Kate Simpson at Falling Awkwardly has started a new series of articles on the metaphysics of Morrowind to remedy the dearth of critical analysis about the RPG. While the first entry is simply a primer to the series, the second and latest piece takes an in-depth look at a piece of Morrowind’s fiction, dissecting it as an attempt by its writers to explain save games in the context of the title without breaking the fourth wall.

It would appear that this Dragon Break has not been an isolated occurence. To explain the real cause of the phenomenon we need to rewind a little, to the ending of The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall. Or, should I say, endings. At the climax of Daggerfall, the player is faced with a choice: to whom to give the power to control Numidium (“Anumidium”, “Big Walker”), the giant, world-stomping magic robot previously used by legendary Emperor Tiber Septim to conquer Tamriel. There are seven possibilities, and seven endings. Obviously, this left the writers ofMorrowind with something of a quandry – which ending to call canon, and write into the history books of Tamriel? The answer, which came to be known as “the Warp in the West”, was: all of them.

At The Artful Gamer, Chris Lepine tries to figure out how mastering a game is its own enjoyment, written as a response to Jamie Madigan’s article at Psychology of Video Games on how gaming can be good for your mental health. Lepine writes:

I see the “poetic imagination” as one source for the joys of play. When I imagine through the world that a story, a poem, or a game  has to offer, part of me is “in the game” and part of the game “is in me”. I cannot distinguish very easily between myself and this imaginary world. In those moments, where I allow myself to imagine freely while respecting the world the place has to offer, I am at my most playful.

Jamie Madigan also writes a piece on Gamasutra comparing jam reviews to video game reviews.

Puny humans are pretty bad at combining an array of weighted factors so as to arrive at a rating or decision –it’s just not how our minds were designed. Jelly or game review guidelines that require us to over analyze our decisions or check them off against a standardized list of factors (graphics, sound, etc.) can exacerbate this limitation and lead us to consider what should be irrelevant information when making our ratings. This corrupts the rating process and takes us farther from our “true” feelings or evaluations.

Chris Dahlen of Save The Robot has a new installment of his on-going series where he covers game universes. In his latest article, “The World to End All Worlds”, he talks about World War II as a world unto itself, which has been a stage for countless works of fiction including many games.

At The Escapist, Ben Croshaw, best known for his Zero Punctuation series of video reviews, argues against the use of the term “gamer”, stating that while we have no reason to feel ashamed of playing video games, we shouldn’t be too proud of it either:

The point I’m trying to reach is that playing games, as entertaining and fascinating and beneficial as it might be, is just something people do, not something they should be defined by. People don’t call themselves moviegoers, or TV watchers, or book readers. That’s the job of marketing agencies.

Robert Yang discusses the illegibility of the free roaming city at radiator blog, calling player agency in “god games” a complete illusion. On the topic of SimCity, he writes:

We aren’t actually creating a city; we’re just optimizing some preset numbers and formulas about how Will Wright thinks a city should privilege high property values or high density housing or nuclear power.

“For as often as I died while playing N+, maybe the best compliment that I can pay it is that I didn’t mind a single time,” writes L.B. Jeffries on Popmatters. Jeffries argues that instead of frustrating the player with its difficulty, N+ encourages the player to master its challenges.

This is a really tough problem to fix in a game because you really can’t predict what weird crap people are going to do. N+ perfectly resolves the issue because you die too quickly to ever invest in a particular strategy. You know that you’re doing something right in a level if there aren’t little bits of ninja scattered everywhere. It’s what helps turn the game into something that you play repeatedly even if you die because you’re puzzling out the correct sequence of moves, making death an intrinsic part of play and also one that feels rewarding.

Steven O’Dell of Raptured Reality brings up some very interesting points on video games and the industry’s seemingly adolescent obsession with violent behavior in “Weapon Overload“. He argues that game developers can and should look beyond the norm, and attempt to do much more with the game space available.

Also on the topic of violence, Ferguson of Interactive Illuminatus has completed a series of articles covering the very subject. In part 5 of the series, Ferguson discusses the role of violence in art:

The reasons for questions about the moral implications of experiencing works made in new artistic medium all boil down to the same thing–that while the violence may be depicting something already depicted by an earlier medium, the new medium is much more successful in its depiction.  New artistic mediums are a double-edged sword in this regard.  The reason for their rapid embrace by the public is exactly the same reason concerns over graphic content arise: they are simply more graphic.  Graphic violence is considered a kind of pejorative in today’s litigation-addled world, but artistically it’s nothing but a compliment.  To depict something more graphically than what came before is the entire goal of art.

Spectacle Rock’s John Haddock covers the subject of licensed games, with a look at some of the industry’s best and worst moments with its use (and abuse) of licensed intellectual properties.

At GamerLimit, Kyle MacGregor analyzes Flower’s environments as narrative spaces, which tell a subtle story of two clashing worlds–of man’s relationship with nature.

When the sun sets during the second level of Flower, it provides an absolutely breathtaking landscape where the silhouettes of turbines line a crimson-gold skyline slowly fading into darkness. This addition of wind turbines may not seem like a particularly huge development for the location in terms of beauty or tranquility, especially considering the environmental connotations associated with the structures, but this marks a distinct turning point for the title’s setting. The world of man and that of nature has begun to intermix. That environment is forever changed, and because the will of man differs from that of nature – a conflict is born.

Rounding up this week’s compilation is Ashelia’s comparison of Final Fantasy XIII and Heavy Rain at Hellmode. She elaborates on their similarities, and expresses her disappointment on the wasted potential of the games. She sums up Heavy Rain’s problems as:

In Heavy Rain, it rains. It pours. A couple of boys are murdered. And then it rains some more. While it looks gorgeous–a collage of scenic cityscapes drenched in a torrential downpour–nothing else happens. It does very little and shows even less.

Adam Ruch at his Flickering Colours blog writes about ‘Attempting to appreciate Gears of War’, saying:

Tom Bissell explores videogames in a deeply personal way in his book Extra Lives, and comes to the conclusion that Resident Evil made it possible for videogames to be stupid.  If Resident Evil paved the Roman road, this makes Gears of War a German autobahn.

Speaking of Resident Evil, Steven O’Dell at the Raptured Reality blog writes that Resident Evil 5 loses by omitting silence.

LB Jeffries at PopMatters looks at the difficulty in making game parodies: “The general traits of a video game parodying another video game are simplification of both content and design to show how inane the bare bones interaction of that game really is.”

Michael Clarkson looks at Nier and ‘the curious case of Kaine’; “So here you have it: a character who basically compiles every single sexist trope in JRPG character design into a single body.”

Eric Swain at The Game Critique argues in defence of Ludonarrative Dissonance.

