surge in apocalyptic movies and games is the second coming of the Western genre, and this accounts for this recent popularity. These games and movies share similar characteristics, they establish a frontier, they create a lawless world and they present the player/viewer with main characters who must create their own law and rules in a world gone half crazy.

Corvus Elrod discusses a particular fascination with the ease of pouncing on and killing guards in Assassins Creed 2. While on the subject, Richard Clark has some thoughts about the end of that game (with HUGE spoilers) and some of the things its provocative ending says about the audacity of the developers.

Lastly, Create Digital Motion talks about the upcoming GAMMAIV competition in ‘Indie Game as Visualist Event: As the Deadline Nears, One Button Inspires‘. Since I’m going to be in San Fran for GDC I’m definitely going to go to see all these excellent games.

A reminder that for all TWIVGB posts on Critical Distance comments are turned off by default to encourage discussion on the original entries, and we can always be reached via the contact page.

Jenn Frank of Infinite Lives writes one of the best explications of the importance of feminist readings of videogames in ‘Videogame feminist of the decade; or, when “You” is a girl’. It’s a hard one to sum up in the short blurb I usually do for these sorts of pieces, so here’s a big chunk that hopefully illustrates some of its more critical points. Frank is talking about Portal here, and the moment in which the player first observes their player-character through a portal.

And so now you say to yourself—maybe not aloud, maybe internally instead—“I wonder what I look like.” So you backtrack, trying to get a better look at yourself. And ever so carefully, you edge into your own line-of-sight. Surprise! You are a chick. THAT IS UNSETTLING. It’s unsettling even if you really are a chick, but probably also if you are a dude. Because, when you spatially align yourself so that you can observe your own avatar, she is staring off to her right or left through a space/time vortex, ostensibly gazing right back at you. And (this is the horrific part), you and she are standing in exactly the same spot and moment in space and time, eyeing each other. I don’t think there’s a stranger existential moment in the history of gaming.

Evan Stubbs writes at Red Kings Dream about ‘the future of digital distribution’. It’s a theme we’ve seen a couple of times this month, first turning up in LB Jeffries piece on the irresistible lure of steam sales, and then several times elsewhere. Rock Paper Shotgun also noted this week the coming of a possible ‘second hand market for downloaded games’. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

Latoya Peterson writing for The Borderhouse this week noted that ‘The Patriarchy Hurts Gamer Guys Too: The Rockstar Labor Controversy, Game Developer Wives and Work/Life Balance’. The most important idea being that while poor managerial practices (such as crunch) hurt everyone, men included; it doesn’t affect everyone equally and can have a worse detrimental impact on women in the game development workforce. Quotes from Erin Hoffman and Brenda Brathwaite appear in the article and both make appearances in the comments.

Daniel Bullard-Bates writes about Final Fantasy IV in a post titled ‘Real Sacrifice’.

Paul Bauman writes in to let us know about a piece he wrote on immersion and risk in ‘The Future: Thrown to the Wolves.’

Matt Gallant helpfully points us in direction of a piece by Jonathan Morin of Ubisoft Montreal about the importance of context in game design. He uses a touching story of the context around losing a baby and the insights it gave him, and moves onto context in sports games. It’s a very different, very intimate kind of post, but worth reading nonetheless.

Aaron Sexton lets us know that he has written about Bayonetta’s plot, which he feels has been overlooked in favour of discussion around the sexualised imagery in the game. Sexton unfavourably compares the game to the King Kong movie game tie in.

We mentioned Gaming Watch in last weeks post, and this week they discuss ‘A Slow News Day’ in which the enthusiast press echo chamber uncritically re-posts dubious polls from a UK website.

Loyal readers of TWIVGB may remember a post from the Lesbian Gamers website that discussed the nature of the Halo 3: ODST character of Dare, with the argument that the game presented a rather sexist depiction of her character. More recently, the author of the original post came across an alternative reading of the Dare character in an entry on the Halo wikia page called “Examination of Female Characters” and praised it for its thoughtful disagreement with the Lesbian Gamers original. My Xbox is currently dead, so I’m still waiting to play ODST, which is a real shame.

