rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

In Brazilian arcades we used to tape over the lifebars on Street Fighter II, to great effect.

s1ocki we should talk more about that idea at some point.

― Alderaan Duran (Will M.), Thursday, November 17, 2011 3:19 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark

yes!

will and i talked about this IRL the other day.

(for those of you following along at home.)

I would contribute fwiw

xpost forks yeah I really want to try a fighting game without visible health bars too. That sounds terrifying and fun.

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushido_Blade_%28video_game%29

buuuuuuushido

god i loved that game

that's like 30% of what made bushido work.
you could still signal visually how damaged the character was.
Or make them less reactive.
Both of which bushido did.

that intellivision post reminded me how awesome Air Fortress is, and now i'm watching youtube videos of some annoying dude going through all of Air Fortress (i think as a kid i used to just play the first three fortresses over and over)

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/201202/burning-man-sam-brown-jay-kirk-gq-february-2012?printable=true

good read!

concur

definitely, that was one of the more interesting things i've read in forever

ketamine dreamz

uh, "forever" was supposed to be "a while"

that Dirty Bathroom game in the sidebar would fuck me up

http://www.themillions.com/2012/02/the-arcades-project-martin-amis-guide-to-classic-video-games.html

wow

:-) that just looks amazing.

Here's a report with some gameplay vid of SnowWorld from about 4 years ago:

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

I'm curious how they've been able to update & re-EQ the game's therapeutic abilities in the interim. This looks like a project you could easily crowdsource art assets and gameplay contributions for.

I think it's really great how they're doing this, but I have to admit when I first saw the pictures of these various demos I was thinking, what is this, 1997? You can crap out better engines now in Flash or Unity or whatever.

it's so weird that it's paul simon

i don't know whether military funding and crowdsourcing really go together. i dunno either if VR 3d uses the same sort of assets as regular 3d, come to think

that thing about martin amis' video game book is 1) omg holy shit and 2) really good! this isn't actually about video games but "the scrupulous, almost paranoiac abstention from banality at the level of the sentence" is a totally accurate bit of criticism of martin amis

also omg holy shit that book, complete YES with obligatory hitch anecdote

re that piece on Amis, the LRB are pushing their review of the book (+ an intro to RPGs) from 1982:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v04/n24/tom-shippey/vidkids

last week's sunday papers at rps was full of pretty good stuff, i'm noticing

bets on whether this is real plz:

http://www.mediumdifficulty.com/2012/03/01/call-of-apathy-violent-young-men-and-our-place-in-war/

I am a private military contractor, and I have an issue with the depiction of war in videogames — or more specifically, the soldiers in those games.

When I say soldier, let me be clear that I am talking about the Infantryman and the Special Forces operator, as I have next to no knowledge about anything outside of this relatively small percentile of service personnel.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of games featuring the military focus on these frontline combat troops in “realistic” action. And that’s where we get problems.

Imagine a war game where you could only move at a slow walking pace. Imagine Skyrim when your inventory is too full, except you can’t drop any of it. This war game has a prone button like Call of Duty, but your character takes 2-3 seconds to change position. Every time you press it, the animation gets slower because your character becomes more and more tired.

Every mission is set in the same level. They each take 12 hours to complete.

this would be good if the person had actually read kristeva

http://www.slowdown.vg/2012/03/03/isaac-and-the-grotesque-body-horrors/

this is like 2000 words on the game design possibilities of the medusa heads in castlevania and is just great

http://kotaku.com/5888474/the-perfect-moves-of-a-video-game-bad-guy

this blog actually seems to be getting academic writing about games right, which surely not:

http://www.playthepast.org/?p=2509

I was v excited for how a cultural studies interpretation of a 20y/o game with examination of source code was going to be the best article ever, until it turned out that the author has either never programmed in his life or is being extremely disingenuous

leaving aside my geekier reservations, you might as well ask "why do the ghosts in Pac-man move in set patterns and eat Pac-men instead of dots, what do these assumptions say about the developer" and, yes, examining the cultural value of those assumptions is all very well, but also, good luck programming a playable game on a 16k arcade board without making any assumptions

haha yeah

i kind of want to give them the benefit of the doubt, if there's more coming. i think the construction of 'politics' (or w/e) in sid meiers games is kind of interesting, and okay there's a schoolboy error there but it's a good start. i dunno, a lot of the other stuff on the blog seems like that too ... good start, now say something

i should write up my thing about why adorno's analysis of jazz music is exactly like multiplay first person shoot em ups no i shouldn't

yes, you should! but I might need a few drinks to get through it

(btw it wasn't just the "schoolboy error" that everyone else has pointed out in the comments, although that was a red flag, but also, among other even more pedantic or handwavily longwinded thoughts:

