rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

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

i like his thesis, but there's not much meat there

"In those days it was fairly common for an article in The Escapist to drag on for more than 3,000 words"

gosh, not three thousand words. that's, like, a lot of words.

nhex did you click through to the whole thing? in places it's almost as batshit as that patent doc:

"The solution to the riddle that woman has always been for man is childbirth. The sexes are distinguished by many other minor differences, but this is the most important, the most fundamental one. Thus man's primeval instinct is for war, whilst woman's for childbearing. With this insight in one's mind there's no sexually conditioned problem one cannot solve. The reason, therefore, that men are so easily seduced by virtual worlds whereas women are generally indifferent towards them (and in fact usually fail to even see the point in them), is because man's vital function, war, can be just as easily performed in virtual worlds as in the real one (and in fact even more easily there), whereas woman's vital function, childbirth, cannot be performed in them at all -- thus spoke Zarathustra."

Make childbirth simulators!

now i am on his forum.

"Yes, Schopenhauer is inappropriate, but random modern philosophasters wouldn't be. For your information, it is the anti-racists and the anti-sexists who are the bigots: there is no more racist person than the anti-racist, and no more sexist than the anti-sexist. "

seriously i know this isn't a productive addition but can someone fucking stab this cunt plz

"Another thing I've already talked about here (in the "Icy's Genius" thread). Style is not a "decision". Only someone who has never created anything could think that it is. Style, as Schopenhauer somewhere explains, is a direct reflection of the author's character. And character is NEVER a decision. It is "an order of fate" as Baudrillard would put it. All I did was express myself as genuinely, as honestly, as directly as I could.

Man, it gets tiring having to clear up the same little misunderstandings for people again and again. I live on a planet with 6 billion people, all of whom operate under a number of unfathomably crude and simple-minded assumptions. What is education doing, eh? Still teaching people about "equal rights", "freedom", "justice", "proofs" and other such mythical beasts no doubt."

*ahem*

ohhh ... senpai ...

Yeah, the levels of craziness are just amazing in that one! I just skimmed over that guy's article, didn't even want to look at the rest of the site, once I realized that wow he might be actually serious and this isn't an Onion-style piece. It's like if Dave Sim was into video games.

Pretty much agree with you thomp on Pitt's article, but I guess I appreciate the intent nonetheless - I really am surprised how video games really "returned" to the mainstream in the last couple of years (beyond the typical Madden type stuff during the last gen) with the Wii and DS, with much older and female audiences really catching on - lots of anecdotal evidence for me personally, yet weirdly it seems the 'hardcore' are getting moreso in response to this. Not saying if any of it is good or bad, but most analyses tend to get obnoxiously navel-gazing more than insightful anyway... hrm

The misogyny in the post is pretty horrific. But, that said, he picks targets that really are ripe for ridicule.

mordy if you at his forum where ppl are like "i agree with you that leigh alexander and c. are overhyped and not very good but do you really think calling them a lot of different words for slut is clever?" he is like "you just don't understand how above considerations like that i am and so i am banning you"

i dunno: i quite like the idea of leigh alexander. there aren't really many outlets that would commission her to seriously think through some of her stuff in an organised way, though, is the thing.

nhex when i went to edinburgh with a crowd of ppl i'd known since sixth form earlier this year it was only the girls that brought videogames. (tho one of them was dating a guy that was carrying around what was basically a handbag with the gears of war logo on it, which i don't know what to think.) i guess in terms of ppl i know who at least halfway make a hobby of videogames it's an even split. but it is pretty much only girls i hear saying "oh videogames are lame." (including one person who IS WRITING A POSTGRADUATE THESIS ON THE COMIC BOOK BONE, which i gotta say, the hour i spent trying to beat brigan in odin sphere just now is a more culturally enlightening use of my time or anyone's, wait, i can't remember what my point was

not really something to 'read' but i can't think of a better thread to put it:

http://tasvideos.org/PasswordGenerators.html

i have to admit that i am sort of bored w/the whole hardcore vs. wii grandmas debate at this point - doesnt seem to really be much more to say

not in reference to to what you were saying thomp - i think that the shifts in the male/female divide in gamers is way more interesting

http://kidicarus222.blogspot.com/2009/06/its-secret-to-everybody.html
Shit is RIGOROUS!

jesus christ dude

omg the article is so long, but i will read it all eventually

that thing is depressing

"Final Fantasy VIII uses the series’ rich history of meaningful names to enhance the game’s plot."

Also warning - that article has a sort of crazy amount of spoilers for Mother 3 and many many other games.

holy shit

Does anyone have Martin Amis's book on Space Invaders to scan in?
I haven't read Martin Amis but I enjoy making fun of him and that Space Invaders book looks like a goldmine.

he wrote a BOOK on space invaders? like a 33 1/3?

hey u know what, someone should do a 33 1/3 series but on video games!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^

would read

haha i would feel sickened by the idea but mainly because i feel i would do it better than whoever ended up writing them : /

nunez you may have seen these?

http://www.martinamisweb.com/commentary_files/ma_space_invaders.pdf
http://www.villagevoice.com/2005-09-20/books/their-back-pages/

tbh i think reading the whole thing would make me like him, at least a little: his new maps of hell mb

Iwata Asks for Punchout http://us.wii.com/iwata_asks/punchout/vol1_page1.jsp

Oh whoops didn't realize this link had already been posted (or even that there was an ignored Punch Out thread)

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/the-edge-of-reason?page=1

the tale of an acclaimed iPhone game and how it's been hogtied by the actions of an unconscionable douchelord

geez that sounds awful....

What an asshole.