Rock Paper Shotgun’s Kieron Gillen and Quintin Smith have been playing the hex-grid turn-based indie game Solium Inferium, by the same solo developer who did the well received Armageddon Empires. This week saw the completion of a truly stunning series of running game diary posts that describe the game in all its glorious backstabbery and intrigue. It’s one of the best things RPS have done and a highly entertaining read.

Other readers that have gotten in touch this week to point us towards this piece by James Dilks at No Added Sugar asking ‘Do We Need Criticism?‘ to which my own response would be a resounding, Yes!

Stephen Locker is producing a series of video essays on ‘Games Worth Remembering’. If you’re at all familiar with the explosion of video essays issuing forth from the multitudes of film critics on the net then you’ll know the format. This piece on the PS3 game Flower combines video, music and voice-over in what is the first truly solid attempt (that I’ve encountered at least) at this format of games criticism. Ever since I encountered one about a horror film I’ve since forgotten, I’ve been waiting now for the first video essay about games to turn up. The first in this very promising series can also be found here.

Did we really get to the end without mentioning Dragon Age: Origins? Better fix that by linking to this piece by Dan Bruno – ‘Morrigan Disapproves’. The DA:O pool is safe for another week.

In the past two years we’ve seen critical writing about games explode from bloggers searching for a deeper meaning in AAA and indie games alike. Games are torn apart piecemeal in search of something that might confirm the artistic potential of the medium and signify progress. If nothing else, I hope this somewhat unique take on a Critical Compilation can serve as a reminder that in many ways this potential has already been realized. The importance of EarthBound isn’t found in its contributions to the development of the medium, but to the development of actual human beings who played it during their formative years.

“(I can sense … that … you have a controller … in your … hands … .)”

EarthBound seems designed to encourage its players to empathize with Ness, without necessarily inviting us to fully inhabit his character. The game breaks the fourth wall several times, but only so as to expand the stage so it can include us. As Jason Love writes in a comment on Emily Short’s blog, the player is given the role of “an uninvolved NPC, or God, or the incorporeal force of narrative inevitability, depending on how you’d like to interpret it.” In a comment on his blog, Darius Kazemi links EarthBound’s self-awareness of being a game to hypermediacy, a concept first developed by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin which suggests that “experience of the medium is itself an experience of the real.” The breaking of the fourth wall, in effect, does not harm our immersion, but enhances it.

Posting on the Something Awful forums, OzFactor makes an argument that the varying difficulty of the game is used to subtly convey meaning about Ness’s state of mind. Since a registration fee is required to view his posts, I have provided a slightly abridged version here:

These areas are hard because they’re supposed to be. Each one is a conscious plot decision; the department store and Moonside are so hard because Ness and Jeff are scared with their friend missing. They had just conquered so much in Threed, only to be separated once again. Twoson/Peaceful Rest/Happy Happy Village is actually the very best example in the game. Ness is leaving home for the first time and his courage is wavering. Luckily, he finds it again in a new friend. In Threed, the two come upon a town that not even Paula’s optimism can brighten up. It’s looking pretty bad until another friend arrives. After you get Poo, the next couple places are a breeze, like the Fourside sewer, Dalaam, and Scaraba. You even pretty much blast through the legendary Kraken, because now as a full team you are some pretty brave kids. Deep Darkness, however, is a pretty scary place, and the Stonehenge base is really the first full assault you have against the forces of Gigyas. They should both be putting the kids to the test. It’s pretty easy to understand why Magicant is so hard: Ness has to fight his demons, and he has to face them all alone. And in the end, the four are all alone, so completely removed from the world they know.

Matthew Gallant considers Ness’s family in-depth in Long Distance Love. He claims that “by wrapping your interactions with them in gameplay mechanics,” they are able to take on an importance to the player that mimics Ness’ reliance on them as a son. Matthew goes on to suggest that throughout the game “storytelling minimalism” is used expertly to manipulate us into relating with Ness, the most obvious example of this being the parents appearing as “‘empty vessels’ that are ready to be filled by the player’s imagination and expectations.”

And it’s Ian Bogost writing about the potential for fruitful exploration of classic consoles and expired platforms by developing new titles for them via, for example, the Virtual Console and XBLA’s Game Room. Bogost says, “I find myself once again hoping that Microsoft might open this channel to sell new games made for old systems.”

