Somewhat appropriately since I’ll be sunning it up in the real world and enjoying the Devonshire coastline, our new topic is ‘One With Nature’:

Where videogames once had ‘levels’ like jungles, an ice world, lava world etc. their environments increasingly resemble real-life: players can now explore whole islands or peninsulas and even make their own worlds and ecosystems.

What’s the most convincing natural world you have explored? What unexpected encounters have you had in a simulated ecosystem? What can games do with environments and nature that the real world cannot?

Please email us your submissions or tweet them to @critdistance and @AGBear with the #BoRT hashtag. Given the length of the submission period, you are strongly recommended to send me an email so they don’t get lost.

Don’t forget the Rules of the Round Table:

• Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic.
• Your blog does not have to be in English. If you submit a German piece I’ll try my best to read it; if it’s another language I’ll find someone else.
• If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start. Use your common sense.
• You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free. We will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.

FORGET IT, JAKE, IT’S THE GAME INDUSTRY

Doing our part to keep this one alive, here’s John Walker’s piece from back in April seeking to answer the question: Why did the SimCity controversy go away?

Elsewhere, Branislav Gagic has another question on his mind. He wants to know why reputable developers are heading to Kickstarter to bank on known IPs, the same as AAA.

ZINESTER: STILL NOT A PEJORATIVE

On Magical Wasteland, Matthias Burns has a few thoughts on the whole “zinester” thing:

Part of my unease with that “formalists versus zinesters” “debate” was how unnecessary it seemed (beyond providing some personal edification to the instigators); it was as if a faculty member from Juilliard had expressed a desire for “a dialogue” with Sid Vicious about chord progressions. It’s not that these two don’t see eye to eye on matters of music theory, which is what the professor thinks, it’s that the punks have arrived on the scene with such a completely different set of values that they might as well be from different planets.

There is also little fruit to be found in having a “dialogue,” I think, because it doesn’t seem particularly hard to see where the “zinesters” (if I must use that word) are coming from, and the idea that they need to explain themselves is confounding. This group consciously and deliberately rejects indie’s failed split from the mainstream and its poorly-concealed capitalist underpinnings, and instead upholds personal expression as the highest ideal, the only goal that matters. And in order to do that successfully, they must break off completely, not at a branch somewhere on the tree but at the very root of the established order. This cannot be papered over or explained away; no amount of hemming and hawing over the definition of the word “game” will fix the fact that there are games out there now that willfully abnegate other games.

Porpentine, in reposting the original draft of her “7 Thoughts on Women” on her own site, also addresses the trap of the “dialogue”:

One of the greatest challenges of this time is not blatant misogyny (an easy target for outrage anyone can participate in) but the crypto-misogynist, whose fear is concealed behind language that sounds basically okay to everyone but the women it is intended to harm.

They’ve figured out they can’t call us bitches, so they resurface under a thin veneer of patronizing “civility”, neutralizing our energies with mindless, boring semantics.

They will find endless ways to intellectualize their discomfort.

[…] Even doing basic work in the games industry, whether it be in a mainstream or indie capacity, becomes filled with chronic ambient terror

DESIGN MATTERS

So, let’s talk about games with no interactivity, says Line Hollis.

Meanwhile, anna anthropy writes on the recent Different Games conference and why the context of gameplay profoundly informs a game. And on GameJolt, Paul Hack interviews Goblet Grotto developer The Catamites.

On Bit Creature, Lana Polansky ruminates on the nature of game cartography. In a similar vein, Nathan Altice on Metopal is continuing his great multipart spatial analysis of several games.

On Twinfinite, Matthew Kim shares a few notes on Demons’ Souls and how it differs from its sequel, Dark Souls. And on Video Games of the Oppressed, Mike Joffe postulates that perhaps the emotion mechanic of Super Princess Peach is more subversive than we think.

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

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

Barnson’s examples lean heavily on the horror genre in particular, which segues neatly into our next article from GayGamer’s Mitch Alexander: locating the connections between Silent Hill and gay Irish/English artist Francis Bacon. Meanwhile our own Johannes Köller invites us to think of the picturesque Proteus as “art gore” (it’s not as gruesome as it sounds).

Finally, PopMatters Moving Pixels’ Jorge Albor elaborates on the systems of security theater in The Castle Doctrine and Papers, Please.

FUCK VIDEOGAMES PART DEUX

Following on Darius Kazemi’s Fuck Videogames from last week, Janet H. Murray offers a considerate response: “Videogame design is not exciting because it is ‘new.’ Nothing gets old faster than mere novelty. Videogame art is exciting because it is a productive way of exploring the truly, historically new affordances of the digital medium.”

Also recommended: Liz Ryerson’s in-depth response to Kazemi’s post and further responses from Todd Harper and Samantha Allen.

RELATIONAL OBJECTS

Games do not exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by our individual perceptions. Writing for Paste, Maddy Myers illustrates this brilliantly with her visit to BioShock Infinite‘s Columbia in the wake of the Boston bombings.

Also on BioShock Infinite, Moving Pixels’ G. Christopher Williams discusses relating to the protagonists’ dynamic as a father of three daughters.

Speaking of fathers, those lie at the heart of this collection of thoughts on Red Dead Redemption from our own Cameron Kunzelman.

And That Dragon, Cancer designer Ryan Green takes to Game Church this week, to propose games have a need for “grace.”

EMBRACE PLAY

Finally, to leave us off for the week, Filipe Salgado has some inspiring words for everyone: just play. Play everything.

THE USUAL

Thanks once again for reading! As usual we greatly value your submissions by Twitter and email… and I’m happy to report our email contact form is up and running again! (Finally.)

Looking for May’s Blogs of the Round Table? Stay tuned! Alan Williamson will be posting a combined May-June prompt in the coming days, so keep those typing keys ready.

All Star Party Zone

Top billing this week goes to Darius Kazemi’s essay titled “Fuck Videogames.” I’m going to refrain from commentary; going into it without any preconceptions is a good idea. After you read that, go for Liz Ryerson’s “it’s okay to like games,” which I read as a companion piece to Kazemi even though they are basically unrelated to one another.

