rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

castlevania bloodlines
butthole brothers: the opening
a boy and his abortion
gurglefest 9: browngurgle
simple beans: fancy kitten hugs
Chocoholic breastmilk
Floor club for men
Epic Flower
The Cavalcades of Sir Rudelman Horcrotch
Just Some Dude
Feather Tickle: Tickle the Pickle
Upside-Down Hedgehog Vengeance
Klondike Explorer: Return of Numbness
Patriarch of Tushybutt Kingdom
Collect Stamp: The Stamp Collection Game for Collectors of Stamps and Stamp-like Collector's items
Frantic Reading
Leisure Suit Larry 14: Sit at Home and Read a Book
Porthole: The Portholening
Practice Makes Perfetc
Sponge: The Official Game of the Movie
Thirsty: The Search for Water
Galileo's Tuxedo
Amputee Battle
Burning Sensation 12
Progress Bar 3: 75%
Slather (From the makers of Butter Lips)
Sondlifect: The Word that Means Nothing
Internet Cat Upload
Magic is Real: The Parent Convincing Game
Headband: The Game
Go Outside And DIE
Dashboard Smash
SmashBoard
Excessively Hungry Hippopotami
California Texas
The Blair Science Project
Cords vs. Wires
Carrot Top's Fitness Program
Phlegm Produce 2
Babysitter Blastoff
Trachea 800
A Gentleman and a Bentleman
Dong Sludge
Watermelon Pregnancy
Nostrilfist 2: Nostrilfist's Revenge
Various Indian Cuisines
Super Mario Brothels
Paper Cut: Decapitation
Hailstorm: The Basement's Adventure
Susan Goes to Liverpool
Boner Javelin
Happy: The Shitty Dwarf
Loose Power Cord
Hands Aren't Feet
The Man Who Killed Larry The Cable Guy (and his Subsequent Rise to Fame)
Tooth in the Wrong Place
Watching Mr. Belvedere: An Enthusiast's Journey
Flashing Pictures
Salad Bowl Slipperooni
Fetus Mouth
Marvel vs. A Wooden Leg
General Custard: A Pudding's Story
The Pair of Plegics
Divorce Brigade
Bridge Over Meat
R.T.D.: Random Turtle Division
French Fry and Potato
Ben and the Last Name Debacle!
The Last Bojangle
C.S.I. Bedrock
Vapidiot 3: Palin
Sadman Forlornia
Upchuckle
A Flair for the Uniform
Simple: A Game for Babies
Cart B. 4: The Horse
Snakewhip
The Lonely Eyeball
Triscuit Flambe
Cavalier Wimbledon
Larry King's Jacks
Larry King's Cup and Ball
Larry King's Wheel Make
I Want Earl
My First Tramp Stamp
The Computer Turn-Off Turn-On
Annoying Friend
Papier Machet Giraffe Neck
Opaque Window
Kitten Disembowel
Freedom 3: Abortion
Tree 2: The Deciduous Project
Palindrome 2: Emord Nilap
Beyond Pudding
Pages of Fury
The Blabberfest
Sweat Spot
Puddle of DOOM
Calamari: The Squiddening

idgi but lol

Tom Bissell lives in Portland now, I think, and I have issues with the part of his Extra Lives book where he goes on and on about how much he loved GTA4, a love that just so happened to coincide with his intake of mounds of blow, which could JUUUUUUUUST color his impressions a little.

it's kinda amazing to me that after doing all that coke he was cool with sitting down for marathon GTA sessions in his livingroom

Kinda strikes me as undeniable proof that dude is hella boring

but how can a drug abuser be boring yo???

ughhhh that bissell piece on spec ops the line is awful. his smarty pants hardman bullshit is fucking infuriating especially when there's a little picture of his stupid bearded lambchop-album-buying face down by the byline. fuck you bissell you are not elevating the discourse the right way and you make us all look bad.

smarty pants is not actually an insult.

Maybe, in the end, "blowing off steam" is the only kind of experience a shooter needs to enable. The shooter is merely a vent. OK. I suppose I can accept that. But I just went and looked into the vent of my apartment's air conditioner. You know what? It was filthy.

yeah it is

No, no it fucking isn't. What he is doing there is making a) a joke and b) a point at the same time. Either of these are largely out of the reach of most games journalists, it's nice that there's someone who can do both.