Brendan Keogh of Critical Damage writes about ‘Feeling Every Punch’ a follow-up to his ‘Player Privilege’ post, looking at the interesting amount of overlap between the real and virtual worlds:

the player takes meaning out of a game (both positively and negatively) through the ways the game affects the player in the real world. To twist this around: the real-world consequences of the player’s virtual actions communicate meaning to the player.

The first time I realised this was happening was a few years ago when, as part of a quest, I tried jumping from a great height in World of Warcraft and my body tensed up, completely in response to what I was seeing.

Evan Kilham writing for community site Bitmob about ‘Making “Wrong” Decisions in Open-World Games’ says,

There’s a conflict, then, between the developer’s story of a mission and the player’s. With “Eva in Peril,” Rockstar wanted to tell a tragic story about how misfortune perpetuates itself unto death. I wanted to tell a story about how John Marston efficiently rid the West of a drunken, pimping fuckstick. The developer’s intentions won, as always, even if that meant arbitrarily removing options from the equation. In many cases, then, the most audacious part is letting players think they have any choice at all.

And from same, Rob Savillo looks at the Rogue-like in ‘Every Death Is Progress’:

Progress in [a Rogue-like] is not progress in the traditional sense. Descending lower in the dungeon and advancing in character levels are secondary to the real meat of the experience: understanding gameplay systems and how they interact. Through experimentation and exploration, which are core design tenets of the genre, you slowly become a better player.

Chris Green at Chronoludic asks ‘Are Games Too Easy?’

At The Escapist, the ExtraCredits series looks at ‘the God of War trilogy’s triumphs and failings as a narrative.’ That sounds like it could be fun.

Ashelia at Hellmode received a glowing endorsement from Epic Games’ own Cliff Bleszinski for her piece ‘Videogames are undeniably art’. Her argument is that “…gamers and their attitudes are why video games aren’t perceived as art–even if we’re why they exist in the first place.”

Leigh Alexander tries to catalogue every videogames console she has ever owned, in chronological order (she’s up to part 2). Back when the whole “it’s a new decade!” thing was still new, I briefly considered trying to do this for the previous decade’s worth of videogames I had played, before realising that it would be quite impossible. Much better to look at the consoles themselves, I think.

Alexander has obviously been keeping busy this week as she’s also written a long essay on whether or not Videogames are “just consumer products” like soap for Kotaku.

I’m one of those who’d like to see gamers be a little more moderate about reducing games to “consumer technology product.” Remember the old five-category “product guide” review system – in which “graphics,” “sound” and the nebulous “fun factor” were disparate and separately-scored categories? Yeah, we ditched that, because games are more complex than that now.

Chris Dahlen’s well received series of posts on world building in games ‘Just another world’ continues with entries on Planescape Torment, ‘This Creepy Circle of Trees Near My House’ and, um, ‘The Phantom Menace’.

Roger Travis is a professor of classics at the University of Connecticut who is collaborating with Karen Zook and Kevin Ballestrini on using game mechanics to teach students Latin. In a post called “Operation LAPIS” on his blog Living Epic, Travis looks at the HUD mechanic and wonders, “What if learning how to read Latin were like learning to use a HUD?”

I missed this last week but it’s worth taking a look at – the always persuasive Tanner Higgin makes ‘A Case for Narrating Gameplay’ – don’t read it wrong, that’s narrating gameplay – which is all about why “there’s immense untapped analytical and political potential in mining the voices of critics and members of the game community.” Higgin says,

Consider how frustrating it is when writing about games to describe the game in the traditional mode of literary or film studies. What precisely are we describing? Working within the conventions of traditional academic writing we rely on a description of the plot, setting, and controls and some cursory depiction of visuals perhaps bolstered by screenshots. But this ends up being ultimately unsatisfying because this is only a partial explanation. We’re not getting at what a game does.

The difficulty in maintaining interest when describing games, game mechanics, and even game experiences, is an issue that Dan Bruno raised the other week in a post on his Cruise Elroy blog about Tom Bissell’s novel Extra Lives.

Matthew Armstrong of the Misanthropic Gamer blog writes about ‘Fats, Blacks and Gigantic Racks’ in which he opens with a blistering “Not even with a twenty-foot pole will you currently see the realm of videogames touch upon a realistic conception of body image.” He’s not wrong.

At the Second Person Shooter blog, Laura Michet has been playing the original Starcraft for the first time. Saying that she might have stuck with it when she was younger “if its single-player campaign hadn’t struck me as such an awful piece of crap”, she’s now found how to get through it:

I’ve been slowly plowing through it these past few weeks, and I’ve been enjoying it. I’ve also been watching many, many Starcraft II replay videos. Together, I think they’re helping me understand something about the role that story sometimes plays in multiplayer-enabled RTSes. Both campaigns and replay commentaries serve, in part, the exact same purpose. They’re translations.

David Carlton takes a stab at answering the question ‘What is it you see in social games?’, and David is probably as good a person as any to attempt an answer as his day job involves developing social games for Playdom. However he’s quite forthright that he doesn’t have all the answers, and is after your help in finding some. Won’t you go give him a hand?

First up, and right from the very tail end of last week, Ashelia at Hellmode looks at her ‘darker competitive side’. A thing I’d like to see more of: writing, analysis, criticism of multiplayer gaming.

At The Last Metaphor Benjamin Garratt writes about ‘choices, entertainment, Pynchon’ in a conversation with a friend. Garratt has an interesting back catalogue of posts you might also like to dip into, like say ‘The Metaphysics of the Instance’ or ‘Spingtime for Helghan: the story of a Killzone clan’.

At Game Set Watch, Jamie Madigan writes about ‘The Psychology of Immersion’, a topic which has been getting a bit of a run again over the past few weeks. What sparks this reinterest in immersion?

Jorge Albor at the Experience Points blog looks at player autonomy, what constitutes autonomy, and what prerequisites exist for making autonomous informed decisions as a player.

G. Christopher Williams writes for PopMatters about ‘Mountains of Men: The Mythology of the Male Body in Video Games’ which comes highly recommended.

The pseudonymous author Spitfire at the Game-ism blog writes about ‘A Narrative Trumping Mechanic’ which returns to the highly regarded Batman: Arkham Asylum and looks at who really is the big bad, and how solving the Riddler’s riddles made him feel more like the Caped Crusader:

Joker’s men (and even Joker himself) were truly nothing more than a nuisance, something for me to backfist while I wasn’t even looking in their direction while I had my Bat-Visor turned on looking for Nigma’s riddles to solve.  That sensation felt like Batman.  There’s always something else going on in Batman’s head; he’s a cerebral detective, not just a pugilist who breaks bones but doesn’t kill.

From Checkers, to Chess, to Super Mario Bros. and Assassin’s Creed – Corvus Elrod looks at jumping on his blog the Semionaut’s Notebook, looking at “what a few games communicate with the verb jump.”