Switch gears. Ryerson and Robert Yang both made what you could call “critical Let’s Play” videos for an event in Chicago ran by Jake Elliott. Yang’s is on the first room of Half Life and Ryerson’s is about the CliffyB sleeper hit Bioshock Infinite.

Bioshock Againfinite

If you’re not totally burned out on anything and everything Bioshocky, Nicole Marie comments on Infinite, but with a particular focus on the critical discussion around Elizabeth as one of the best female characters of all time. Nick Dinicola also has things to say about the game, reading Booker DeWitt’s character arc as a failed one.

Issues of Representation

Speaking of representations of women in video games, Samantha Allen posted an audio recording of ETSUcon’s Sexism in Gaming panel (which I was lucky enough to be a part of) over at The Border House.  At the same site, Mark Filipowich writes about privilege and how it is expressed in the RPGMaker game Exit Fate.

Helen Berents reads Ni No Kuni through the lens of peace studies, focusing on how the game positions conflict in relation to childhood. Rebecca Mir writes on Dog Eat Dog> and its representations of colonialism as a “fun” activity. At First Person Scholar, Sarah Gibbons writes on Auti-Sim and how it might be a problematic representation of autism that could push us forward to better, more equitable games dealing with the topic. A pull:

One of the important messages that disability studies scholars and autistic self-advocates reiterate is that disability should not be understood through the lens of pity. Working against a medical model that suggests that disability is an individual problem, disorder, or defect, many scholars articulate a social model of disability that emphasizes the disabling impact of built environments and social attitudes. Some scholars question the idea of impairment; for example, Shelley Tremain, who exposes the realist ontology that informs our understanding of impairment, explains that our definitions of impairments are not objective, but historically contingent . Tremain and other scholars point toward a generative model of bodily difference. The question with respect to games becomes, can simulation games enable players to explore these alternative models?

Developing A Critical Games Writing Community

Real talk: video game criticism is in a strange place. It is mostly performed by under-/un-paid people who want to talk about video games in some way other than “this was good, this was bad, 9.5/10.” So with that in mind:

The new website re/Action launched into its beta this month. As the About page states,

re/Action evolved out of the need for change. Critical, experimental writing suffers in a media landscape based on traditional publishing models, and diverse readerships only find hostile environments without proper inclusivity policies. This publication aims to celebrate the amazing writing often turned away from the mainstream sites and left unpaid. We want to capture the conversations that need to happen and create a safe space for all to participate.

The first, “beta” month has articles by Lana Polansky, Denis Farr, and EIC Mattie Brice.

Five Out of Ten Magazine also released a new issue this week. If you haven’t purchased any of the magazine so far, maybe think about buying the value-laden triple pack?

Take a Breather

Watch these motion capture videos of videogames by Nicolas Boillot.

History Schmistory

Here are some links about games history: Michael Barnes writes on the history of the “Dudes on a Map” genre of board games. Carl Therrien speaks in interview about a particular way of doing games history, laying out some basic information while pleading for a move to critical and specific history. More contemporary: read the story of Jager and how they came to develop Spec Ops: The Line. At Eurogamer, Craig Owens delves into a forum community obsessed with doing design archaeology of Shadow of the Colossus.  Finally, Joel Cuthbertson tells it like it is: “The Boston Bombings Are Not A Meme.”

Video Games Are Serious Business

Chris Bateman posted about the problem of “fiction denial” in games. Steve Wilcox interviewed Jesper Juul for First Person Scholar.

Design Time

Over at Unwinnable, George Weidman calls for a resurgence in analysis about Antichamber and makes lots of interesting points about lateral thinking. Scott Juster finds the banality of evil in Papers, Please. Adam Biessener pleads with the designers of videogame morality systems: “stop making me kick puppies to shoot lightning.”

Nathan Altice (who only writes golden articles of wonderment) analyzes basically everything about Super Mario Bros. through vectors and how they work. Go learn.

Random Things That Are Good So Go Read Them

Andrew Vanden Bossche gives us magic. Roger Travis gets to the heart of immersion in Papo & Yo. Stephanie Carmichael shows us the mirror worlds of Twin Peaks and Deadly Premonition. Jason Johnson went looking for Jason Rohrer’s hidden board game. George Kokoris finally saw in 3D with Nintendo’s help. Aaron Matteson wonders if there is such a thing as “compassionate trolling.” I played Rogue Warrior and found it to be no more silly than CODBLOPZ. Joel Goodwin falls in love with Starseed Pilgrim.

Foreign Correspondence

As always, Johannes Köller is here with the foreign correspondence appreciation station:

Over on Kleiner Drei, Lucie Höhler interviewed Lea Schönfelder about her Kinect game/art project Perfect Woman. On videogametourism, Rainer Sigl, Franzi Bechtold, Christof Zurschmitten und Robert Glashüttner all shared their experience and thoughts on the recently concluded AMAZE festival (or A MAZE, or Indie Connect, or whatever it’s called these days). On superlevel.de, Benjamin Filitz also wrote about the AMAZE at length and Dennis Kogel has an interview with Jana Reinhardt of Ratking Entertainment and Arnold Flöck of Tinytouchtales up, in which they muse about the structures of the local indie scene and wonder why it doesn’t seem to produce any well-known, polarizing figures. Why is there no local version of Phil Fish?

Details

That’s all for this week!

We’re still having issues with our contact form, so please keep submitting links via Twitter or by emailing Kris.

Thanks for reading!

This month’s BoRT roundup comes to you from a train to Scotland, where I wrote my entire submission on an iPad in an hour.

April’s theme was ‘VINPCs’:

“Non-player characters, or NPCs, make up the bulk of interactions in many games. Sometimes they provide a mere resting place for a bullet, other times some canned dialogue, but increasingly they’re becoming more sophisticated companions capable of being worthy party members or even love interests.