Also the article told me about things I didn't know about, and connected them to other things in a smart way - again that's just journalism, but it stands out.

The gentleman declines to answer, so Sam sticks his knife into the gentleman's clavicle. The gamer is then given an onscreen prompt to twirl around his controller's joystick, which in turn twirls around Sam's knife in the gentleman's wound. The screaming gentleman gives Sam the info he needs — and, suddenly, it's "moral choice" time, for Sam has to choose whether to kill or knock out his freshly tortured victim. Let's review: a moral choice — after an interactive torture sequence.

this is seriously fucked up.

goole otm, what the hell

i didn't think the article quite pushed all the way into the places i wanted it to go but like is the objection here that his metaphors are pretentious or that he called shooters filthy or what, because i thought that metaphor was serviceable and shooters are obviously filthy

what is the joke? what is the point? a physical vent is dirty so maybe his psychological vent is too? great.

i acknowledge that games journalism is terrible but sticking some dumbass klosterman/simmons/blog narcissism into it isn't going to fix anything.

it's unfair to compare anyone to dfw, but i couldn't help but think of the lobster festival profile where he discusses some of the moral issues involved w/ eating lobster. one thing about the shooter article is that he makes ethical decisions but doesn't seem to implicate himself in them. whereas for dfw the ethics were always personal and collective, bissel kinda posits himself as a moral hero fighting for truth + justice. this is a guy btw who think GTA is the epitome of video gaming (and if you look at his list of *good* shooters, if you've played many of them you may notice that they don't really handle violence in a particularly sensitive way - they are just better designed aesthetically and ludically. which i guess makes it easier to enjoy them w/out feeling bad about yourself).

like if his answer for why ppl like video game violence is that it taps into reptilian brain consciousness and helps blow off steam - seems like a huge missed opportunity to get at some deeper things about american culture, gaming culture, etc. of course u could try to write a big piece that addresses those things and lack just as much substance. i didn't hate the article fwiw, i found it enjoyable in that superficial Bissel way where he clearly cares about these things but maybe isn't so ambitious about how he approaches writing about them.

bissel kinda posits himself as a moral hero fighting for truth + justice

Not really.

The paragraph that JCL's quote above came from seems to implicate himself fairly well - not in a sense that he is railing against and/or trying to extricate himself, but I guess he doesn't do that so much?

one thing about the shooter article is that he makes ethical decisions but doesn't seem to implicate himself in them.

the impression I had was that he spent the entire article asking "exactly how sick am I that I love these games?"

yeah when i said "the places i wanted it to go" i meant that i want articles about this kind of thing to really be rigorous about extracting+describing the evil worm in the writer's soul. this kinda talked about it: my favorite line in the whole thing was "for me shooters aren't about blowing off steam; they're about taking in steam." i don't actually think that metaphor quite works but i get the idea. most of the article shies away from that. prolly cuz it's the single most unpleasant subject a human can address. then there's questions like "why do we want our puzzles to bleed and scream?" which he asks and immediately drops.

Videogame violence needs to be discussed in the correct context. They exist in world where (most non-vg playing) people watch the evening news, stories about the murders and rapes and crisis of REAL PEOPLE. Where TV and movies glorify violence using not shaded polygons but REAL PEOPLE. They exist in a world where we outspend every other nation on war and national defense. Blowing up REAL PEOPLE overseas.

in the second half it just turns into a straight review of the game -- Terrifying Knife Guy and stuff -- which is fine, especially since even halfway decent game reviewing is so rare, but i think he sort of skips over the surface of all the dangerous stuff he brings up.

Blowing up REAL PEOPLE overseas.

with joysticks, from airconditioned basements

. then there's questions like "why do we want our puzzles to bleed and scream?" which he asks and immediately drops.