Chris Dahlen’s got a pair of posts this week, looking at World Building for Edge Online and elaborating on the issue by looking at Crackdown in particular on his personal blog.

At Bitmob, Pat O’Malley writes about ‘How Square made Kingdom Hearts Work‘ and Isaiah Taylor laments the death of local coop.

Pippin Barr writes for his personal blog ‘On the inability to “Stay Frosty”’ in Modern Warfare 2.

Sebastian Wuepper writing for the Chronoludic blog explains the German Game ratings system, Germany being notoriously strict about videogame violence.

And lastly Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer blog looks at how Portal got onto the course reading list for all freshmen students at a small liberal arts college.

Missed this one in the shuffle last week but it’s too brilliant to omit; Auntie Pixelante teaches us some level design lessons by way of Castlevania.

After Leigh Alexander’s expose about Activision discouraging its developers from taking creative risks and, in particular, having female protagonists, Dilyan Damyanov at the Split/Screen Co-Op blog writes in defence of the much maligned company, in a post titled “Activision’s all-male games are quite okay, really”. And Dilyan’s blogger-mate Vanya Damyanova concurs, in a follow-on post about “Evil game makers and women’s rights”. Are they convincing?

Pippin Barr writes about ‘Playing With Your Dinner’ on his personal blog:

Being a modern couple, we watch a whole shitload of movies and TV series when we eat our meals. Yeah, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks – we’re watching something. That’s what meals are for. Surprisingly, though, Tales of Monkey Island has taken over all of that.

Over at the PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog, G. Christopher Williams looks at ‘Brutalizing Children in Limbo’ and, um, stares longingly at Chun Li’s thighs.

Chun-Li’s sexuality becomes something more than an incidental quality to be admired merely because she inherently possesses an extraordinary physical trait.  Chun-Li’s thighs might be eroticized, but they represent an earned physical extraordinariness.

Williams’ blogger-mate Nick Dinicola comes back with another piece on Limbo in ‘Dreaming in Limbo’.

Mark Cullinane at the No Added Sugar blog has a rather different reaction to Limbo, turning his attention to the critical response to the indie XBLA title and finds its reception unwarrantedly hyperbolic. Cullinane says,

Starved for such avant-garde minimalism, visual novelty and effective mood-setting elsewhere, Limbo has become a receptacle for the hopes and dreams of a videogaming generation: and it is here that the problems begin- because it simply can’t bear such a weight on its slim shoulders.

On the subject of the critical response, George Kokoris looks at the Echo Chamber nature of our responses to media and videogames in ‘On Echo Chamers’. Kokoris explains himself, saying,

I’ve found that I’m really uncomfortable with the world of videogames. With all aspects of it; commercial, indie, academic and journalistic. My reasons for this are still largely intuitive, but I know enough to say that homogeneity is at least partly to blame.

At the Border House blog, Quinnae Moongazer asks “Ain’t I a Gamer?” It’s an unfortunate tale that seems to indicate Microsoft doesn’t think that any women use their Xbox LIVE service:

Chantaal describes a customer service letter that was sent to her by Microsoft that assumed she was writing about an issue her nonexistent son was having, instead of making the correct inference that she was the gamer in question.

Jake Adelstein writing for Boing Boing involves some real life Yakuza in an assessment of Yakuza 3.

S: I don’t know any ex-yakuza running orphanages.

K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy.

M: You sure it wasn’t just a tax shelter?

K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know.

Steven Poole’s ‘Don’t Believe Everything You Read’ for Edge Online made me chuckle this week. It’s a short piece about an imaginary world in which books are treated like the moral degenerates games are often assumed to be.

And similarly, Kieron Gillen at Rock Paper Shotgun writes about parallel universes in games. Well not in so many words, but that’s the implication I took from what he’s talking about here – it’s regarding StarCraft 2’s method for dealing with certain player choices in the campaign.

Emily Short writes this week on her personal blog about Braid, Tom Bissell’s book Extra Lives, and explains her unique diagnosis of the issue afflicting many (dare I say, most?) indie/art games:

This ghastly indie-art-game prose: it’s writing that tries to communicate ideas in the same way that game mechanics communicate ideas. Such writing offers allusions and suggestions, hints for the player to assemble, but it shies away from specifics or a through-line plot. Characters often go unnamed, or are named something thuddingly symbolic, or are Everyman. Theme is presented heavy-handedly (you wouldn’t want players to miss it!) and via the most cliché images.

Robert Yang at his blog Radiator takes a very quick look at a particular videogame title and why it’s so good. Which videogame? “Sins of a Solar Empire”. It does have a certain ring to it. Click through to hear why it makes for such a great title.

Adrian Forest at the RedKingsDream blog makes a case that Ian Bogost’s Facebook game Cow Clicker ‘Isn’t Exploiting You Enough’. Forest’s exceptional thesis applies only to a particular kind of social game, one that “…is running a social structure, and treating it like a business.” Essentially Cow Clicker, while an excellent pastiche of the act of playing this type of game, fails to replicate the social forces involved in playing a game like this.

A game that might follow the logic of Bogost’s procedural rhetoric in a way more relevant to the social gaming system might be something along the lines of a management sim about running a social gaming development company.

David Carlton at Malvasia Bianca looks at ‘Operas, Musicals and Videogames’ and wonders why,

If these well-respected art forms can use a threadbare narrative as a vehicle for glorious set pieces, why on earth shouldn’t we do the same?

Kirk Hamilton on how Grand Theft Auto IV should have ended – I never got around to playing GTAIV so this one’s all Greek to me.

Linda Holmes at NRP debunks some of the myths surrounding the market for the Scott Pilgrim film. It’s interesting in that it exposes the pervasive level of game-awareness that exists outside the stereotypical ‘gamer’ culture.

Gus Mastrapa looks at how “Game Designers Can Be Cursed By Their Successes” for the Joystick Division blog.  Mastrapa says,

Somehow the Scorsese principal doesn’t quite translate over to games. In games, it seems that you’re almost forever indebted to your first hit. Only multi-hit geniuses like Shigeru Miyamoto get to flit from one idea to the next like a beaming fairy with a magic wand.

And finally, Michael Abbott of The Brainy Gamer is compiling something like a list of “What makes each game fun” and is asking for your help. It’s called ‘The Fun Factor Project’.

First up this week is a trifecta of posts from Game Set Watch – Zoran Iovanovici is back talking about Metal Gear Solid 4 and the War Economy this week, and Jamie Madigan looks at a concept called ‘psychological reactance’ in the games of Bioware. The third is Ian Bogost who is rightly afraid that his Facebook game ‘Cow Clicker’ may become his most well known (certainly his most virulent) project to date, as he tells Leigh Alexander. I’ll admit I’ve kind of become attached to my Soviet Cow in ‘Cow Clicker’.