This month, we’d like you to talk about a memorable experience with an NPC. It can be a good or bad one, as long as it’s worth talking about! Alternatively, if you can’t think of any memorable experiences, what aspect of a game’s systems get in the way of good NPCs?”

‘Cunzy1′ at That Guys a Maniac has managed to keep the same Omastar from Pokémon Fire Red to Black 2, which is particularly impressive given the number of times Nintendo have changed their transferring technology. Can anyone better this? Is it possible to take a Pokéman all the way from Red to X and Y? Can you do it with one that isn’t rubbish like Omastar?

Cody Steffen is sorry to WWE referee Earl Hebner for virtually assaulting him in Smackdown games over the years. As he points out, this isn’t that different from real WWE matches. Then again, if you wanted a truly realistic WWE game the players would get a script before each match and you could compete to win or lose according to that script. You’d get more points for not breaking kayfabe.

… this is actually a really good idea.

Mark Filipowich examines Oracle in the Batman: Arkham games, a character who interacts with Batman even though she’s never on-screen. Mark makes a really interesting point that Oracle fulfils the same role as a helpful spectator, whether that’s a friend or partner. Since Batman is a pretty lonely guy, the Oracle character is a welcome inclusion in the game.

With NPCs in games become so advanced they practically play the game for us, Jed Revita (or as my iPad wants to call him, Jed Revitalise) feels like he’s the inanimate object. He discusses A Mind Forever Voyaging, a game where the player is a cameraman passively observing events. It reminds me of when I used to play Atomic Bomberman on the PC, but it was too hard to play alone, so I’d just watch the AI play itself in one big screen saver. Are other games in danger of becoming the same?

Edward Smith had a memorable experience hanging out with Jenny in The Darkness after he found his own name on the apartment mailbox. The seemingly banal experiences of every day life can be more compelling than overt fantasy, a subject also tackled by Jordan Erica Webber’s ‘Blood, Births and Backsides’ in the new issue of Five out of Ten. Come on, you knew I’d get a link in here somewhere.

Nick Degens argues that good NPCs should react to the player, which seems obvious enough, but there’s a big difference between some canned dialogue when you bump into a towns person and the shopkeeper in A Link to the Past who bumps you off if you steal from him. He also mentions Fable III, which is an interesting comparison because I thought its crowds demonstrated both and best and worst of the modern NPC: reactive and multi-faceted, yet also repetitive to the extreme and obviously fake.

Finally, some Irish guy wrote about Elizabeth in BioShock Infinite and whether her relationship with the player is a convincing one. I think people are going to be talking about Infinite for years, but perhaps not in the way Irrational intended.

And that’s us for the month! Join us early next week for another instalment of Blogs of the Round Table.

Final plug: if you haven’t read any issues of Five out of Ten yet we’ve also introduced a Triple Pack of our first three issues at a discounted price. There are loads of pieces by Critical Distance staff, so you’re indirectly helping the site by feeding its contributors. That and it’s a damn good read.

<iframe type="text/html" width="600" height="20" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=April13" frameborder="0"></iframe>

And you’ll get this:

At least, conflicting schedules are the official reason for my sudden rise to stardom. I’d like to think our brilliant leaders simply wanted some fresh, pretty face for this newly redesigned Critical Distance, so that our sleek, new look would forever be associated with my own pristine skin and effortlessly disheveled hair. And tired eyes, crooked nose and disproportionate chin. Moving on.

Mammary Quandary

The sexualization of female characters in games became this week’s most prominent topic when George Kamitani, president of Japanese developer Vanillaware and artist for their upcoming game Dragon’s Crown decided to respond to Jason Schreier’s concerns with their art design by questioning his sexual orientation.

While some saw fit to defend the game’s “visionary art“, Jason Schreier of Kotaku and Ben Kuchera of The Penny Arcade Report both quickly explained that the actual issue here is, of course, not sexualized imagery in itself, but its predominance in our industry and the problematic power relations in maintaining this kind of imagery solely for the spectacle of male, heterosexual audiences.

Christian Nutt and Christian Walters have expanded on the silliness of making homosexuality the punchline over on Gamasutra and Gay Gamer respectively.

On Unwinnable, Jenn Frank notes how frequently such discussions of sexualized design and male gaze vilify the female body.

When we talk about character design, we might even use words like distorted, exaggerated, fantastical, grotesque, fetishism, comical parody, somebody please cover her up. Abnormal. Unnatural. And “distracting” – that’s a major one. God, her breasts are so distracting.

Spirituality

The Ontological Geek deals with religion and theology this month, and Ethan Gach wrote an interesting piece about themes of messianism in Earthbound and their parallels in its cult following.

Robert Rath of The Escapist wrote about magic in games and how its role as a simple, mundane tool fails to connect to our deeply-rooted understanding of the divine.

On a tangentially related note, G. Christopher Williams wrote about suffering in games for Pop Matters.

Formalism: Revengeance

In response to Raph Koster’s letter to Leigh Alexander and its view of interactivity as a form of dialogue, Andrew Vanden Bossche wrote about “The Tyranny of Choice” for Gameranx, arguing that “[c]onsciously or unconsciously, we can’t help but limit the terms of dialogue as designers because we create them.”

Raph Koster responded, in turn, by examining choice architectures in games and other media. This, in turn, has led Dan Cox to consider the limits of performativity in games.

Can Journalism be Games?

Interestingly, this week saw several contributions in the form of Twine games. Darius Kazemi responded to Raph Koster’s aforementioned letter in style, Raymond Neilson lets you explore religious themes in games and Cara Ellison made a brilliant game about heterosexual relationships, or in her words:

[...] I wanted to make it about the heart stopping drudgery of being heterosexual in a world where heterosexuals are conditioned not to talk to each other, or listen to each other, or really have any idea what they are doing.

Everything Else

Sydney Fussell wrote about the shortcomings of games when it comes to dealing with race and racism over on Gamasutra, while Samantha Allen chronicled her experiences using Halo to teach about oppression and feminism on The Border House.

