rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

getting to the bottom of that required no less than six page-downs

I know, right? a forum post! crazy!

GameSpot UK: Why are you sick of Katamari Damacy?

Keita Takahashi: Wouldn't you be?

Yesterday As I Was Enjoying The Sonic Demo For The 1,000,000 Time My Picture Started To Go All Black And Grainy I Wasn't Sure Of The Problem So I Went Back To The Dashboard And The Screen Was Fine Apart From My Avatar That Was Also Grainy. So I Decided To Turn Off My Xbox And Switch It Back On. But When I Switched It Back On I Got 1 Red Ring And On The Screen Saying In Loads Of Diffrent Languages System Error.

I Also Got A Code At The Bottom Of The Screen Saying E 74. So I Went To Xbox.com And Went To Find Out What The Problem Was. The Only Help They Could Give Me Was Unplug Everything And Plug It All Back In. So I Did. Same Screen Came Up And I Still Had One Red Ring. It Also Said It Could Be A Problem With A Bit Of Hardware. Customer Support Was No Help The Robot Gave Me The Same Information. But I Found If I Unplug The Wire That Goes 2 The Back Of My TV Then The Red Quadrent Does Not Come Up.

Could This Have Any Thing 2 Do Wif It?

Cheers

man, it must be onerous to feel compelled to capitalize like that. plus you can never get an iphone!

this is some pretty enraging shit: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/lanc01_.html

i mean loldon review of books lol john lanchester lol this isnt a viditorial lol who cares but, i mean seriously: "[Bioshock] was a huge hit, and I have yet to encounter anyone who has ever heard of it." O RLY

"Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all."

difficulty in meaning, reading or understanding /= difficulty of execution, or playing

btw the mental image of john lanchester hunched over a controller is a bit unbearable

http://www.smh.com.au/ffximage/2007/07/13/JL_070713111214469_wideweb__300x375.jpg
"fuckin tubular!"

haha I liked that article, I didn't really disagree with anything in it

i agree with some of his assertions and disagree with others but concluding with such a hands-in-pockets, shoulder-shrugging, bet-hedger is pretty lame. "are games art? well, not now, probably, with some exceptions but it's likely they might be, in the future, probably."

and the whole thing is really lazily argued and glib and inept esp when he's talking about games and the way they function. he invokes poole but doesn't really understand him or try considering the ramifications of routine as ritual, for example. i actually think he's right about the second way in which games can become art but that point deserves to be made better, with more clarity and rigour and generosity and less emphasis on mechanics.

the way I read it, his main point was that we at least need to be having the conversation (something that gets brought up every year by different people, but his version was enjoyable enough that I actually read it) and paying attention to some of these questions - he starts off with $$$, which should tell you right away he's not trying to find a big answer in this piece.

i think lanchester tries to tell ppl reading the lrb "hey, video games are a thing now, here's why" and then he tries to answer the "is it art?" qn. and it feels to me like he's doing the former to justify even asking the latter which gets my hackles up, and maybe it shouldn't. but that's such a big, important question to some many ppl in the industry, not just me, that i can't help but feel he's not equipped to answer it.

also the other big flaw, and i think it leads from his relative unfamiliarity with the medium, is that he keeps complaining about sequels and corporations and the money-men and yet gives no indication of playing anything other than "blockbuster" releases himself. its fair play to say that considerations of developers and others aren't important to the end result but lanchester tries to have it both ways here sating "that nothing within a world so fully made by a corporation can be truly creative" and then refusing to engage with the desires motivating "corporate" designers.

ugh i can tl;dr about this for hours but the article bothered me which is probably lame but there it is

i'm such an illiterate

I think that if all those writers (Lanchester, Klosterman, etc) wrote about video games instead of writing about how we should write about video games, then there would no longer be a reason to write about how we should write about video games.

Also, maybe if video games are too hard for the "older generation," then they should just resolve themselves to the fact that they will never totally *get* this new artform. Fuck blaming the medium for their own inabilities. When was the last time a professor blamed Joyce for a student not enjoying Ulysses?

I'm really happy Klosterman's not writing about video games, thanks.

But yeah, I get your point Mordy and I think there will be some worthwhile video game writing anthologies by end of '10.

i thot the article was ok, more interesting ("interesting") for revealing the limitations of the standard boomer literate liberal worldview in assessing what happens in video games. i think the writer gets this but maybe not.

as in, never meeting anyone who's ever heard of bioshock isn't video games' problem it's your problem.

