rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

http://archive.org/details/crt_emulation_test_videos_2012_11
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3786
shocking how nostalgia inducing the video is

wow, totally! The sort of thing that's changed sort of gradually and you forget how everything used to look.

i went to an arcade auction recently, so definitely feelin' it

http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/iPhone/Curiosity+-+what's+inside+the+cube/feature.asp?c=46406

kinda wanna know from anyone who's played Far Cry 3 is this article has some teeth to it, or is just total garbage:

haven't played it & read that article & it sounded interesting but then i read dude's article on hotline miami and i am thinking maybe he is just future EUKARYOTE thread fodder

"the first postmodern videogame?" ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

punctuation his not mine btw

people are trying really hard to pretend far cry 3 is an unflinching stare into the heart of awful bro dudes instead of, like, a really hamfisted embrace of awful bro dude ideology in service of stupid, stupid storytelling.

i really like this piece

http://killscreendaily.com/articles/essays/press-x-not-die/

http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/2982-a-link-to-the-past-how-to-add-crt-filters-to-16-bit-games-on-pc/

I haven't really done the emulator thing in a while, but this CRT emulation is pretty interesting. Problem is it seems like there's no standard easy to use collection of this stuff, you kind of have to download multiple filters and then mix them up? Or is there a simple and good-looking all-in-one thing?

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/12/28/john-butterfields-battle-of-the-bulge-rejuvenates-an-old-rogue

(vaguely disappointed that the Butterfields pictured are not stoot barfield's parents)

(sorry, I have never had the patience for war games, so the rest is lost on me)

Depressing article:
http://nightmaremode.net/2012/12/the-negative-influence-of-games-an-autobiographical-essay-24380/

These were all pretty good:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/28/the-very-best-of-rps-2012-gaming-made-me/

forks posted this interview on xcom thread w/ lead designer on xcom and it's worth reading:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/08/interview-xcom-jake-solomon-pc-gamer/

Solomon: Yeah. The idea of consequences is something really interesting, because DayZ is… I know you’re a big DayZ player. That and Walking Dead and FTL and XCOM, you’re right. 2012 was almost the year of consequence. Players, I think, are looking for authentic experiences. These are games that give you those real, authentic emotions when you play.

And difficulty, too, which I think of as being related to but separated from consequence. You look at Dark Souls as well, and the popularity that’s had on all platforms. And Amnesia, in 2011. I think people are ready for brutal experiences again.

Solomon: I think that’s true, and I think that it’s been the sort of thing where… The pendulum swings a little bit. I don’t honestly know. My head is so far down in my own development experience. But it’s funny how all these things have coalesced. Maybe that’s a coincidence, although it’s probably not. It’s probably people acknowledging that… There were some forerunners with Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft’s survival mode. Then you have these experiences where then you do get things like FTL or XCOM or DayZ. I think people are ready for these experiences are that are bringing a little more of the challenge back into games. I love playing narrative-driven shooters, but there’s a lot of ways to get your fill of that. Maybe there was a void that some of these games are filling.

i think this is very otm and i've been thinking about these things - consequences, difficulty, finality (that seem to me like rogue influences) - bc my ballot this year is dominated by these kinds of games. partially i think bc a lot of them are shorter experiences - FTL is maybe an hour max, XCOM you can drop in for a mission or two and it only takes an hour (or less), Walking Dead eps are relatively short - that are easier to slot into tight schedules. also tho i do find them very gamey + satisfying to play.

...

The visual freedom of early video games opened the path for a certain abstract-motion expression, concerned with gameplay visuality and not necessarily sacrificed to verbal storytelling, a path shared by cinema during its first decades. Such coexistence of images without words, movements without plots and attractions without boundaries questions our assumptions about film and game culture, proving that the richness, multiplicity and differential nature of both mediums goes way beyond the restrictions of allegedly cinematic techniques like cutscenes, verbal dialogue and hyperrealism.

http://gameplaygag.com/videos/

This is a wonderful article and I've been tempted to write something like it. This site looks like it may swallow up a few of my evenings.

I was playing Super Mario Galaxy 2 last night and at some point it just because blatantly obvious that it was a loving homage to Buster Keaton-style silent film action serials. Even the music was some form of ragtime piano roll, just synthesized. I'd always thought there was a connection from Mario to early silent film. Take the title screen to Super Mario Bros. 2 -- it is very much in the style of those old films. Maybe this is intentional? Maybe Nintendo realized the early years of videogames could draw allusions to the early years of movies. Sound was very primitive -- any text is spoken and there was a maximum of 3 note polyphony -- so it was a good idea to focus on catchy atmospheric themes that could be repeated over and over like a piano roll. Maybe this was all intentional? I can imagine Koji Kondo getting the scoring job for SMB and being told "Make it sound like a Charlie Chaplin movie". And of course you can look back to Pac-Man's cutscenes and it's a pretty faithful recreation of early film.