In response to Bogosts’ ‘Cow Clicker’ and the interview above, Nels Anderson asks ‘What does free really cost?’ in which he looks at the non-monetary costs associated with the compulsive social game.  On the flip side of the social game discussion, Erin Hoffman’s ‘How Social Games Ate Our Lunch‘ reports on the surprises that she uncovered in her “full immersion” into the social game realm, leading to her conclusion that,

we should be acknowledging and welcoming this new kind of gamer, and listening to what they have to say. From Senet to Settlers of Catan to Counter-Strike to FarmVille, we are all gamers, connected through the electric muse of interactivity, chasing the same brain state. And that, especially when it unnerves us, is a beautiful thing.

David Wildgoose at Kotaku Australia kicked off the healthy amount of discussion seen around the XBLA game Limbo this week. Wildgoose, inspired by a Kyle Orland piece at Gamasutra talks about game durations in ‘Does length matter?’ He relates a common occurrence at tradeshows like E3 stating that,

Almost without fail, a game demonstration at events such as E3 will conclude with one of the assembled media enquiring as to how many hours of gameplay are contained within the game we just saw. If I’m rolling my eyes, the developer giving said demonstration would surely want to do likewise. After all, it’s a stupid question.

Continuing the discussion, Brian Longtin at Under Culture discusses ‘Death and Education’ in Limbo, saying that “By setting its action in a literal out-of-body experience, Limbo changes our perception in two major ways that make it essentially and marvelously different than its peers.” Go check out the full piece for the details on those two ways.

Mitch Krpata had a rather different response to Limbo, however, proving the rule that not all games are made for all people. Krpata felt the game was,

Some clever ideas thrown onscreen with no regard for how they fit together, and no semblance of anything I recognize as good game design. Games are about rules, with the occasional exception that throws you for a loop. Limbo is all exceptions and no rules.

Kirk Hamilton of Gamer Melodico also wrote about Limbo this week, but focussed mainly on ‘That one puzzle in Limbo’ which seemed to give everyone grief and uses it to launch into a discussion of how much can be expected of a gamer, and how much they are able to draw on the knowledge of a community. Is it safe to assume, for instance, that everyone has access to the internet & gamefaq’s?

Andrew Kauz at Destructoid also wrote about Limbo this week in piece titled, ‘Violence, mystery, and meaning in the dark world of Limbo’.

Moving on from Limbo, John Walker at Rock Paper Shotgun demonstrates with some pretty graphs the definitive connection between the Grand Theft Auto series and the rate of deaths/divorces, etc. This is a post with its tongue planted firmly in its cheek. Graphs can’t be wrong, right?

Brendan Keogh looks at ‘Player Privilege: Why It Is Still Just A Game’ in a thought provoking post on Critical Damage. Here’s what he has to say about it:

The majority of games hand the player all kinds of privileges that affect how they experience the game. The player has received these privileges for so many years that not only is there a presumption that these privileges are required, but most players are so comfortable in the current environment that they do not even know such privileges exist. I want to abolish the player’s privileges—or at least challenge the player’s dependency on them.

The phrase ‘Ludonarrative Dissonance’ has been a contentious once ever since it was introduced by Clint Hocking in his famous essay on Bioshock. This week, Corvus Elrod took the phrase to task in a post for his Semionaut’s Notebook, saying,

When we use the term ludonarrative dissonance to describe gameplay that does not support that plot and theme of the narrative, we are saying that gameplay is fundamentally other than storytelling. That gameplay and story are somehow haphazardly stapled together in an uncomfortable union. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Kris Ligman at Pop Matters writes about ‘Worlds Without Words: What German Expressionism Can Teach Us About Game Design’. This piece comes highly recommended.

Another must read this week was Leigh Alexander’s in-depth look into creative and managerial direction at Activision which, citing a number of sources, alleges pressure is often put on developers to conform to focus testing, and in particular to conform to profitable sterotypes. The result, as investigated by Alexander, is often to the detriment of the representation of female protagonists, and the practice is so much in evidence apparently that there are “No Female Heroes At Activision”. Top shelf journalism, the likes of which is all too rarely seen in the enthusiast press.

Daniel Primed at his personal blog attempts to ‘deconstruct the Mario franchise on the Game Boy’.

At Bitmob Omar Yusuf asks “what techniques should developers employ in order to achieve the same verisimilitude which Speilberg injected into [Saving Private Ryan]?” which, while an interesting thought exercise, seems to miss a bit of the point about the differences between the two media. It also presents a good excuse to link to Clint Hocking’s “Live and Let Die” post from (coincidentally) this same week last year, in which Hocking explains why he feels aping cinematic techniques in games is a bit of a dead end. Hocking notes that,

By mastering these narrative techniques and wedding them to our designs…we can arrive at Saving Private Ryan. What that means is that 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, we will deliver a brand new entertainment medium that is as powerful and moving as one we already have. That’s great, I guess. But if I am going to dedicate my life this, I want to end up with something that is more, something that is better than what we have now.

Also at Bitmob: Ben Maxwell looks at the upshot of hardware limitations of earlier periods that resulted in some of the most iconic character design videogaming has seen, and Brett Bates looks at whether or not Alan Wake’s new DLC has improved its use of collectibles (remember those oft-criticised thermoses?  Gone but not forgotten).

Quinnae Moongazer looks at how her relationship with the World of Warcraft has changed as she herself has undergone a change:

It was no longer ‘my’ fantasy, a fact that intruded quite violently on my mind during the RealID crisis and in other recent events on the WoW forums where the mass of the game’s population poured scorn on transgender people. What had made it clear to me was the fact that my own comfort in the game was now “political”- not in the classical sense of the personal being political, but in the sense of ‘politics doesn’t belong in my game, so keep it out.’

And in a similar vein, guest blogger ‘Pewter’ writing for GeekFeminism in a piece called “I don’t see your problem: Sexism, World of Warcraft and Geekery” says,

When I log in to WoW, I don’t get discriminated against because I am a woman. My opinions are valued by my fellow officers and guild members (and a wider community of people on my realm.) This blog is my voice, and I have power over the comments. I am surrounded by intelligent, clever, eloquent people in the communities I have chosen to interact with. I have been educated by their words, by their examples. If I want I can exist in an online bubble and chose to believe that this way of thinking is mainstream. …And then I poke my head out of my friendly little bubble, and the magnitude of crap out there makes me wibble and want to hide away again.

Andrew Leonard was a game reviewer for Salon.com until he fell off the wagon, but though he doesn’t write reviews anymore, someone forgot to inform Blizzard and so this week he considered ‘The temptation of Starcraft II’. Leonard notes the crucial difference between videogames and other media, saying:

A compelling video game is not like a good movie or a book that captures a few hours or days of one’s available attention. A compelling game is a voracious invader that takes over your life and won’t let go.

