rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

That article makes me glad I haven't yet started a gaming blog to pour out my depression to the world. Self-hate is for your self!

and c'mon Cozen, if there was something more enjoyable and fulfilling than FADCing into Ultra a thousand times you probably would have or will pursue it

Okay, let's go back to that Jesse Schell presentation that Nhex was talking about here:
http://www.sirlin.net/blog/2010/2/22/external-rewards-and-jesse-schells-amazing-lecture.html

Where he posits a strange future where you "Get Points" at work by getting your reports done and becoming more adept at the programs you use.

So here I am downloading this now:
http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero

the singularity is coming!

I liked that Schell lecture, too.

I've played it for like three people now; i think he's spot fucking on

Yeah, it's got that McLuhan insight but the tone is tailored well to his audience.

UGH HATE

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/toddler-dies-mistaking-gun-wii-controller/story?id=10056190

Cheyenne Alexis McKeehan of Norene, Tenn., shot herself Sunday night after her stepfather left his loaded Smith & Wesson handgun out on a table, Wilson County Sheriff Terry Ashe said.

...

"The unfortunate thing is that this Nintendo game called Wii had what looks like a solid black, basically automatic-looking type mechanism that operates the game," he said.

NO YOU FARTKNUCKLE THE UNFORTUNATE THING IS THE FUCKING DIPSHIT OF A DAD LEFT A LOADED HANDGUN ON A TABLE WITHIN EASY REACH OF A TODDLER

How many of you are still playing Portal? How many of you still love your girlfriends? And now how many of you are ready to admit to yourselves, in a whisper, that you’re liars you've already GISed my name to see if i am hot or secret fattey?

how i would have ended that article

wtf @ that article dyao posted

That sheriff is like the dumbest person on Earth

If this leads to the Wii being banned I'm all for it.

i can't find the Black Isle alumni thread, but here's an interview with Obsidian's Chris Avellone done by sometime ILG-er Chris Dahlen:

http://www.avclub.com/articles/avc-at-gdc-10-an-interview-with-alpha-protocol-cre,39091/

worth watching, not reading but clever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIZVCCJxIQ4

neato

anyone got a list of these BRUTAL & FILTHY games so we can poll them?
http://www.complex.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/tracychriscover_large.jpg

(pause)

Brian Ashcraft: Child Porn Advocate

jeez that article links to some deeply heinous shit

lol @ child porn advocate

guy's a sleaze. i know i've posted this x times before, but nearly every story he posts is about some creepy underage-looking model/popstar/videogame character. also, he can't write, which doesn't distinguish him from the rest of kotaku.

Cannabalt is an adult’s game. It embarrasses no one.

That article is ugh, but this is a really good summary of my instinctive dislike for that game!

gonna play the devil's advocate here and say i'm more disturbed that you can jail people for drawing gross cartoons than that there are people out there jerking off to said cartoons. i mean they're drawings, that's really nothing compared to, you know, the actually horrifying practices of child pornography that they are equating it with

but of course, to defend this stance means you have to go in with the pedos :( and brian ashcraft

xp haha, what do you mean?

xp haha, what do you mean?

Well, the whole article touched on something that I've been thinking about for a while. My issue isn't so much with Canabalt (which I played a few times and enjoyed) but with the reviews of it I read, and with its presence on game of the year lists etc. So much of what I read was about how easily non-gamers were converted to playing it, how smooth and non-cheesy and, well, grown-up it seemed, in theme and execution, how easy it was to learn...

I feel the same way about 'Passage' which I actually found v. affecting! It's just that I'm very conscious that Canabalt is 'showing' what 'Passage' is to 'talking about' - something that you use when justifying your hobby to people who don't share it. And while I understand that, for me, that's not gaming. That's the gateway drug to gaming, but it shouldn't ever be confused with the end product. The end product is that really deep engagement with ruleset, that staying-up-until-five-playing-Civilisation feeling, Braid with its stupid adolescent writing and really hard, unforgiving, honest, satisfying puzzles, Ninja Gaiden, Madden played on hardest with all its stupid unrealistic aspects and ai glitches and needless intricacies. If you've only got an hour a day to play games that's cool, I'm in the same boat! But don't tell me that Canabalt is the deepest pleasure the medium can give.