A quick plug for Sun B Kim’s “Design Play Blog” which is looking for help in translating English videogame design blogs into Korean. Kim has previously translated Critical Distance’s “GTAIV” critical compilation, as well as a number of other articles from other authors, so it’d be great if any of our readers could give him a hand.

There’s a bit of a meme going around the game blogosphere at the moment, and Denis Farr hops on the wagon with his post about his Shepherd in Mass Effect. The point is to “make sure people don’t forget that not everyone plays a default white male”.

Kate Simpson has long been known as the best blogger without a blog. However she’s got one now, and its initial offering is a fantastically well realised conversation about her “Commander A. Shepherd”, another offering in the Mass Effect ‘my Shepherd’ meme.

Lyndon Warren does not understand why people dislike Game of the Year awards and picking a “best” game out of the year’s crop. I added my own rationale for avoiding referring to a game as the ‘best’ in the comments, which are full of interesting points on both sides.

Michael Abbott writes about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, calling it ‘the wrong game’. This week, Abbott also started a new monthly column for Game Set Watch called “Abbott’s Habit” whose initial entry contrasted the imagined landscape of Demon’s Souls with the architecture very grounded in reality present in Assassin’s Creed 2.

Scott Juster calls the film Avatar a “colonial wet dream” and says Uncharted 2 is “the most dangerous game in recent memory”. Here’s why:

Uncharted 2 is a post-Quentin Tarantino response to Indiana Jones: Drake is a hero who indulges in both witty repartee and self-aware meta-comments; he is a struggling everyman and a sociopathic killer; he walks the line between affable bumbler and ruthless professional. The game features lush-looking environments and textured characters, but does so by enforcing the rigidity of film onto a medium based on malleability.

C.T. Hutt writes about controllers and how their development has influenced “The way we play.”

Eric Swain has been reading up on Bayonetta & sexuality, sending in this series of links containing various responses to the game. Tiffchow writes about “Sexuality as decoration vs. celebration” which is in turn responding to Leigh Alexander’s initial post about the game, “If you run out of ammo you can have mine.” William Huber also has a negative opinion of Alexander’s article, labelling it “the perpetuation of a misguided notion.” In related news, Iroquois Pliskin responds to Gus Mastrapa’s review of the game for Wired. Pliskin dissents from Mastrapa et al.’s view that paints Bayonetta as a dangerous employer of sexist imagery, saying

…the real perniciousness of sexualized images of women, to me, resides in the way that they warp our images of womanhood. The evil begins when a girl sees that image and says, that is what I am supposed to look like. I cannot imagine how anyone, even someone in the grasp of the body selfhatred industrial complex, could take these representations seriously. The faux verisimilitude of your standard issue of Cosmopolitan is far more harmful per capita than this ludicrous game.

Our final entry in the Bayonetta discussion is Chris Dahlen’s Edge Online column that talks about the imagery in the game while taking a look over the critical reception it has received. Don’t miss the comments thread on this one, either.

David Carlton sent us this link to Emily Short’s latest “Homer in Silicon” column “On Ageing”, which primarily discusses indie game The Graveyard.

Gamecritics’s Chi Kong Lui writes about ‘The fallacy of universal authorship in games’, inspired by a number of other authors’ comments primarily centred on the interactivity in Uncharted 2.

Michael Clarkson takes some time out of this week to talk about some of the immersion breaking moments he experienced in Assassins Creed II.

Richard Clark looks at “Five videogame moments that give me hope for the medium”, including two unexpected moments from the games Lucidity and Spider.

I don’t remember if we’ve linked to this before, but Dan Golding’s started a new project called ‘Gaming Watch’. Australian readers will be no doubt familiar with ‘Media Watch’ on ABC TV, and Golding’s aping of the format takes away nothing from his pointed observations into videogame demonization and misrepresentation in the media. Definitely one to watch going forwards.

And lastly for the weeks worth of writing, Sean Sands’ editorial at Gamers With Jobs is notable for coining the phrase the “Kotick Doctrine” when it comes to game publishing. That’s a keeper, that is. The piece also contains an excellent discussion of sustainability in game development and publishing.