Back at Gamer Melodico, Annie Wright took an in-depth look at Zombies and suggested that ‘The Zombie Apocalypse is the New American Dream’. I’m not sure it’s an entirely new idea, but she certainly puts an interesting slant on it.

Sebastian Wuepper seemed to be the only one still talking about Red Dead Redemption this week, making the assessment on his blog Tellurian’s Petshop that “Rockstar’s latest masterpiece suffers from a disease a lot of current games have contracted. Minigamitis.” .

And lastly for the week, Steve Gaynor at the Fullbright blog writes “On the old vs. the new”, discussing the issue of immersion, inspired by yet another Clint Hocking thing – this time a talk he gave late last year at MIT.

Roger Travis looks this week at whether Bioshock belongs (in the classical tradition) to the Epic or Tragic genre:

The question I want to consider in this post is whether it’s helpful to think about these ancient genres together in connection with our ongoing attempt to figure out what video games are good for.

I’ll resist the temptation to respond with a Brownian “Absolutely nothing!”

Matthew Armstrong of The Misanthropic Gamer writes about ‘The Pokémon Ego Agenda’, saying

It’s pretty damn easy to point out that Pokémon is a series that needs to change. The trick however, is dealing with what is an established and deeply set-in formula that has lasted over a decade now.

Denis Farr, having moved his blog the Vorpal Bunny Ranch over to a new site, writes about the independent XBLA game Limbo in an aptly named post, ‘Before Limbo’.

And at Bitmob, Patricia Hernandez also looks at the game in, ‘Limbo: A Journey Through Hell’, a beautifully written piece about humanity’s relationship with travelling:

Today civilization is defined by the industrious stationary cityscape. Civilized men, you will find them in towns, in cities, in an office. The others, the ones that render themselves illegible to society — nomads — their world is travel.

I could definitely see this being spun out into a much more lengthy and in-depth piece. It’s a rich topic for discussion at any rate.

The Game Prodigy blog turns its attention this week to ‘Focus, Atmosphere, Limitations: Learning from Shadow of the Colossus’.

At the Grey Wardens, Emily Bembeneck writes about ‘Shale and Gender Stereotypes in Dragon Age’ examining the DLC character of Shale.

On a related tangent, Andrea Phillips at Deus Ex Machinatio looks at the choose-your-own-adventure style games by Choice of Games and the way they handle gender choices. Phillips’ argument centres on the fact that merely changing the gender of the avatar results in a superficially “female” character as it won’t reflect a true female experience. She notes,

…one of the things I found so captivating about [Dragon Age] was the overt sexism of some characters. It was incredibly satisfying to me to have a character take a dismissive attitude of me in the game, because I was a woman — as in real life — and have the power in the game to rise above it and prove them wrong, in a way I don’t always have the courage or capacity to do in real life.

Of course it’s a supremely tricky line to walk, and she goes on to outline some of the ways to approach the issue, each of which has unique drawbacks.

You might like to read the next in light of the above, as Leigh Alexander explains what she discovered by playing Persona 3 Portable as an in-game girl for Kotaku. It’s interesting as it’s not quite same situation Phillips found herself in, as Alexander notes:

I didn’t realize a virtual sex change would make the experience anything but the same as before.

LB Jeffries writing at Pop Matters considers ‘Morality in Shiren the Wanderer’. I’ve always wanted to play Shiren, ever since Iroquois Pliskin mentioned, way back in January of 2009, that he’d spent a delirious week walking the line between consciousness and unconsciousness while playing Shiren with a horrible tropical fever.

Also at PopMatters, G Christopher Williams has one of the most punchy openers to any blog post I’ve read recently, noting:

Pac-Man will die. / The space invaders will win. / Donkey Kong will get the girl.  And you won’t.

It’s about ‘Cynicism and Retro Game “Endings”’.

Psychology of Games looks at Immersion in videogames taking a more theoretical approach to the subject than some of the recent more philosophical discussions.

Simon Parkin’s ‘maps’ for BoingBoing was an interesting read. I thought it was interesting that the map of the Final Fantasy world depicted at the top was so characteristically Final Fantasy-esque, even if it was from a game I hadn’t actually played, I could still tell it was Final Fantasy.

Evan over at the freshly minted Fickle Cycle blog writes ‘On why Far Cry 2 and STALKER are some of the most important games this gen’. I couldn’t resist.

Michael Abbott writes about Deathspank for GameSetWatch in ‘Blood, Steel and Bacon’. And on his Brainy Gamer blog, Abbott writes about the ‘Arab Shooting Gallery’ that is the WiiWare game Heavy Fire: Special Operations. In response to the points raised by Abbott, Jason Young on the Beeps and Boops blog writes about why he felt outraged by the aforementioned game in ‘Destroy All Arabs!’

Kirk Hamilton attended ‘Jesse Schell’s “Visions of the Gamepocalypse”’ talk at the Yerba Buena Centre in San Francisco this week and helpfully wrote up the talk for everyone to dissect and enjoy.

Radek Koncewicz looks at the difficulty in localizing exclamations, taking the example of FFXIII:

As things stand, vocalizations often come across as alien and awkward. They break the flow of conversation and the suspension of disbelief, and can leave a new audiences feeling put off.

Brendan Keogh at Critical Damage writes about his first faltering steps with Final Fantasy VII in ‘imagined interactions’, using the tale to advocate the use of more player imagination in gaming.

Paul Sztajer at Fabula Ex-Machina discusses Inventory Management in games.

Nels Anderson asks, quite pertinently, ‘Why Are So Many Indie Darlings 2D Platformers?’ spurred on by a twitter conversation. Anderson says,

I’m not using ‘indie darling’ pejoratively, and I’m going to sidestep splitting hairs about what is and isn’t “indie.” Suffice to say, edge cases aside, I think there’s a common set of games we can agree on. As for why there are so many 2D platformers, there are at least two significant reasons. One is purely pragmatic, the other more related to the medium itself.

Go read the whole thing to find out what Anderson thinks those reasons are.

Matthew Burns spoke to Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Videogames Matter, about the game Alan Wake and what he thought about a fiction writer as game protagonist:

I can’t tell you how excited I was to hear about a video game whose protagonist was a fiction writer. Then I read that this fiction writer protagonist could sprint for only about ten feet or so, and I thought, “Yes! They’ve done their research!”

It’s short, and won’t take you more than two minutes, but there are some real gems in there.

Thanks again to Eric Swain for covering TWIVGB so thoroughly in my absence.

To start off I want to note two works that comment on an ongoing debate and criticism of the larger video game culture, namely the video game review. Jim Sterling at Destructoid does his best to give the public what they want, a completely objective video game review. He does a magnificent job on Final Fantasy XIII, ending with the strong and irrefutable declaration that: “In conclusion, Final Fantasy XIII is a videogame.” In contrast, Kirk Hamilton, writing for Paste Magazine, eschews all of the normal expectations of a video game review and instead focuses on the nature and impact that Limbo instilled in him. I wish there was a little more to it that would explain the game to someone not in the know, but I think it is a step in a much better direction. See reviewers, this can be done.