I don't think this is a question that can be answered outside of a psychology study

sure, it is modest and probably smart of him to not try to be a psychologist. but i mean he's a writer. maybe i just want a little more hubris.

i don't know how much we really need to tease out the appeal of shooters--like, at what point in human history were games not about violence (some games, that is. maybe most)? we just have the tech to do it better now.

really i feel like the dominant mode of "smart" game criticism draws too much from pop psychology (like my point immediately above) (but we don't have a critical vocabulary with which to properly tackle these topics) (yet). like bissell is not far removed from gladwell in terms of intellectual rigor. that's my main objection. also his face.

lol adam

xp Sure, but there is still a line between "I am aware of this and may support other people doing it" and "turn right thumbstick to make suspect scream"

(that basically serves as a response to adam as well - The immense increase of popularity and profile of manshoots is definitely a new thing in the last decade or so)

(and the realism is the actual connection between the two posts)

can we not use the term "manshoots", this is not ILTMI

Throwing Bowser into a giant lake of fire is pretty fucked up

not really, he's got a carapace

this is from 98 but has some interesting info if you have access to sciencedirect or some other journal database:

Dill KE, Dill JC. Video game violence: a review of the empirical literature.  Aggression Violent Behavior.1998;3:407-428.

i'm looking for literature about violence in childhood play throughout history, no luck yet.

"Although youngsters would be denied admittance to the latest Steven Segal movie without parental supervision, they are able to enter any department or toy store in America and purchase graphically violent games like Mortal Kombat or Killer Instinct without censure."

thinking of non-violent videogames now, of which I guess the historical standard is Tetris? maybe Pong?

It gets easier to find them as you go back to before they were big bu$ine$$.

i remember Nickelodeon had a show called 5W or something (reference to Who What Where When Why questions of journalism) where kids did 'investigative reporting' and one of the episodes was about violence in video games and showed footage from Doom

doom seems so quaint now, like, these are demons from hell! fucking shoot them!

my parents pretty much let me play whatever but once i was playing wolf3D and my dad stood behind me and watched me shoot nazis for a while and then launched into this impromptu dramatic scene where he played both the dead nazi's wife and the dead nazi's son, who was waiting up that night for his father to come home because he'd made him some kind of present but his father was late coming home and it was way past his bedtime and his mother was saying just go to bed dear you'll see him in the morning etc

parenting

nazis tho! i mean if you can't shoot nazis whom can you shoot

i guess that's the point

it's also hard to extricate violence from conflict in terms of games. in pong you are in direct conflict with your opponent (or simulated opponent if you are playing agains the fiendish AI) and while you are not committing acts of violence upon his or her avatar in-game i am willing to bet that a lot of the neurochemical reactions are the same ones that go down when you pop some motherfucker with a sick headshot in call of duty.

so then i guess one could ask why pong 2012 (virtua tennis?) isn't selling 40 billion copies.

hah awesome.

Yeah im trying to think of a non-violent videogame and it's just not coming to my head. The Monkey Island series is pretty non-violent.

Maybe that's what we get with a medium invented on military equipment developed for World War II.

Tiny wings. Orbital. Trainyard (omg train crashes though!). Does Fez have baddies in? Violent ones?

most adventure games are mostly nonviolent, especially the myst strain; there are lots of complaints to make about dumb ol myst (tho not about riven which is that genre's one stone masterpiece) but i always thought a lot of the vitriol directed its way by Real Gamers was connected to its lack of violence

a few years back i wrote up a short scene set around the kitchen table of a generic enemy from the first level of Castlevania III. he gathers his immediate family, along with his best friend who works in the second level of Donkey Kong Country, to deliver the bad news - Trevor is approaching Dracula's castle, and he is rumored to be very good at Castlevania III. death is a certainty. they then go on to have a frank and rewarding discussion about the inevitability of death and the meaning of service.

hahahahahaha

yeah there are totally lots of non-violent games, just like there are games or other forms of play that are non-violent/non-conflictual. i'm just saying that conflict/violence simulation must scratch a particular neurological itch, which is all right and natural, but i'm curious (and i think bissell is too even if he's not all that good at saying it) about what attracts us to the trappings of realistic violence.

so in the last splinter cell game, conviction, there's an occasional minigame where michael ironside drunkenly interrogates foreigners and effeminate men by smashing their heads into objects in the environment. it's only one button press (B on the xbox) and dude goes into this whole animation and audio thing.

new splinter cell is taking us one step closer to 1:1 torture control (better with kinect!) which feels like a separate neurological path from conflict entirely.

Does Fez have baddies in? Violent ones?

Well, the longer you play, the more you rip apart the fabric of the universe. There are bombs but no sentient baddies.