At any rate I've been looking around online for stuff that talks about this. I'm tempted to write an essay but my knowledge of early film is limited and I'm not that good a writer but I still may give it a shot. Odd that connecting early videogames to early films doesn't seem to come up when the "Are videogames art?" discussion is brought up. You could even draw parallels between how the evolution of technology has affected both mediums.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bEyfaM9pQBE#!

I mean this is just brilliant. When they made the Super Mario Bros. movie they should have just done it as a silent film homage.

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/08/on_games_and_gags_between_sile.html

Here's more, referencing the above works. This kind of stuff is immensely fascinating to me. These writings seem to be focused on the kinetics of the storytelling between the two mediums. The content of silent film/early videogames as an expression of motion. However I think there is also alot to be said about presentation, aesthetics, staging, etc, that has yet to be touched upon. Take parallax scrolling backgrounds, for example, are highly evocative of theatrical sets, which were a huge influence on film before editing and cinematic tricks became the norm.

Loving those links and your comments, Adam. I don't really have anything useful to add but thanks for posting that, serious food for thought.

Can people who know more about film elaborate on why the silents tended to favor a "2D platform" kind of presentation? Everything more or less in "elevation," in a plane parallel to the film plane, moving from left to right... is it a legacy of how'd you stage things in theater, a reflection of assumptions about what would be easy for audiences to process/understand, or something somehow inherent to the film-making technology itself - like a narrow depth of field making it important to keep important stuff in the same focal plane?

Also reminded of the Errant Signal thing about violence (or, really, action) in games, that in part it stems from the kind of interface that's available and what sorts of things are actually easy to do, versus simulating diplomacy or something. Maybe this points up something (obvious and well-known, probably) about early film: given that it was silent, it was kind of bad at courtroom dramas but great at slapstick and tower-climbing, pit-leaping adventure.

Well yeah i just watched a wonderful lecture about the history of film by David Bordwell (https://vimeo.com/57245550). Basically the idea is that early film relied on Tableau staging (basically filming a theater production from the front, which introduces line-of-sight issues that effect storytelling) vs. Cinematic editing (basically multiple cameras, multiple perspectives the cut, playing w time, more freeing and stylistic and cinematic). Tableau is sort of a legacy left over from the theater-based origins of plays, dramas, vaudeville, etc. Maybe you could liken it to a shift from a 2D perspective to a 3D perspective.

If there is a camera shooting a theater setup in front of it, everything is sort of locked into a 2d representation. Actors can only go left or right, up or down, but not really in front of each other, because then they will be blocking each other from the camera. However this actually lends itself to some interesting techniques that Bordwell talks about, 2-dimensional visual tricks that shift the eye from one object to another, maybe someone is blocking a doorway that someone else stands behind, and they move, revealing a previously unseen character.

That lecture is very interesting, though doesn't have anything to do w videogames.

btw this is also brilliant

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EV-k9ESCZ8Q

Compared editing between Samuel Beckett's visual work in "Film" (1965) and "Quadrat 1+2" (1982), and a selection of glitches from Super Mario 64 (1996).

unintended consequences of posting that, but the beckett clip (quadrat 1 + 2) is completely blowing my mind. i want to find a local dance group and try to make them do absurd things. completely awesome

COMPLETELY BLOWING MY MIND

http://www.livescience.com/6521-video-gamers-control-dreams-study-suggests.html

http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/16/3740422/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-arcade-for-amusement-only

Ooh, that last one was a good read. I was arcade-age in the early 90s, so I remember the Street Fighter II era as a lot more varied and exciting and "golden age" like than it's depicted here, though I don't doubt that the economics and scale of the industry were drastically different. But I totally dig that idea of the spaces where kids were left alone to socialize and impress each other and all that kind of thing. Even just an hour and a half while the parents were doing grownup shopping at the mall...it was a significant part of my childhood really.

(In addition to fighters I think we mostly played the side-scrolling beat-em-ups, which are similar in mechanics but I think not in play patterns or the social life they engender.)