As preamble to the rest of this week’s This Week in Video Game Blogging I’ll note the strangely interconnected nature of much of the material. It is almost as if all of the writers were working in tandem, for much of the same thematic space is covered and interwoven, to the point where posts begin to inform on other posts deepening the subject matter. Each delving into deeper and deeper layers only revealed by the other works that come later or before. Almost like it was an inception…

A review of Christopher Nolan’s Inception at Kotaku is done as if it were a video game review, noting many of the video game tropes it borrows and alludes to. SnakeLinkSonic takes a step back and writes a review of reviewers of Inception by looking at the actual film. In many of his comments on what makes bad reviews, he could as easily have been talking about video game reviews or ones done like them as about a film. Kirk Hamilton, again, reviews Inception’s “tutorial” 1st act and how well it presents the user interface to the audience and juggles the mechanics Nolan chose to include.

Moving from the self searching of Inception to the self searching of immersion, VooRFACE writes a follow up to last week’s post in response to Ben’s comment on the different concept of self in eastern philosophies. To immersion in RPGs, Jonathan McCalmont from Futurismic looks at “Roleplaying Game and the Cluttered Self,” saying,

“The history and evolution of roleplaying games teaches us that the search for the self is a process of rendering something that is abstract and elusive into something that is concrete and substantial.  Whether as individuals or societies, we are constantly trying to define ourselves, to scream into the void that we exist.”

With Sartre saying the self is defined by action and the choices we make, Game Critics looks at the types of choices offered in Dragon Age: Origins. Joel Haddock of Spectacle Rock laments about the by gone days of the western RPG where you created a whole party that you defined as a group and didn’t boil down of size and personalization that he says is the definitive Japanese influence on modern western creators. Laura Michet from Second Person Shooter notes the emotional alienation that factors in many of the modern western RPGs and how it distances the player from the character they are suppose to be. Robert Yang at Radiator Blog, however, explores the meaning and emotion he experienced through Dragon Age: Origins with the application of a single mod. To travel to the other side of the Pacific, Nick Dinicola at PopMatters talks about how the party divisions in Final Fantasy XIII is its characterization. Allen Kwan at Bitmob discusses how the player character’s avatar is characterized through their romantic relationships and how the RPG seems to be granting Equal Opportunity for Love. And for one last shot at the existential self in video games, L.B. Jeffries looks at A.I. and how it tricks the player into thinking it is real, even if only for a few seconds.

But what could be more intricate towards the self than death. Richard Clark asks “Is Death in Games Cheap?” on Gamasutra. A few days later Jeffery L. Jackson at Video Game Theory & Language wrote A Response to “Is Death in Games Cheap?”

Turning death outwards, Steve Gaynor explores the concept of violence in video games as a method of creating meaning and being meaningful unto itself. Alex Raymond at The Border House looks at such a game that tries to use violence to get a point across and does a link round up about Hey, Baby. Fraser Allison looks in the other direction at games that would have been better served if they had toned down the player’s ability to be violent more or removed it completely. And Bruno Dion at Bitmob talks about at how violence should be addressed and how most enemies are faceless entities that carry no emotional impact.

Ferguson at Interactive Illuminatus looks at what it takes to craft a worthy opponent: “when the player is defeated, the player should not say, “I lost,” but rather, “The villain won.” Sam Shahrani from Gamer Melodico runs down a list of Proper Villains in video games.

All of the above topics, the self, characterization, death, opponents and so forth come together in the comprehensive, conversational examination of Indigo Prophecy (aka. Fahrenheit) done over at Raptured Reality by Michelle Baldwin (the fresh eyes) and Steven O’Dell (the re-visitor).

Finally, there are the stragglers. Leigh Alexander analyzes how the three sections of the game industry, creators, journalist and consumers treat the other two and themselves fostering a cycle of unhappiness. Whether you agree or not, she brings up points that should be considered.

Ashelia at Hellmode, writes on the general failure of StarCraft’s ability to tell it’s arguable great story as limited by the genre conventions it created and StarCraft II’s possible inability to do the same.

Brendan Keogh at Critical Damage looks at Dues Ex Machina in Games. Ironically ending this round up on a note of fatalism after starting from a point of individualism. Ok, I’ll stop now. Ben will be back next week.

Speaking of time, I’m not sure how I missed including this last time I compiled TWIVGB – it’s Margaret Robertson with a piece she originally wrote for a Polish newspaper, freshly dusted off and popped online. It’s about ‘games as dating tools‘.

Sent in by Matthew Gallant and continuing the trend of sourcing from outside this week in blogging, Lost Chocolate Lab performs an ‘Informal Game Sound Study‘ by looking at the sounds of footsteps as heard in a number of games. Footstep sounds are a microcosm of the broader issues of game development. Gallant also recommends Brilliam’s piece ‘Pretense, Affectation, Videogames‘ in which Brilliam diagnoses what he sees as the problem of affectation in the game enthusiast community: “the real problem: we, as game nerds, are too embarrassed by our pretentiousness to call it what it is.” Not sure I agree with this one, but thought provoking nonetheless.

Keeping the contrarian theme going is the blogger known as Voorface, who writes in a post titled ‘Against Immersion‘ that “Pretending that videogames are real is a way to avoid living. One of the definitions of the verb “to immerse” is “to embed; bury”. Immersion is nothing less than a death wish.” To offer a quick alternative – my understanding is that in some spiritual philosophies the letting go of ‘self’ can be a path to enlightenment.

The ‘Game Narrative Triangle‘ by Fraser Allison is a thing worth reading. Allison takes the usual author/player dichotomy in game narrative and storytelling and adds a third element to the mix – the computer.

Found via Rock Paper Shotgun’s always worth reading Sunday Papers – as videogames (or at least hardcore/mainstream videogames) are a very dude dominated subculture I thought this tangentially related piece had real applicability to the industry and to videogame communities – How to ‘Make your dude dominated subculture more accessible to women‘.

At the intriguingly named Wing Damage blog, Jesse “Main Finger” Gregory asks ‘Will We Still be Able to Play our Games in 20 Years?‘ Another pertinent question might equally be will we even want to play these games in 20 years?

Michael Abbott has the following to say in post on The Brainy Gamer called ‘The Waggle Wanes’:

…. it seems to me developers (especially 3rd-party) have finally embraced the notion that waggling the Wiimote may not always be the best or even necessary option. Looking over the list of Wii games I’ve played over the last 6 months, I see lots of terrific games that made little or no use of motion-control (or rendered it purely optional), and none suffered for the loss.

