rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

I bet you guys are real excited to read another long feature about JBlow, the game industry's "most cerebral developer":

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most-dangerous-gamer/8928/

stopped here:

“It just drives home how fictional money is,” Blow said, squinting against the unseasonably bright December sun. “One day I’m looking at my bank account and there’s not much money, and the next day there’s a large number in there and I’m rich. In both cases, it’s a fictional number on the computer screen, and the only reason that I’m rich is because somebody typed a number into my bank account.” For the world’s most existentially obsessed game developer, coming into seven figures just provided another opportunity to ponder the nature of meaning in the universe.

jesus christ STFU

tell you what, let me hold six of those figures and then call me back about existential meaning

nothing jblow says there is as bad as whoever wrote it

^^^^^^^^^^

Yeah, the bit where he tries to make out that games were wall-to-wall Call of Duty and nothing else before Braid came along is the worst.

What I got from that article is that one of the philosophical changes made by fictional money is that it will cause some journalists to cast you as the next Howard Roark rather than say "Dude has autism-spectum disorder".

the atlantic's such a good magazine, why would they have published this laughable profile?

this bugged me the most but it's my problem really

This means, somewhat incredibly, that Blow doesn’t believe in even trying to communicate a game’s central message in words; the medium itself, he argues, is the message.

YOU DON'T SAY

i wonder what the odds are that the profiler thought "the medium is the message" was an original blow nugget

jotted it down in excitement w/ a little arrow pointing to it: "somewhat incredible!"

although since most professional editors get paid by the inserted adverb (bonus pay if what it's modifying is already an adverb) i'd say chances are good the first draft called that insight straight-up incredible

although since most professional editors get paid by the inserted adverb

lol i wish. in fact, reading this i just thought if i'd been editing it, i'd have given up halfway through as a bad job. such a credulous interviewer, such a douchebag interviewee, such a bad combination. and i enjoyed Braid, kinda.

lol at little arrow saying "somewhat incredible"

not even gonna read that sigh

i like how the guy's next game is myst.

what an asshole/also what a terrible article/also like the worst issue of the atlantic i've ever read--did yall see the piece about how qaddafi's son was sad when his dad died and the reader is supposed to give a shit? or the kanye thing? tho the br meyers takedown of chad harbach was good.

His face, bounded by a closely cropped widow’s peak on top and a clenched jaw on the bottom

Friendship with Blow requires patience for his rigid, often puzzling personal codes. He enjoys talking, but abhors idle conversation and is intensely private.

what a deep and paradoxical fellow!

fuck braid

coming close to that opinion without ever actually having played it.

nah, braid was cool. soulja boy nailed it.

braid was gorgeous and inventive and fun but of course every think piece about how paradigm-shifting it was concentrates on the parts before each level where you read some coy prose about being a sad boy, because obviously that's where the Art is

nah fuck braid, any game that relies that much on hushed artifice and a busted prince of persia gameplay mechanic is just as phony and overblown as modern warfare 3 but way less honest.

i don't even like braid that much but whaaaa?

braid is great, jblow sucks

i always walked past the books without reading them

"he enjoys talking, but abhors listening"

"he enjoys blazers, but abhors long pants"

ignore the overblown plot and braid is a very sweet game; preferred limbo where shit was less spelled out if more tim burtony

interview made me want to replay infocom's trinity tho, maybe i could get somewhere in it now that i'm not 11

i like how the guy's next game is myst.

― adam, Wednesday, 18 April 2012 15:21 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol first thing i thought when i read about it

I liked Braid until it got too hard for me (about 10 minutes in as I am totally uncoordinated) but that article seriously made me regret giving him any of his giant pile of money which he feels such ostentatious indifference towards

(didn't buy it full price, but then I bought it on its own and bought some bundle with it in, so I guess I gave him money twice)

At some point, Steam holiday sales will deliver them all to me anyway

http://www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/2012/04/dissident-designer.html

blow currently responsible for reinventing: myst, marshall mcluhan, sturgeon's law, the wheel...

wish Michael Abbott wrote more often

since there isn't a "rolling thread of furniture worth buying on videogames"

http://www.gizmag.com/nintendo-controller-coffee-table/22224/

ha, and it actually works!

http://images.gizmag.com/inline/nes-table-3.jpg

although admittedly, that looks like the kind of activity that you hype up all day but only end up doing for about 3 minutes.

the giganto tv and controller/table compared to the tiny NES makes it look like Giant world on SMB3.

http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Yeah that was brilliant and now I wanna work for valve

i love how it looks like a 90s computer game manual

xp mega, mega OTM

Didn't realize that AV Club had spun off the gaming section its own site. Nice little piece on Majora's Mask/Dark Souls:

http://gameological.com/2012/04/games-played-in-inches/

In Decadent, where we explore two games united by a common theme and separated by time—specifically, by a decade or so.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/169159/the_origins_of_night_trap_an_.php

dear lord. i should've known what i was in for when the first paragraph describes this as an excerpt from the book "GENERATION XBOX"

coming at the movie/game crossover from the opposite angle, i liked these two wired pieces:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/halo-movie-generation-xbox
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2012/04/generation-xbox-super-mario-movie/

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/may/01/zone-chernobyl-tarkovsky-video-game/

Stalker, game & film