^ OTFM.

Isn't it possible that until recently, there hasn't been that much source material for critical video game writing? At the outset of the century, there were a relative handful of games that could plausibly warrant "serious" critical analysis (Fallout, the rise of MMORPGs, fill in the blank). Now, in the past couple of years alone, we have LittleBigPlanet, Fable 2, Fallout 3, Bioshock, Spore, etc. Point out all of the forward thinking 80s and 90s games that you want, but I think it would be difficult to argue that there aren't more thought provoking games coming out than ever right now. As such, the writing on video games will evolve along with the games themselves. I don't think it's anything we need to advocate for, it'll happen naturally.

I have to disagree with that. The Inform era of gaming had plenty of things worth talking about (A Mind Forever Voyaging never really got its due). And I can't think of a single year where there wasn't a single game worth discussing. Maybe not in the plentiful numbers we have recently (it has definitely been a couple amazing years for gaming), but great source material has always existed.

hay guys i saw someone, somewhere on ilg, mention a distinction btw 'ludic elements' and 'narrative elements'? is there a particular writer who has fleshed this out? if so i'd like to read it.

Emily Short does a lot of writing on that.

i half wrote and then abandoned a post on another thread - i think where we discussed the grammar of fun - about what it was like writing about games in the mid-90s and how much that's changed. the best writing back then was either about games culture or like, nintendo power. most if not all mags followed the formula of this is a game about X similar to games Y and Z and here is where you find the key in the second castle. of course this was time that a 14 y/o could write about japanese imports.

i have a really half-formed theory about how the internet changed the way ppl write about games but its probably not necessary.

Also, though not in videogames, indie-rpgs.com does a similar breakdown into Gamist V. Narrativist functions in second-person gaming.

xp
I don't disagree about the great source material always existing. I only mean that there has to a critical mass of existing worthwhile material before a literature rises up around it. Who knows, I'm rong about pretty much everything these days, but I doubt that book and film criticism/analysis would be as robust as it is today if there were only three or four books or films worth discussing each year.

I hear you. I'm trying to remember where I read the argument that critics create the context of quality source material and not vice-versa. It was a really well put argument... Hmmm. Maybe it was a New Yorker article about book reviewers? From... two years ago, I think?

that's an old argument, Mordy but james wood had something about that in a cormac mccarthy review. don't know if that's what yr thinking of

Lemmi see if I can find it.

I think it wasn't tied to any particular book. And I think it was about how there is a dearth of book criticism being written - and it may have been written around when Sontag died.

yah i found the wood article it wasn't what i was thinking of either. maybe i should just repost this:

Some interesting stuff. I suppose every games writer has to overcome some kind of inferiority complex coming from society at large?

― Nhex, Tuesday, December 16, 2008 9:52 PM (6 days ago) Bookmark

"if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable" — yeah, wait, what, really? REALLY?

(Seriously: who outside of a few annoying wanker fringe elements ever justified what they're doing by claiming difficulty is their desired effect? Trying to subtly rearrange the history of all cultural thought evah just to justify being artistically conservative is just ... clodlike.) (Maybe I should read the rest of the article, now.)

if my grandma would dare sit down and watch me play a video game... let's just say she is pretty out of it when it comes to video games... if she watched me play bioshock and wasn't apalled by the violence and bloodshed, maybe she would admit that the oldtimey music and plot concept is actually cool. This would last for 2 seconds at most... I have yet to see her take an interest in any of my interests even once in the past 15 years.

but boy she sure likes hugging me and would loves new photos of the grandchildren to put in her picture framss. (yet still she would never care about my interests or video games)

you guys are really being some bitches about that article. he addresses the problem of the difficulty convention really well, I think, and he also sums up the promise of good video games as well as I've ever read it imo -

This sense of agency is the cultural and aesthetic USP of video games. The medium doesn’t have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can’t match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film. But it does have two great strengths. The first is visual: the best games are already beautiful, and I can see no reason why the look of video games won’t match or surpass that of cinema. The second is to do with this sense of agency, that the game offers a world in which the player is free to act and to choose. It is this which gives the best games their immense involvingness. You are in the game in a way that is curiously similar to the way you are in a novel you are reading – a way that is subtly unlike the sense of absorption in a spectacle which overtakes the viewer in cinema. The interiority of the novel isn’t there, but the sense of having passed into an imagined world is.