Zoran Iovanovici continues series for Game Set Watch on ‘What Metal Gear Solid Has To Teach Us’, this time looking at Metal Gear Solid 3 and Baudrillard’s concept of Hyperreality. Also from Iovanovici is this piece at Gamasutra analysing ‘Humanism And The Virtues of Violence and Patricide in God of War’.

Jeffrey Jackson at Game Language comes out swinging with a pair of posts on ‘Cultural Hegemony within the world of Mass Effect’. Part one has this to say,

In the universe of Mass Effect, the organization called Cerberus is either a terrorist group or a pro-human organization. In cultural studies, however, it could be considered something else: an instrument designed to combat cultural hegemony.

And then read the follow-up, part two.

LB Jeffries writes for Pop Matters about the ‘Transparent Difficulty in Order of Ecclesia‘.

Also at Pop Matters, G Christopher Williams has been playing the new Prince of Persia game and finds ‘an aesthetics of demolition’ in the game. From there he goes on to discuss ‘Abusing the world‘ and the games like Red Faction Guerilla that involve some level of subtraction from the world as part of their game mechanics.

Even games without obvious opponents frequently depend on the idea that erasure is the solution to the problems that games pose and that some measure of satisfaction is derived from such erasure.  Indeed, a similar pleasure is evoked in a seemingly less destructive game like Tetris.

Paul Sztajer, now blogging at Fabula Ex Machina, writes in ‘A Matter Of Perspective’ about the separateness of gameplay genre from the issue of perspective. He says,

There’s an innate problem in defining the narrative form of a game: the gameplay genre may point towards one form, while the narrative essence of the gaming medium points in a different direction. Yet this description seems to underplay the sheer complexity of the issue, a complexity which seems to lie mostly in the concept of perspective.

And finally for this instalment, Matthew Weise at Outside Your Heaven explains “Why Red Dead Redemption Is Disappointing”. We Must Dissent!

Greg J. Smith at Serial Consign usually blogs about architecture, and occasionally, we are blessed with an essay like this one where he “consider[s] two broad themes in examining the delineation of urban space by architects and game designers. These themes are a top-down, consideration of the city as a system and the charged notion of “play” in urban space.” Smith notes that,

Advances in computer graphics and a need for increasingly sophisticated in-game navigation and informational systems have made gaming an R&D lab for exploring methods of representation derived from not only architecture, but interface design, cinematography, cartography and data visualization.

Nick LaLone at Before Game Design tries his hand at defining the term ‘video game’.

Michael Clarkson looks at ‘The Dunning-Kruger reticule’ which is a deceptive kind of reticule occasionally employed by RPGs that belies the fact there are hidden calculations behind the shot that determine where it’s going:

The steady reticule that doesn’t really represent where the bullets are going to hit isn’t a very satisfying representation of the character’s lack of skill. Indeed, it isn’t a representation of this at all. This is a problem because the visual language of games, and specifically the visual language most frequently experienced by the audience these games are meant to attract, attaches a certain meaning to the reticule, which the probabilistic calculations of an RPG violate.

Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer says kids are a ‘tough crowd’.

Chris Green at the RRoD blog is attempting to render Dostoevsky’s classic ‘Crime and Punishment’ using only the game-cum-story-machine Sleep is Death. He writes about some of the things he’s learnt from the exercise in a blog post entitled ‘Playing Monomania: A protagonist in the throes of madness’. What’s monomania, you ask? Says Green: “Monomania bares a resemblance to Paranoia because of its tendency to make the sufferer believe that their reality is the real one, that others are wrong and are plotting against him/her.” I swear I’ve had that at least once.

Ian Cheong says that he “played Uncharted 1 & 2 in the span of a week. It may have been the shortest amount of time I’ve taken to play two games and it’s because I never wanted to leave” and he’s been enjoying discovering the quality of the series. He says it mostly comes down to smart and believable character writing: “Dude Raider he is not. Unlike Lara Croft, Nathan Drake is a multidimensional character–one full of personality.”

The big story this week was the blow up around Activision/Blizzard’s RealID, but the only piece on it we’re going to mention here is from the Pensive Harpy blog. The author of this post says that the abortive move to force players to use real names on the World of Warcraft forums shows that, in the eyes of the company, ‘We are not the customer anymore’:

I think for many of us, this change from ’small tight-knit company to mega giant’ is a sad one, especially if you’ve been in MMOs a long time and remember when things were smaller and more personal…. I think we’ve finally crossed that line in the MMORPG sphere. Sure, it means bigger budgets, flashier graphics, bigger expansions and tie ins, and more prestige. But I think the MMORPG as a genre has lost a part of its soul; a part that had originally appealed to many players in the first place.

Jason Young at the Beeps and Boops blog writes about ‘Videogames as Propaganda’, starting with the BP Oil Spill situation and the prescient “BP Offshore Oil Strike” board game and moving onto others including the intriguing Redistricting Game and the eponymous America’s Army.

Julian at LittleBoBeep on ‘How Board Games Explain Everything – Pt 4, Utopia, Sex, Art’ and for the sake of completion, here’s part 3 which I don’t think we linked to at the time: ‘How différance can be understood in terms of games, play and Calvinball’.

Angelo at the Bergsonian Critique blog writes about ‘Understanding the Narrative of Final Fantasy XIII’. I’ll leave it to you to determine whether that’s mean disparagingly or not. It’s probably a neat companion piece to Simon Ferrari’s analysis of the FFXIII combat system. It’s certainly about as lengthy.

Brendan Keogh at the Critical Damage blog has a post this week called “Understanding My Allergy To BioWare Games” and it looks at the old bugbear of telling versus experiencing story.

Mashup, remix, pastiche, borrowing – whatever you want to call it – should only be a good thing for games, or so says Jorge Albor at the Experience Points blog in a post titled ‘Theft and Recreation’.

After mentioning Leigh Alexander’s excellent Jeremiad ‘Who Cheers for War?’ last week a number of writers have come out with responses to the piece.  First is Roger Travis at the Living Epic blog who being a Classics professor has

…a very long view of the question “Should we be worried that so many video games are about armed conflict?” In fact, that long view makes me like to ask the question somewhat differently: Why is traditional epic always about warriors? Why are so many of the most popular video games about soldiers, super-soldiers, and super-duper-soldiers?

Which are probably better questions to be asking in the larger scheme of things. The full piece is ‘Games of Armed Conflict: a question of narrative technology’ and I strongly encourage you to go read it. Similarly introspective and interrogative is Nick Dinicola who muses on “Why do I cheer for war?” and realises that “It’s not something that I’ve ever specifically thought about, but I now ask myself—why do I love shooters?” Which, if nothing else, is an endorsement of Alexander’s call to think about the subject a bit more critically and more often.