Jennifer Finelli has got a nifty article about using sound as the basis for gameplay up on Insert Quarterly, and Cameron Kunzelman mused on his out-of-body experience playing Mirror’s Edge.

In my corner of the world Dennis Kogel is still not done getting all his GDC stuff out, here he is interviewing Quynh Nguyen and Richard E. Flanagan, makers of FRACT OSC. Don’t let the beginning fool you, the interview is in English. Plus there’s an audio version, for if you want to listen to it.

Also on Superlevel, Christian Schiffer wrote about political ideologies and commentary coded into the systems of games such as Cities XL.

Be a Star

That’s about it for this week. If you have any submissions for next week, let us know on Twitter until we get the contact form up and running again. You can also email Kris directly.

Write swiftly and you might still have time to contribute to this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt, too.

See you next week!

One thing of note: our contact form is still out of commission. We’re trying to figure out what the issue with the plugin is. For now, if you want to submit links please tweet them to us or email them to me.

INFINITE BIOSHOCKS

Set an afternoon aside for this one. Tim Rogers has finally finished his sprawling analysis of BioShock Infinite’s many systems and the best foot it chooses to put forward.

Over on Kotaku, guest commentator Jordan Ekeroth writes that rather than blasphemous, he found Infinite “deeply Christian.”

Reacting to the suggestion his last piece was “inflammatory,” Jeff Kunzler argues that there is plenty within BioShock Infinite itself to get righteously indignant about:

What’s truly inflammatory in 2013 is Infinite as a collaborative work with millions upon millions of dollars and man-hours put into it, couldn’t bother, apparently, to hire a non-white writer to put some proper perspective into the use of racism to justify a white man’s murderous romp through a floating city in the sky. The use of the (mostly non-white) Vox Populi and (black) Daisy Fitzroy as an enemy for the (white) player character to mow down and brutally murder is utterly idiotic [sic], unjustified, and completely insulting. Inflammatory.

This post by starburp, also linked in Kunzler’s first post, is a required read:

seriously? you make racism against blacks germaine to the plot of your storyline, but you don’t even do any research to find out what else blacks were up to in 1912, and then you bury our ACTUAL struggle against racism in a hippie dippy “we’re all human” resistance movement turned sour. seriously?

do you know why you did this? because the black people in this storyline aren’t fucking people. they’re props. literally. they are props. and that’s what i find so fucking offensive about bioshock infinite, is that it makes black people props in a storyline in which white people get to revise white history through all kinds of fanciful sci fi wizardry in order to make themselves feel better while STILL excluding and marginalizing black people, and we’re supposed to be happy about it.

ETHICS IN THE TIME OF MANSHOOTERS

On his personal/professional site, developer Charles Cox writes on why he will never work on First-Person Shooters again. Back on Kotaku, an industry veteran from both the development and publishing side of the fence condemns the exploitative practices of today’s games market and concludes “we need better video game publishers.”

Jay Barnson points out that always-on DRM by any other name we would know as malware:

[T]his is nothing more than a control grab by game manufacturers, an attempt to force us to their door so that we can pay for a game like it was a product, but use it only at their discretion as if it was a service. It’s the best of both worlds as a publisher, and the worst of both worlds as a consumer.

Finally, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker takes the journalism road less traveled, opining that you don’t need to resort to crass tactics to stay afloat.

BUT DOES FORMALISM ART GAME???

On the heels of last week’s Great Formalism War of 2013, Dan Cox –who has put together some excellent Twine tutorials– observes that in all this most people don’t appear to know how Twine actually works.

Elsewhere on Peasant Muse, Jeremy Antley asks why board games have scarcely been brought up throughout this conversation:

Returning to the question [raised by Raph Koster], “Is the only moral move (of Train) not to play?”, my answer is: no. It’s not just no, it’s a hell no. Why? Train is about providing the player a sense, terrible as it is, of the sort of grotesque, normalizing effects that focusing on transporting Jews to concentration camps presents to those attempting to maximize and make efficient such transportation. Playing Train isn’t supposed to be pretty, or even fun. It’s meant to be torturous, it’s meant to make you ask and question the source of your own humanity.

Did you take glee, ignorantly, of moving the most amount of people to the end of the line? Probably. And when you discovered the true purpose of the game- moving representative figures to their representative death- did you recoil and become sick at the idea? The ethical answer is yes. But would you have encountered this full range of quandary, of questioning your own humanity, if you simply refused to play the game out of moral concerns?

The final word on the subject goes to Colleen Macklin, who motions toward a non-definitional critique of games:

Is there a definition of “game” that we can all agree on and hold up to evaluate the quality of the things that fall into our orbit as games so that “all relativities and contradictions would be either resolved or beside the point?” Is it important that we determine this now, for once and for all?

I say no. It’s a trap!

To ask whether something is a game (or whether it has ‘gameness’) is the same kind of question as whether something is art or not.

Ultimately whether this thing is a game or that thing is art is determined by its context and community of practice.

This idea, that games have a purest nature and that we need to strive to make games that represent this limits what we can do with games.

DESIGN MATTERS

Who was Nintendo’s most recent 3DS Direct for? It wasn’t for you, says Jon Irwin, who believes Nintendo is stuck in a generation gap.

Over on Bit Creature, Zolani Stewart explores Mirror’s Edge as an aesthetic wasteland. And at Shut Up and Sit Down, Mark Wallace broaches the topic of licensed board games, good or evil?

On Gamasutra, Mark Slabinski furnishes us with a heady list of games exemplifying Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of ‘flow.’ Meanwhile, on Eurogamer, Rick Lane looks at the challenges in modeling climbing in games.

For those who were curious about Magnus Hildebrandt’s recent Kentucky Route Zero article for Superlevel.de, Dennis Kogel has helpfully translated it into English.

Speaking of German, or rather in German, our Senior Ultra German Correspondent Johannes Köller has hooked us up with another round of excellent games criticism auf Deutsch.