- author identifies that there are 30 code blocks which are only run if the character is or is not "native", lists screenshots of results of this search, but doesn't actually say what any of these code blocks does - they may just change the random name selection or the sprite displayed. I'm sure there's stuff in some of them which would further support the thesis, but the fact that he doesn't go into any of them or even acknowledge there is anything more to go into adds to the suspicion that he's no idea what any of it does

- where is this source code from? Is it the original code? Is it tidied from the output of decompiling the executable, in which case the variable names are not original and the internal logic may be slightly different due to compiler optimisations? Or is it just a remake by some guy on the internet? We can still analyse the latter, but if this is in preparation for a "book chapter", the real book needs to be more specific

see, I said they were geeky)

but, I read it all and will probably read more of their articles now, so...

thanks thomp... the medusa head one especially is killin it

yeah, ditto!

yea medusa one is excellent!

surprising that castlevania 3 didnt do much of note with the heads. iirc the level design was quite good. but I'll take this guy's word for it.

Not sure the right thread for this. Was reading through the radian games blog and saw this:

"This interview from Kill Screen makes me sound depressed, which is not true (the vast majority of the time). The interviewer asked a lot more questions than is shown, so when I give too much information about having to cut back or things like that, it was because he kept asking for more specifics. This interview from DIYGamer is a lot more accurate about how I’m feeling these days. I’d describe my current status as “uncertain”."

(http://radiangames.com/blog/?p=997)

So I read the kill screen interview and sure enough it seems like it's really a pretty one-sided cut compared to the other interview or other things on the developer's blog. Really more related to "what's wrong with kill screen" and a "state of videogame crit" discussion but the c&p thread is well beyond that now.

Missing that ! means 'not,' is a really very basic programming error that undermines the author's entire authority...

w/r/t colonization: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Seven_Cities_of_Gold_(game)

also yeah, the ability of folks to actually carefully read code in the broader context of how it's written and what it means and not just in isolation for what it sounds like it might mean is the stumbling block of much of critical code studies at the moment. I don't think the notion is doomed, but I have yet to see it executed well.

I feel like unless it becomes architectural/linguistic studies of code (which exist already), it's always going to be limited to either a) finding how coders described sections of the code in comments/names of functions and show how that's "problematic" (ie: Natives as a variable) or b) just extracting things without context because they sound interesting. I could see a really interesting, maybe super-Levi-Straussian structural analysis of code develop, but aren't the really serious questions about code mostly already covered by computer science + game theory + stuff? And the things this guy wants to study (broad identity studies w/ a nod towards critical theory/cont. phil) he would probably be better served writing about the game on a game level. Anything embedded in the code is going to occur on the surface too. You don't need to open up the code to realize that you aren't given the choice to play as the natives in the game. Going through the code to show how even if you hack the game, there still aren't sufficient options for the natives is just redundant.

but I have yet to see it executed well.

i don't think it's redundant - the screenshot of the empty town it creates manifests something interesting you couldn't get at in other ways. and i think there's stuff that (if you had code-literate ppl doing this) it would make more sense to get from the code, like e.g. how the AI makes decisions about native behaviour, than to observe and reverse-engineer the design principles. (a couple things i read about how the alien team thinks on the worryingly comprehensive x-com wiki made me go 'huuuuh'. i'm not sure x-com is as interesting to deconstruct for 'meaning' though.)

man, nothin on rps this sunday worth reading at all. fu british games journalism

some likeminded bros of mine have started some pretty cool gaming blogs

crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com
gamefeel.tumblr.com/
pldevelopment.blogspot.com
gamergoku.blogspot.com
shutupandgame.blogspot.com
finalbrutalweapon.blogspot.com

they're mostly coming from anti-narratologist POVs

looking forward to exploring that list

who are these ppl and why didn't they start one nonbuttugly blog

why do that when you can start an ironic webring

http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2012/03/bioware-day-one-dlc-developed.html

i guess this is an example of 'critical code studies' that tells us something we couldn't know without looking at the code

xpost do they actually have little webring .gifs and stuff that i missed bcz they totally should

if 'critical code studies' consists of uncovering whether companies are lying about dlc ripping you off or not, i'm not interested in the field.

like, this isn't critical code studies. it's consumer watchdogism bolstered by code analysis.