rolling thread of stuff worth reading on videogames

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

thanks!

ok, not really any new information here but i lol'd once i realized zombie boner
http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/8/8/4595050/adults-only-ao-games

http://www.newstatesman.com/games/2013/08/returning-alter-ego

Excellent article.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/time-to-feel-old-inside-the-nes-on-its-30th-birthday/
No shocking developments, but a solid piece, and definitely some good photos and videos selected along with the article I hadn't seen.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/grand-theft-autos-bigfoot-hunters.html

Christian Cantamessa, a former Rockstar employee who worked as a level designer on the game, took a similar stance when I approached him. “It is a little like asking the U.S. government to discuss Area 51, isn’t it?” he said. “The only appropriate comment is ‘No comment.’ ”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/23/us/cia-acknowledges-area-51-exists-but-what-about-those-little-green-men.html

do u guys Believe???

(and is there a game myths-relevant thread? I love that shit)

Yeah that's a cool article! Personally I don't think it's there - if hackers have discovered Hot Coffee by now, they should've discovered a bigfoot model. But that article puts up a good argument for both sides!

i remember some weird kid at my school telling me that he had 'hacked' the cartridge for zelda 64 and discovered a secret fish at the lake you can fish at

was it the loach? 'cause the loach is in there by design. I could never catch it tho

http://www.bogost.com/writing/consumption_and_naturalism_in_.shtml

http://www.polygon.com/features/2013/9/6/4641320/pewdiepie-youtube-commentary
fucking pew die pie is horrible

http://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204
imo

cute
http://vimeo.com/74645125

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-fi-c1-rodrigos-world-20130902-dto,0,2239765.htmlstory

Good behind-the-scenes piece from lolKotaku on the demise of Lucasarts: http://kotaku.com/how-lucasarts-fell-apart-1401731043

yeah, that's a good read and should also be on the george lucas crimes thread because it sounds like he had a big hand in fucking that company up

god damn you george lucas

None of those abandoned games sounds like a big loss tbh

Day of the Tentacle HD sure does.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/10/hiroshi-yamauchi-henk-rogers/