On Videogame Tourism, Rainer Sigl and Christof Zurschmitten have wrapped up their three-part letter series on Year Walk. Also for the same publication, Jannick Gänger wonders what Mass Effect would be like if you were allowed to fail horribly.

Finally, Christian Schiffer turned up on Deutschlandradio for an hour-long feature on interactive storytelling. (Transcript here.)

SIGNAL BOOSTING

Mike Joffe has kicked off a new blog, Videogames of the Oppressed, looking at the intersection of games and kyriarchy.

And a call for writers! Win Lin’s Insert Quarterly is a new paid publication currently seeking hires. They look pretty fetch, so pay them a visit!

(Gretchen, stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen.)

MIND OUR DUST

You may have noticed a brief service interruption yesterday while we performed a terrifically overdue server migration. We’re in the process of tightening up the last few loose bolts and also rolling out a new site design, so expect weirdness over the next few days. If you can’t get in touch with us through our contact form please try @ing us on Twitter.

And have you seen this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt yet? Huh? Have you? Time is running out, you know!

That’s all for this week. Till next time! As a wise entertainer once said: dress classy, dance cheesy.

Back in March of 2011 I played Deirdra Kiai’s recently released Life Flashes By and wanted to talk to her about it. I asked for an interview and she graciously accepted. Through a series of semi-ludicrous events that interview has ended up here for your enjoyment. You can download and play Life Flashes By at Deirdra’s site as well as check out her other work.

Podcast: Direct Download

Opening Theme: ‘Close’ by The Alpha Conspiracy

Closing Theme: ‘Wishing Never’ by The Alpha Conspiracy

SHOOTY McGUNPANTS

At Unwinnable, Brendan Keogh sits down with the Konrad to his Walker and has a long conversation with Walt Williams, lead writer of Spec Ops: The Line. Over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Nathan Grayson puts the finishing touches on a three part series of interviews with Walt Williams and Far Cry 3 lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem.

SIMCITY BLUES

You might recall when Mike Rose modeled his town in the new SimCity to diagnose its traffic problem. Observing the bugs in the new SimCity’s traffic modeling, he went back to SimCity 2000 to see how it handled the same problem.

On Quarter to Three, the eternally engaging Tom Chick presents us with a pretty unsettling depiction of how SimCity’s systems (inadvertently?) model contemporary malaise.

BIOSHOCK INFINITY AND BEYOND

(A general content warning, once again, for spoilers in most of the following links.)

On Gamer Theories, Ben Meakin has written a bit on how we can look at BioShock Infinite through the lens of auteur theory. Elsewhere on Terminally Incoherent, Luke Maciak walks us through the first in a series of thorough dissections of BSI’s art direction.

On critical mainstay Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott deems the game the beginning of the end for the FPS genre. Meanwhile, Amnesia developer Thomas Grip praises the game for what it attempted to do but concludes “it feels like an attempt to tell a serious story through a theme park ride.”

On Gamasutra, Andreas Ahlborn delivers an exceptional analysis of BioShock Infinite as musical composition. Posting on his personal site, Kevin Wong views the game’s conclusion as “a metacommentary” on the multiplicity of emergent narrative. And on Critical Missive, Eric Schwarz dispenses with discussion of the setting and story and focuses squarely on a fine assessment of its combat mechanics.

On Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez peels away the layers of how the game’s design puts the player at odds with behaving like a real person. And on How Not to Suck at Game Design, Anjin Anhut criticizes the game’s “straw man racism” as a device by which to alleviate white guilt:

A thing that many movies do, most comics and Bioshock Infinite, is depict the faction in the story representing racism as unequivocally evil. Cartoonishly evil actually. This pretends like racism is some sort of thing mentally deranged people do, something sociopaths and psychopaths are drawn to or something you become when you are indoctrinated into some sort of cult.

While this of course serves to condemn racism as a concept, it mainly serves as a way out of dealing with your own internalized racism and serves as a way to absolve yourself by comparison. It also serves – and that is actually the truly ugly effect of that treatment – to push what we are allowed to label as racism into an extremist corner and it sabotages any healthy debate about racism in our society.

On Design is Law, Jeff Kunzler rails against other critics’ suggestion that the game is excessively violent, and instead poses that Columbia is a place we SHOULD be interested in destroying:

Bioshock: Infinite’s failings aren’t in its heavy use of violence, or the fact it’s a first person shooter. It’s the perversion of oppression, the creation of a world white people want to get lost and “immersed” in, instead of tearing down, the total lack of decency in regards to the views of people who have and still are the victims of racist oppression in America, and really just a general lack of empathy for the sake of entertainment.

Dan Golding decries the game as going out of its way to be inoffensive to the status quo, concluding “despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art.”

Writing for her own blog, editorial heavy-hitter Leigh Alexander weighs in as well, saying the game is flawed but engagingly so:

This is not a game about American exceptionalism and the choice between obedient prison and chaotic freedom. This is a game where you have to chase a ghost among parallel realities. This is a game that lives in its own alternate universe, is in love with its own cleverness, instead of being genuinely clever. There are tears everywhere. And in the game.

The Levine-led Irrational team has birthed a universe, now, of games about a dominant ideologue enforcing a slavish devotion to fearful systems, even after those systems have become irrelevant. It gives us worlds plunged into the stress of compartmentalized factions where teams don’t communicate, where promises are grand and lovely, but terrible on execution.

I think to some extent every game must be a reflection of its creative environment, its studio culture. Infinite strains its framework so fiercely you can see through to the flickering reality behind it. I would love to do an interview: Not a grand portrait of Levine, but with his soldiers.

And on Drop Out, Hang Out, Space Out, Daniel Joseph cautions against the cultural gatekeeping implicit in the process of artistically evaluating a game like BioShock Infinite, which segues neatly into our next section of links.

BUT IS FORMALISM GAMES

Writing on his personal/professional site, Raph Koster opens up a debate/can of worms when he responds to remarks made by Leigh Alexander over Twitter, and calls for dialogue on a number of subjects, including the role of definitions, games as rhetorical devices, and formalism.