Yeah, absolutely. if anything it was the opposite, like you would play with your pals, or randomly friend up with other kids playing those beat'em ups like X-Men, The Simpsons, Final Fight, etc. while Street Fighter II was the kind of game that was so heated and competitive you could get into a real fight over it.

Also interested in the topic about socializing/kid's spaces - I'd like to see an article that really digs into that notion. A tiny little arcade that opened in my small town during the early '90s was constantly being threatened by the town board and various concerned parents, they actually posted clippings about it from the local paper in pride on their walls... until it finally was closed down a year later.

I think those kinds of spaces were particularly crucial for me because, living in the sprawl age, I was inundated by fictional images of childhood derived from urban or small town existence (where there was a big 'gang' of kids doing things together, building tree forts, going on adventures, whatever) while my actual world was largely circumscribed by the bounds of our cul-de-sac street and its two other kids that were my age. Arcade space (here including all arcade-like worlds) was really the only zone of existence that came close.

Also re beat em ups/fighters: totally different relation to the learning curve...if you sucked at X-Men you might be sort of a drag on the team but you could keep feeding it quarters and to some extent people are so busy with what they're doing that they won't notice your bumbling (not allowing for spectators). If you sucked at Street Fighter, you're out in two rounds and somebody else is playing the winner, so you're back to the end of the line.

Yeah i can't wait to read this. I came from the exact same era as you guys. I remember seeing the TMNT arcade game for the first time and just overwhelmed by how cool the graphics/sound/play was.

Book pitch: The Latchkey Archipelago.

This is pretty interesting. It's also kind of sad that there has been a war on videogames from even before there were videogames!

TMNT arcade game was excellent.

The side-scrolling ones were so great in that usually no one cared if you stayed on the machine for a long period of time, and usually people would end up cycling in and out so even if someone beat the game, it usually wasn't the same group of people that started. The four player large versions of those games with the multi-panel screens were so cool. I think, with friends, I beat the Simpsons and X-Men ones a few times, but the arcade that had TMNT had the difficulty set pretty high.

Helloooo. Just dropping in on ILG as a total noob to ask if there are threads about interactive fiction? I played Howling Dogs this morning and started reading up a tiny bit but wondered if I could peruse any threads only search has not turned up any. I see Emily Short got one mention in this thread but...no further discussion?

some discussion on these threads iirc:

Christine Love, Emily Short, Jane McGonigal and Other Indie Female Game Designers I Love
Text adventure games

Perrrrfect. It's annoying not to be able to see threads more than four weeks back.

this is a more recent thread that might be relevant:
StoryNexus (Fallen London, Zero Summer, and more)

http://www.vice.com/read/my-name-is-tom-and-im-a-video-game-addict

wait, that IS the James Franco I'm thinking of. weird!

dude is badly overeducated

Extra Lives is a search for what is so attractive about video games, but it is also a kind of modernist investigation into the essence of the medium and what video games can do better than other mediums. If we tried to translate the agency given to the player in video games to other mediums, you’d get something like elaborate coloring books or extensive choose your own adventure books. But to the nth degree, because videogames are now able to contain random interactions, unplanned occurrences between the player avatar and the unscripted independently programmed characters and elements of the game world. This means that the video games are approaching the open-ended dynamic of life.

reads like a college essay through and through but with sentence fragment issues

When he talks about himself and sad-robot coke habit then he's tedious. Much better is when he writes about his reaction to a game - a lovely passage on resident evil springs to mind. You can tell he's a travel writer by trade. I suppose it's hard to talk about your reaction to something without coming across overly narcissistic, which he def does at times, but the good bits of the book make me want to read more personal emotional reactions to games (ilg is v good at this)

I couldn't really find a good thread for this but:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/6/6/4403602/interplay-repurchases-freespace-ip-thq-volition

Only $7,500? Wow. What does Interplay even do these days?

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/07/the-worst-video-game-ever-created.html

good read

Yeah, that was cool! Never heard of that before.

that opening paragraph is great but the rest of the article doesn't seem to refer back to it. or did i miss something?

you missed something

“They didn’t contact us,” said Teller. “Someone sent me a news story about the event over e-mail. So I got in contact.” Saunders e-mailed Teller back, thanking him for his interest. He asked if Teller might consider giving the team an encouraging phone call to inspire what had become a “hub of sleep deprivation.” After Morgan van Humbeck hung up on him, Teller found another number to reach the team, and asked what they’d like for lunch.

ah thanks, my fault for rush-reading

http://mentalfloss.com/article/51930/legend-oregon-trail