I sound like table-is-the-table on the gay thread!

re: the Ashcraft article, I'm as staunch a 1st-amendmentist as they come and I actually completely agree with Ashcraft's position in this circumstance. on the other hand it's the most gut-bustingly hilarious gaming blog tard revalation since Tim Rogers spent a few paragraphs talking about "hypothetically" wanting to s3X0r his sister in the middle of a review of like Gears of War or something.

re: Canabalt, I think a lot of the problematic writing stems from the fact that it was one of the titles that helped define and/or legitimize the iPhone as a gaming platform in a lot of people's mind (it certainly did for me, anyway). I still think it's a masterpiece (and still play the hell out of it), but every time I've tried to harangue someone into checking it out I end up explaining the whole experience to them and I completely see how that would sap the fun right out of any game experience - imo that moment when you suddenly fully comprehend the totality of a game's mechanics is (or should be) every bit as significantly impactful as a plot twist like who Keyser Soze is or w/e, and blowing that reveal for people is kind of a dick move.

Actually the more I think about that article the more stimulating I find it! Like: there really *is* something important to me in the idea of games being to some degree shameful - after writing that post I had a craving that's lasted all day to just say fuck it and play a videogame all night but I have too much stuff lined up tomorrow that I actually enjoy to just write the whole day off - to a degree it *is* a preserve of the unhappy and that is part of its texture. It's the feeling too, that people were talking about on the chatroulette thread, a nostalgia for 'the old weird internet' we grew up with, that wasn't safe at all but offered possibilities that the modern me-and-my-friends facebook net seems to lack. Like: maybe one day all games will be accessible to the people they want to reach but at that point they won't be for *me* anymore? idk idk.

Is there a specific term for "i resent the successful rise to acceptability of this particular type of otherness i have a sentimental attachment to"? Because it is a common feeling!

in music it's called "hipsterism"

haha! that's pretty otm

this feature is the inverse of the thread title: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theobserver/2010/mar/21/tom-bissell-video-game-cocaine-addiction

ugh why did i read that

that is the worst thing I've read since Tim Rogers review of Braid

Worth watching, if only for the horrible UK tabloid hackery:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryH2WemACIM

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/22/the-alan-titchmarsh-show-on-videogames/

tsunami of violence

i want 2 be a games journalist so bad

or at least have sum1 pay me to write abt painscription drug abuse & playing atelier rorona for 80 hours

brother, i have the same dream

http://juxtapixel.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/theyre-just-videogames-right/

yes, it is another mini-autobio entry about what games mean to a man, but i liked this one more than the one about the cokehead. also I can identify really strongly with some bits here, especially delivering passionate monologues to others about games (who do not understand it)

http://botherer.org/2010/03/21/the-observer-the-beguiling-nature-of-videogames/

Saw this linked from gamesetwatch. It's in response to that irritating coke/gta4 Observer piece.

not tremendously insightful, but gently amusing: geoff dyer on gta3 a few years back:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2005/jul/24/games.shopping1

Time sped by. There was, obviously, a certain amount of maiming and killing going on. At one point, due to a random press of an inadequately understood button, I picked up a knife and slashed a couple of cops. There's no shortage of hookers in San Andreas and I am informed you can score points by having sex and then beating them up instead of paying. Now this, it hardly needs saying, is not nice. Nor is it quite what Matthew Arnold had in mind when he wrote of culture toggling us towards the sweetness and light.

http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html
nothing new here but ebert betrays his lack of interest in supporting his central point by not even taking the time to more clearly understand the games he's dismissing.

yeah, i can't help but feel he's just straight up linkbait trolling here. also from what he writes, i think he is basing his judgment on videos and what other people are saying as opposed to debasing himself by actually, you know, playing a video game

The best thing about his trolling is that it is totally working.

I bet he actually loves videogames.

He does love videogames! He wrote a very positive review to one of those CD-ROM games back in the day.
The central point that validates his position, one that Ebert weirdly is a little ambivalent about, is that games are anti-art by their very nature.

"Braid .... a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie."

Ebert OTM

Also, I think Ebert is OTM about the reason for all the video game is art handwringing -- that they're trying to use "art" as legitimization. Why can't peeps just enjoy playing video games without making all kinds of other claims for them?

Lots of games are resembling work more and more, so if they're not getting paid for it, I totally feel their need to legitimize seemingly uncompensated labor.

Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with six circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of cinema as art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Education, and Executive Management. I rest my case.

http://www.clicknothing.com/click_nothing/2010/05/451-weeks.html

kind of interesting but immediately upon finishing it, i wanted to yell at this guy, wait - so why the fuck are you quitting? why write this thing if you're just going to talk around the reasons and "bad habits" that you have developed? what a bizarre semi-inspirational yet passive-aggressive resignation notice, the most eye-rolling bit is the "i have to walk on coals" shit - he's quitting because he job is just too damn good for him to live with

i read that and then realized i had no idea what he had actually said

So I liked a bunch of Extra Lives -- which is the thing worth reading on videogames, not my review of it that I'm linking to right here and hoping the total tackiness of linking to myself will be overlooked since I mentioned it myself: http://popculturecurator.tumblr.com/post/709868739/book-review-extra-lives