Leigh Alexander responds in kind, reposting her comment from Koster’s blog and adding: “We have much more to learn and gain, at least for now, by eschewing definitions than we do by prescribing them.”

Writing on his Radiator blog, Robert Yang continued the discussion, responding to Koster’s letter with one of his own in which he lays out the reasons for some of the original post’s negative reception. “[With personal games], game design is not physics, engineering, or science — rather, it’s political science, it’s history. Maybe we could approach our criticism of these games more like those fields?”

The comment thread on Yang’s post, starting with some thoughtful remarks by Jesper Juul, are also very much worth reading.

Reacting to all the dust-up caused by these posts, Canabalt developer Adam Saltsman appeared on Polygon, opining that mutual respect and openness to feedback is called for.

Tadhg Kelly soon chimed in as well, erecting a (some would say unnecessary) dichotomy between formalists (as he self-identifies) and “zinesters,” borrowing a term from anna anthropy to describe the outsider artists taking umbrage with his and Koster’s statements.

Andrew Vanden Bossche quickly called for a decoupling of the idea that systems are the unique territory of formalists:

“Formalist” vs “zinester” is not a binary that exists … Everyone gets to talk about mechanics. The game/notgame binary is not an immediate conclusion of a frame of analysis that focuses on mechanics. I believe instead that it is a very strict and limited definition that carries its own political agenda, consciously or not.

Zoe Quinn, developer of Depression Quest concurred, noting that limiting the number of systems in a game can be a justifiable design choice, adding: “I feel like there’s almost this attitude among the people that decry this sort of thing as a notgame that creators of interactive fiction and twine games especially somehow just don’t know how to make real systems.”

It wouldn’t be a debate about terminology without someone getting Storified, and this time around it’s John Brindle, in a curated set of tweets dismantling some of Tadhg Kelly’s positions.

Craig Bamford is briefer but just as energetic: “Tadhg Kelly, please stop trying to tell me ’what games are’. To be extremely blunt, judging by both your site and your CV, I don’t think you’ve earned the right.”

Consciously adopting the role of old man with kids on his lawn, Daniel Cook relates a history of game development establishment and rebellion, as he sees it anyway. Back on Gamasutra, Devin Wilson invites us to think of the discussion over definitions of the word “game” as, itself, a game.

Rounding us off, Mattie Brice reminds us why, in the midst of all this bandying about of labels, labels matter, and they are always charged.

I RATE THIS FORMALISM 8.5 OUT OF 10

Switching gears a little (or a lot), on Kotaku Jason Schreier writes on how Metacritic harms games.

DREAMIN’ OF GDC

If you missed this year’s Game Developers Conference, you cannot afford to miss Dan Pearson’s writeup of the GDC Hothead Rants.

On Unwinnable, Sam Machkovech sits down for an interview with Cart Life developer Richard Hofmeier.

Keeping the German-language ludodecahedron strong, Dennis Kogel follows up this week with a GDC game roundup auf Deutsch. On the English side, he has an interview with Hotline Miami luminaries Devolver Digital.

DESIGN NOTES

On Game Manifesto, Joel Jordon explores the ludodiegesis of Corrypt and Portal. Over on PopMatters Moving Pixels, Nick Dinicola looks into how the opening of the Tomb Raider reboot evokes the horror genre.

As part of Ontological Geek’s Religion Month, Hannah DuVoix muses on the extent to which Skyrim has you desecrating holy places. And reacting to the formalism debates highlighted above, Naomi Clark performs a taut formalist reading of Porpentine’s Howling Dogs.

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

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

KYRIARCHY

Sidney Fussell turned up on Medium Difficulty last week, exploring the notion of closeted homosexuality in games. Fussell also popped up on VentureBeat, posing that game violence appears to disproportionately be brought up as a motivator for white spree killers.

Back with Kill Screen, Jordan Mammo takes a gander back toward Katamari Damacy as a game in which the artifacts of consumerism add up to “a snowballing addiction that literally uproots the earth itself.”

On Not Your Mama’s Gamer, Alex Layne lays out an infographic breakdown of EA’s employee code of conduct. And at Kleiner Drei, Lucie Höhler recaps the major sexism-related issues of the last month, from GDC to RPS, for German-language readers.

JAM ON!

Two successful international game jams took place last weekend. Kill Screen’s Jason Johnson provides us with an overview of one of them, the QUILTBAG Jam hosted at MIT. And at Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander profiles the weekend’s other big jam, the Pulse-Pounding Heart-Stopping Dating Sim Game Jam.

TWINE TWINE REVOLUTION

Cara Ellison is just gonzoing it up all over the place lately. She popped up at PC Gamer with a feature on and interview with Porpentine, and a scant few days later appeared on The Guardian, interviewing anna anthropy.

HEY! LISTEN!

It’s strange to think we may be heading into a leg of critical discourse for games where academic mainstays like book reviews become common again, but that’s just where things seem to be going. Shaun of Arcadian Rhythms recently reviewed Brendan Keogh’s Killing is Harmless and First Person Scholar’s Danielle Stock reviewed Ivan Leslie Beale’s Video Games for Health.

First Person Scholar is turning into a hot new pub, now that we think of it. This article by Rob Parker on voluntary player constraints –featuring Mattie Brice’s Pokemon Unchained, among others– is a good read.

On the topic of new blogs, Shut Up and Sit Down is gearing up to be a great new blog for fans of board games. Here’s Matt Thrower with a primer on wargaming.

At some curious intersection of academia and devlog is Michael Cook’s Games By Angelina, Cook’s PhD project and game-making AI.

ALL THE REST

Thanks again for setting part of your Sunday aside for Critical Distance! As always we’re indebted to our readers for all your wonderful submissions by tweet or email. Keep them coming!

And if you haven’t yet checked out this month’s Blogs of the Round Table prompt, this is a prime time to get involved!

Lastly, we will be performing a server migration in the coming days. Readers should not experience any lapse in access to the site, but we are going to try to update the layout at the same time so… keep your fingers crossed for us.