Grayson Davis has two good reads from the past week-plus-change; the first on ‘The Players Role’ and the second on ‘Time and Games’ which looks like quite a thorough treatment of that particular aspect of game design. Here’s a quote to whet your appetite:

I think it’s fair to say that games are disproportionately concerned with time compared to other media, and we should consider why that is and why games are uniquely suited to talk about time.

Zach Whalen is back to (sporadically) blogging at Gameology.org, and he wrote recently about the issue of videogame canonization, suggesting on the way a few more titles that could be added to the ‘existing canon’. Wait, you didn’t know there was a canon? As Whalen notes, in 2007 “a committee of game scholars, developers and journalists” picked ten rather foundational videogames for preservation by the IGDA game preservation special interest group. His own piece, however, seems interested in the inherent value of making lists, and he puts forward a few more games for inclusion in a gaming ‘canon’. Says Whalen;

Anyone familiar with the discourse of literary studies over the past few decades will be well aware of the intellectual and political stakes in canon-formation, but a simple look through Digg or Cracked.com reveals how much appeal a top-ten list can have. More importantly, the kinds of questions a game canon raises are useful pedagogical ones…

The Escapist ran a piece by Erin Hoffman this week that briefly summarised the Riot Grrrl movement in music that arose in the 90s, and suggests that the games industry is in desperate need of something similarly empowering to female gamers. Not being particularly familiar with the movement in question (I was busy growing up in the 90s) I nevertheless found it a fascinating read. Developers – take note!

Jonathan McCalmont wrote in to let us know about the writing he’s been doing at the website Futurismic and his most recent piece about Dragon Age: Origins (looks like the pool is still going). Addressing Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about Cultural and Social Capital, McCalmont goes on to suggest that DA:O is doing something akin to World of Warcraft minus all the other players. He doesn’t take this to heart however, as he postulates that:

The end of human civilisation is millions of World of Warcraft servers with only one human player on each of them. Dragon Age: Origins seems to bring that day one step closer.

This one was sent in by Matt Gallant, who links us to Nick Rudzicz’s post critiquing some of the “science” in Modern Warfare 2. I liked the part about the size of the earth being all wrong, and how a certain shockwave that plays a major role in the plot would actually fail to propagate through the vast vacuum of space. The above quotes are there for a reason.

Jim Rossignol at Rock Paper Shotgun looks at some recent gaming-related scientific research and summarises the results. It’s quite an intriguing read, for instance, playing Tetris can help with post-traumatic stress related flashbacks.

Alex Raymond wrote this week about why she writes about games, namely because,

…talking about pop culture is a great way to reach out to people. Not every feminist-minded individual is going to take a women’s studies course or pick up a bell hooks book from their library, but plenty of folks love discussing games, television, movies and so on on the internet. Looking at these things from a feminist perspective can introduce these concepts to people who may hold feminist ideals and just don’t know it yet.

The TigSource forums reveal some of the less-than-useful feedback some entrants received from their IGF judges and… hey, that feedback looks a shoe-in for almost any first-timer’s videogame review. They do seem to say, however, that on balance the judges were generally good.

Ian Barczewski responds to an article in the Orange County Register called, quite hyperbolically, ‘Video games were invented by the devil’. Which seems odd to me as I always thought it was William Higinbotham that invented gaming with Tennis for Two for the vintage 1958 oscilloscope. Barczewski opens his critique of the offending column with this statement that made me sit up and pay attention:

When I was only three years old, I taught myself to read. That’s right. Guess how I did it? Video games.

One of my favourite reads this week was ‘The Videogame Store is Decadent and Depraved’ by Quintin Smith. He got the title wrong on his own blog the poor man, but after an experience with a game shop like this, who can blame him?

LB Jeffries took time out this week to write about the license to print money (for Valve at any rate) that is Steam online sales, as well as other time-limited discounts on digital delivery platforms in general.

Brenda Brathwaite did some research about Daikatana recently (the game everyone knows sucked) and she came up with this interesting observation,

In researching a game that it seems most haven’t played, I’ve now counted 100 negative comments in a row, not a one of which resulted from actual play.

To which I reply, ‘So you’ve been reading Gamestop user submitted previews then?’ Seriously though, audience reception and perception of games they’ve never even played is an issue that is well worth addressing, and I’m glad Brenda’s doing so here.

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