In a similar vein, Michael Thomsen at IGN makes the case that games should be even more violent, including a deeply disturbing and visceral description of the experience of cutting the throat of a chicken, illuminating quite powerfully (and perhaps upsettingly – reader discretion is advised!) how devoid of bloody reality games almost invariably are:

It’s been six years since I did all that and I can still remember the small details and the irresolvable emotions I felt in deciding my will should trump the right to life of another being. Making that judgment of another human, even in the safely authored realm of fiction, ought to provoke at least as much emotional conflict and self-doubt. Likewise, if killing a chicken is so complicated, it’s safe to assume killing a human being might require more than a melee attack or a few quick button presses.

At community site Bitmob, Jon Porter writes about backtracking in Metroidvania style games. I’m awarding bonus points for working a screenshot from Futurama into the article.

Laura Michet at the Second Person Shooter blog ‘failed to restore oxygen to the moonbase‘ and thinks NASA needs to take some game design lessons from the commercial sector. The problem?

I was convinced, throughout the whole playthrough, that the astronauts would die, that they would suffocate to death if I didn’t save them. Dead astronauts are the creepiest things modernity has offered us in the past fifty years.

And instead, all that happened was a minor setback, a day of productivity mysteriously ‘lost’. Sounds like Michet is looking for a Permadeath mode.

Touché Bitches has a nice illustrative post called ‘Beautiful Games’ drawing our attention to the beauty in a number of games and their art.

If you’re like me you’ve probably heard Johan Huizinga’s “Homo Ludens” referenced in just about any and every journal article about games ever written and yet somehow neglected to read it yourself. Well, now you don’t have to as LB Jeffries is here and he’s gone and made us a cliff notes version.

Chris Lepine of The Artful Gamer blog writes about ‘The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces’ this week.

On a more sombre note, the Press Pause to Reflect blog is, well, pressing pause to reflect for an extended, even indefinite period. Thanks for the all great work over the years, Daniel and CT. Enjoy the break.

The last word for the week can go to Leigh Alexander’s video about What’s Wrong With Videogame Journalism. It made me laugh.

First is Dan Bruno at Cruise Elroy who has been playing Mass Effect, and who says, “I am not Shephard”, comparing the decision to record dialogue for the player character’s voice in ME to Dragon Age’s mute protagonist.

Matthew Armstrong at SnakeLinkSonic talks about ‘Pissing in your games’.  He’s talking figuratively here, of course, but it’s about marking one’s territory and owning a particular game. It’s interesting to think about, at any rate.

At the Experience Points blog, Jorge Albor writes about games that present players with a youthful or child-like avatar in ‘To be young’.

Journalism graduate Lauren Orsini was a Kotaku intern, and she’s written a brace of worth-reading posts this week. In the first she discusses how ‘In video games, non-linear does not equal interactive’, and while you’re there, check her story about ‘the day I pissed off 4chan’ which is a timely cautionary tale for anyone on the internet, but writers and bloggers in particular.

Richard Clark at Christ and Popular Culture talks about ‘Red Dead’s particular brand of redemption.’ For Clark,

“The ends justify the means,” has been as much the mantra of video games as they have been the mantra of action films. The hero simply must do wrong so that a greater wrong may be avoided. No game developer has exploited this fact more masterfully than Rockstar.

Visiting a Parisian videogame exhibition, Tracey Lien of the ZeroLightSeeds blog is nonplussed.

Leigh Alexander wrote a terrifically evocative piece for Kotaku called ‘Who Cheers for War’ in which she questions why it is that games are so fixated on war. The issue hits close to home for Alexander, as she tells us, “The cousin of someone dear to me got all but one of his limbs blown off in Iraq. This is our most popular way to play together? And we are all okay with this?” I’ve long advocated the position that if games can be art (and the community seems to be in agreement that they can), then, like all art, there is the potential for it to have a real effect on people. And that effect doesn’t have to be positive. I think that’s what Alexander is alluding to here.

What continues to concern me is that we don’t think about it and we don’t discuss it. We’re able to witness grenade-flung bodies, we’re able to crush enemies under the treads of our vehicles, we’re ourselves able to die in trenches. And get up again, and keep doing it. How far can we push things before video games like these stop being a way to interact with and process the human experience, and instead cross a line to where they’re trivializing it?

Over at Futurismic, Jonathan McCalmont has an excellent entry looking at the social forces at work behind a piece of technology like Microsoft’s newly announced ‘Kinect’. McCalmont argues that,

Products like Kinect are responding to an increasingly universal desire by humans to retreat from the world and back into the womb. A womb provided by technology.

Andrew Kuhar, writing for community site BitMob, talks about how a certain time and place in the summertime and the attendant heat, always reminds him of a particular game (in this case the original Left 4 Dead). Says Kuhar,

Whenever I think of L4D, my mind always leaps back to that field trip. At the same time, I can’t see myself ever forgetting how hot it became back in our studio/lab, surrounded by 10-foot-tall windows facing the sun any moment it was up.

Also at BitMob, Andrew Lynes looks at the impact naming your own character has on the game experience, and on the player’s sense of immersion. As he notes,

The key issue this question speaks to is the role of the player in a video game. Is the player actually participating in the game universe? Am I Link? Or am I simply bearing witness to Link’s quest?

Keith Ferguson at the blog Interactive Illuminatus writes about difficulty, suggesting that designers ‘Slow it down – don’t dumb it down’.

Looking at narrative arcs and dramatic intensity in other media, Brendan Keogh at Critical Damage seeks to apply those lessons to games by ‘Keeping Pace’. This reminded me of Clint Hocking’s GDC ’09 talk about the unique and cyclical Composition/Execution pacing of Far Cry 2.

This week we have a new blog to watch out for, as Jeffrey L. Jackson, a self-confessed videogame scholar from Syracuse University, has started blogging under the heading of Video Game Theory and Language. His post on ‘the human condition’ that looks at Mass Effect 2 and how games can go about making players care about the actors in their stories is well worth a read.

…a single loyalty mission is not quite enough to make me really care about [a] death, if that should happen. Rather what needs to happen, and what developer BioWare is usually good at, is getting different NPCs to interact with each other during the mission.

Now to look at another academic, this time MIT researcher Matthew Weise of the Outside Your Heaven blog, with a pair of archive posts from April and May. Do we dare include such non-contemporary posts? Yes, we so dare. The first is ‘cold war punk’ and then the more recent post is ‘Letting the World Be – The Inherent Politics of Stealth?’, both about the Metal Gear Solid series of games.

Lastly, a pair of posts to put a knowing smile on your dial from the First Person Observer, which is reporting on a curious case wherein an ‘Assassin Experiences Ancestor’s Memories, Connection Problems’. Also a completely unrelated story, apparently this week a ‘Seminar On Improving Doorway Navigation Skills Delayed By Doorway’.

And a Happy 4th of July to our readers in the United States.

A quick reminder that comments are disabled to encourage discussion on the original postings.