Lastly, for my fellow USians. Bitter about tax season like I am? There’s a game for that now.

BIOSHOCK INFINITE

(General content warning: most of these involve some manner of spoilers.)

This game came out recently, you might have heard about it. Something to do with shocking infinity and women in too-tight corsets. Our very own Cameron Kunzelman has drafted a preliminary critical compilation for some of the early critical response.

That’s not to say we’re off the hook, though. Here are some extra articles not included in Cammy’s roundup.

On Edge, Adrien Chmielarz takes issue with the design of the game’s opening as a gamey mess. On io9, guest poster Kyle Hill asks: if the city of Columbia really ran on helium (not that it does), could it?

Kieron Gillen, whose description of Infinite‘s floating city as “the 1893 Chicago world fair takes off and becomes an American Exceptionalism Death Star” will hopefully live forever into posterity, posts some “assorted thoughts” on the game including what it could possibly be saying about parenthood.

Rab Florence, reacting to other journalists’ criticisms of Infinite‘s violence, invokes the term “gaming cringe” to describe a sort of hyper self-criticism:

If there is any game that can justify its violence, it is Bioshock Infinite. It is a story about a violent man, and about the violence within society. It’s a story about extreme beauty, and extreme ugliness. It’s also saying a lot about videogames, and as it delivers its story and themes, it does it through patterns and behavioural codes that we all understand. The violence isn’t only justified by character, story or themes. It’s justified by the language of game mechanics that the game is using.

What games can’t justify their use of extreme violence? Almost everything else. And yet I haven’t seen commentators call all those other games out. Why wasn’t Gears of War widely taken to task for gruesome violence? Why wasn’t Modern Warfare 2? Was it because those games didn’t aspire to be anything other than silly old videogames? Was it because those games knew their place?

On PopMatters Moving Pixels, Scott Juster praises the “Strong Pictures and Subtle Themes” of the game. Meanwhile, SnakeLinkSonic is more critical, saying, “There’s Subtlety, Then There’s Cowardice.”

Not so much a critical article, but Andy Kelly offers up a good explication of some of the funkier bits of the game’s plot. Elsewhere, on Kill Screen, Yannick LeJacq interviews a terribly exhausted Ken Levine.

Lastly, an article auf Deutsch via our German-language correspondent Johannes Köller, Marcus Dittmar of 99leben describes how his on-and-off relationship with motion sickness prevents him from playing the game.

AFTER –SHOCK

But wait! There’s more. On Eurogamer, Richard Cobbett paints a fond retrospective look at that other BioShock sequel, BioShock 2. Elsewhere, Daniel Weissenberger digs even deeper into some thematic roots and cousins with a retro review of System Shock 2.

TOMB RAIDER

The other AAA name on everyone’s fingertips these last few weeks remains Crystal Dynamics’ and Rhianna Pratchett’s Tomb Raider reboot.

Back on Moving Pixels, Nick Dinicola comments on the “desperate” feeling of Tomb Raider’s combat. Meanwhile, on The Border House, ACLU worker Daniel Bullard-Bates explores its treatment of bravery.

On Groping the Elephant, Justin Keverne discusses Tomb Raider‘s “identity bubble.” And on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the shamelessly female Cara Ellison sits down for a memorable interview with lead writer Rhianna Pratchett, surely undermining the entire internet in the process.

DESIGN MATTERS

Straddling the two games above, Paul Tassi of Forbes wonders if we aren’t oversaturating games with ultraviolence: “I have nothing against killing in games. It’s just that as video games continue to evolve as storytelling vehicles, this idea that the main protagonist has to kill HUNDREDS of people per game is starting to seem a bit odd.”

On Gamasutra, Leigh Alexander hosts a roundtable with Andrew Plotkin, anna anthropy, Emily Short and others on the building renaissance of interactive fiction.

Leigh Alexander also popped up this week on Polygon with Quintin Smith, bringing us a new letter series on Persona 4.

On GameCritics, I was really gratified to come upon Brad Gallaway’s meticulous breakdown of male- and heterosexual privilege in the newest Fire Emblem.

Since we’re on the subject of JRPGs, Mark Filipowich is putting together something of a series on the role of ensemble casts within the genre. He’s currently continuing the discussion with Breath of Fire 4 on his personal blog.

There seems to be a mini-trend lately on drawing connection points between game design and improv theatre. Following on that, Problem Machine has a few interesting thoughts on the improv precept of “if this is so, then what else is so?”

QUANTUM GAMING

This is pretty dire. Richard Morgan suggests the new SimCity actually collapses the quantum wave-form of multiple realities. Eat your heart out, Rosalind Lutece.

In some other place and in some other time, Jordan Rivas presents us with a touching, if rather unserious, interpretation of Mass Effect 3’s “Citadel” DLC as taking place in the afterlife.

And somewhere in there Kambyero’s Mix Villalon managed to sneak in a well-designed three-part series in defense of bad endings.

FAITH

Two excellent pieces showed up on Medium Difficulty this week, on the subject seeing one’s loss of faith mirrored in games. First, Samantha Allen likens her departure from the Mormon Church with the feeling of isolation experienced in Dead Space. As a companion piece to Allen’s, Kaitlin Tremblay shares her experiences leaving Catholicism for atheism, and seeing that transition paralleled in Starseed Pilgrim.

On Gamasutra, Rob Lockhart approaches the subject from the point of view of a developer, musing on how one might model the transition from theist to atheist through game mechanics.

BUT IS IT ART

John Brindle, busiest of the Brindle clan, has produced a fantastic essay on Pippin Barr’s Art Game.

On Unwinnable, Dan Crabtree returns to the island of Dear Esther with a rumination on the convergence point of ‘understanding’ and ‘salvation.’ Dear Esther is also on Line Hollis’s mind these days, as she compares it with The Stanley Parable and how the two games approach storytelling from opposite directions.

Gamertheories explores horror in tablet gaming with Year Walk. Our own Eric Swain poses an interesting thought experiment on the different visuality of first- and third-person “walker” games.