^^^^ completely otm except I dunno if involvingness is a word

having read the whole thing even the bit that annoyed me is more of a gag in context, actually : /

I liked the lanchester article. I didn't agree with everything, but I thought it was a well-considered piece on the whole.

Great series of articles from 1up: they tracked down the composer for Contra, Hidenori Maezawa:

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3172388

I absolutely loved these games soundtracks, anyone else who's an insane nerd over those NES scores must read these now.

I thought this guy's takes on TWEWY, Layton and L4D were pretty spot on.

http://www.hiwiller.com/2009/02/10/best-games-of-2008/

How is there no X-Com thread?

Anyway, here's an interesting read:

http://www.edge-online.com/magazine/the-making-of-x-com-enemy-unknown

Fascinating that the whole strategy element was imagined by the publisher, not the Gallops, so they could create an epic product that would compete with Civilization, and explains why (sadly) it doesn't exist in their later products at all.

Sirlin on subtractive game design. Good article.

http://www.auntiepixelante.com/?p=459

http://www.google.com/patents?id=aAuzAAAAEBAJ&pg=PA3&source=gbs_selected_pages&cad=2

really liked that auntie pixelante piece

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_210/6252-Time-to-Move-On

I can't believe that anti-Leigh Alexander bit quoted isn't some kind of over-the-top parody!

That article in general is really problematic. I imagine much of the "new" popularity of games is due to gamers growing up. Not due to games somehow magically finding a new audience.

cool pixelante piece

aw super mario land

so dope

that describes every service-based game these days. the reviewers don't get the real experience

A different take on the thread subject, I think. I found this thread with comments from video game fans living in far flung and often tough locations that make being a gamer really hard:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/15whag9/physical_games_are_almost_gone_where_i_live_and/

There's some of the usual posturing and debate, but mostly lots of stuff about the practical challenges of game costs, dwindling physical media, download speeds, lack of stable power, low wages/weak economy. Caught my eye.

Thanks to Leee on the Last of Us thread for recommending that Something Rotten podcast. I've listened to most of the LoU2 episodes, and while it's often chaotic or incoherent (per hang-out podcast protocol) and I often disagree with their takes (which are steeped in not just general cynicism but also the sort that comes from spending way more time with this particular game than the vast majority of people) it's also often very incisive, and it's all been worth it for the (more or less) last installment with Cameron Kunzelman, who I was unfamiliar with, and whose smart presence sent me scrambling for a pen and paper to note down all the other stuff I wanted to pursue. Kunzelman's book, for example, The World Is Born From Zero, and his other writing on video games, or writers like Stuart Hall, who I also don't know. Not to mention Jacob Geller's video essays, or the epic game analysis videos from Noah Caldwell-Gervais.

For example, I was watching one of Caldwell-Gervais's videos on the Souls games, and he brought up a very interesting point, how almost no matter what action game you are playing, from Last of Us to Doom to Spider-man to Uncharted or whatever, but especially conventionally story-driven games, no matter how easy or difficult, everyone ends up at the same place, more or less the same way. But in Dark Souls, et al., no two players - and in a lot of ways, no two playthroughs - are the same, and how you reach the end is as ambiguous as what the end even *is*, which makes the games particularly rich, mysterious and entrancing. As a more or less casual gamer I'd never really considered this aspect.

I've also got a bunch of books about games queued up. Blood, Sweat and Pixels; Masters of Doom; All Your Base are Belong to Us; Extra Lives. Go figure, there are a lot of books out there about video games.

Interesting interview with old heads in the industry: https://kotaku.com/activision-ageism-video-games-cliffy-b-warren-spector-1851220345

Not as in depth or groundbreaking as I'd like but it approaches game development from a different angle.

https://www.polygon.com/reviews/24070454/banishers-ghosts-new-eden-review

Sounds like my kind of game, gotta keep an eye for this if it goes on sale

https://ff8isthe.best/2024/02/the-game-magazine-that-spent-two-years-taunting-a-final-fantasy-viii-hater/

hehe

lol that last pic, amazing

so petty lol

Yeah great pay off at the end there

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqYKT3emSzA

Longform on the pipeline between journalism and development: https://aftermath.site/games-journalism-game-development-ign-kotaku

wasn't familiar with that site; seems good, but it also made me kind of sad to read this as someone who consumed so much games writing in the '00s that so much of it is lost

wow. booming post.