rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

"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

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.

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.