On VGRevolution, Marc Price calls for more “immersion criticism” in games, “exploring every nook and cranny until there’s no pixel left untouched.” Meanwhile at Uncanny Postcards, Sylvain Lavallée proposes that it can be productive to think of games as possibility spaces.

Touching on the recent ousting of Sweatshop from the Apple Games store, the latest in a series of serious games dropkicked from the outlet as ‘unsuitable,’ Jorge Albor wonders: where is the place for them?

And here’s another German article brought to our attention via Senior German Correspondent, who describes this piece by Magnus Hildebrandt as “the definitive guide to understanding Kentucky Route Zero and its cultural roots, references and relations.”

BUT IS IT WAR

Regulars of Critical Distance know well my fondness for essays on the intersection of military, industry and games. Here is a fabulous piece courtesy of Jeremy Antley on how nascent drone warfare and the recent sequestration has an impact on military war games.

ESPORTS

We don’t feature pieces on eSports near enough on Critical Distance. Here’s an interesting interview with Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime on the recently announced StarCraft 2 World Championship Series.

Commenting on the Museum of Modern Art’s recent acquisition of Dwarf Fortress, Bill Coberly muses how the game might function as spectator sport.

PEOPLE AND PEOPLE AND PEOPLE

I had the distinct pleasure of running into Simon Parkin at GDC, who shared with me some of his secrets to his fabulous life-changing interviews. I believe I called him brainful, to my and his horror. And no, you won’t hear his secrets from me! Here he is, however, profiling the one and only Notch, Markus Persson himself.

Back with Kill Screen, Clayton Purdom brings us a feature on the artists behind “cloud rap,” “the unlikely convergence of JRPGs and indie hip-hop.”

THE LONG VIEW

Courtesy of The Magazine’s Mohammed Taher an elucidating look at the contribution of the MSX to the 1980s Middle Eastern game scene, and where the industry stands now.

And on IndieGames, Robert Fearon reflects on the evolving coverage of indie games.

#1REASON

Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker has posted a new mission statement on feminist allyship within games writing. “Many women are mistreated and misrepresented within the games industry,” he writes. “It’s not a matter of opinion, a political position, or claim made to reinforce previous bias. It’s the demonstrable, sad truth.”

On The Mary Sue, Jill Pantozzi addresses the recent sexual harassment incident at PAX East, and in doing so touches upon several incidents at other recent events and the endemic problem it represents.

Back on The Border House, guest poster Sarah Argodale challenges the “accepted wisdom” of game advertising’s narrow representation.

GDC CATCH-UP

What’s the big deal with this Game Developers Conference everyone and their dog went to in March, anyway? I couldn’t adequately convey everything which went down but here is a great sampling of posts on the conference (and GDC-adjacent events) which showed up in my feeds these last two weeks.

First, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Nathan Grayson has a great overview up in which he describes this year’s conference as “a worrisome, hopeful contradiction“:

RPS’s own wayward ronin word master Cara Ellison, during a post-convention victory dinner, put it best: “GDC is where we first hear about all the stuff everyone will be talking about next year.” Maybe it’s a trend-setter, or maybe it’s just a megaphone for gentle tickles of trends that are already in motion, but the point remains: GDC tends to be pretty indicative of where we’re at. People often view E3 in that light, but the fact is, it’s a dinosaur wreathed in fireworks, frilly undergarments, and little else. E3 is a projection. GDC has evolved into its opposite: introspection. We look inward, and then we discuss. And this year – thanks to things like the renewed prominence of PC gaming, a focus on indies, and the #1ReasonToBe talk – I came away quite optimistic.

David Rosen has posted the write-up of his rant from this year’s Indie Soapbox, encouraging independent developers to make not eschew technological advances because of their AAA stigma. The one and only anna anthropy also posted a write-up of her dys4ia post-partum and other talks given at GDC. Elsewhere, Dennis Kogel conducted an interview with anthropy for Superlevel.de.

Bit Creature’s Jason Johnson looks back at some of the indie titles he encountered during the conference. In a similar vein, Jenn Frank played That Dragon, Cancer at the Unwinnable Salon the closing night of GDC, and reflects powerfully on the game’s subject matter.

Responding to recent controversies about hired models at GDC parties, Jason Killingsworth invites us to look at it from a different angle: his sister, a professional model, has attended plenty of similar events, and “there was nothing shady about the practice.” Killingsworth adds, “The way I see it, a little demystification goes a long way.”

On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander, who spoke at this year’s conference, shares why GDC brought out so many emotions for her. Writing for the same, Kirk Hamilton describes this year’s conference as a wake-up call for the videogame industry: “Change is in the air. Change for the better.”

On the German side, Dennis Kogel delivers in spades, with splendid series of write-ups and interviews for Superlevel.de. Here he is interviewing Austrian games journalist Robert Glashüttner. Here, he covers the FTL postmortem, the #1ReasonToBe panel, and the Creatrilogy talk with Andy Hull, James Lantz and Davey Wreden. He also covered the IGF and Developer’s Choice Awards!

LOST LEVELS CATCH-UP (PART 1)

You may have also heard some murmurings on the Twitters about Lost Levels, a GDC “unconference” held across the street from the conference. George Weidman has an excellent write-up of the event. We should have a more thorough collection of video, photos and write-ups from the official site in a few days, in time for next week’s roundup.

And if you read German, Dennis Kogel has you covered there too.

OH MY GLOB WHAT IS IT

Have you heard of Alpaca Niisan? It’s about to give you nightmares. Thanks, Anne Lee. I think.

THE USUAL, PLEASE

The new Blogs of the Round Table topic is up! Go have a gander, for your health.

As always, we are dependent upon our readers for sending in your reading recommendations via Twitter and email. And yes, we welcome self-submissions! Don’t be shy.

Join us next week where we will hopefully have a slightly more manageable list of links for you to dig through. For now, we apologize if we just ruined your Sunday plans. But I think we can all agree it was surely worth it.