I spent this entire week reading articles on videogames so you didn’t have to. Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea of the love that shows for you, you faceless audience? No?
Well, screw you too, and here are your articles.
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Rock Paper Shotgun’s John Walker has been talking with Double Fine’s Tim Schafer about the developerment studio’s recent Kickstarter success and, par for the site’s course, been doing a bang-up job of it.
Interview: Tim Schafer on Adventures, by John Walker via Rock Paper Shotgun
I previously wrote about the Double Fine campaign and the revival of adventure games on this very website and am happy to see answers to some of those questions answered in Walker’s interview. When Schafer talks about designing aspects of Full Throttle to have both an “action path” and a “puzzle path” it makes me really look forward to seeing what the Kickstarter game will be like. The only thing that makes me a bit wary is when, at the beginning, he also declares that the new game will “serve [fans of traditional adventure games] and not try to rope in [a different audience].” Here’s to hoping that dedication to the ways things used to be doesn’t get in the way of a more user-friendly brand of adventure.
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This week, pretty much everyone has been writing about the disgusting behaviour going on over at Cross Assault, a Capcom reality show featuring two teams of fighting game players duking it out for a share of $25,000. Probably the best write-up was provided by Ben Kuchera over at The PA Report (marking two weeks in a row of outstanding reporting) who gives a thorough summary of the main issues and highlights key points of the story.
Sexual harassment as ethical imperative: how Capcom’s fight game reality show turned ugly, by Ben Kuchera via The PA Report
This is the kind of thing that makes me want to bow out from talking about games at all. It seems like, regardless of the increase in quality discourse growing up around the medium, there are still a large number of players who refuse to, well, not be complete fucking idiots. Obviously Bakhtanians belongs to a specific subculture of creepy jerks, but this sort of thing negatively effects the entire medium. Who wants to take a chance on videogames when these are the kind of people contributing to the public face of it?
Ugh.
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Digital Love Child’s own Tom Auxier wrote a fantastic piece for Pixels or Death suggesting that sports and games fandom, despite seeming so different on the surface, have a lot in common.
Winning: Sports and Videogames, by Tom Auxier via Pixels or Death
It all ties in, to me at least, with the futility of subcultural labels. Why can’t someone be equally in love with sports and videogames? I nerd out as hard over books and music as games, but I would hesitate to call myself a “fan” of one to the exception of the others. Tom offers a compelling counter-argument to this type of phenomenon by showing that, in the end, the archetypal jock and the archetypal D&D nerd share a lot of the same traits.
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Lastly, brand new games site, Medium Difficulty debuted this week with a handful of articles. My favourite is a piece by Brendan Keogh, decrying the tendency of modern games criticism to discuss what games should be rather than analyze what they already are. Though I don’t agree with absolutely every point he makes, I do think a greater emphasis on textual (rather than purely theoretical) criticism is an important one to note. Critics should ask for better games, but doing so by working with what’s already available creates a much better framework than grasping at some utopian ideal.
Chasing Mirages: Turning Videogame Criticism Away from the Future, by Brendan Keogh via Medium Difficulty
Aside from the weight of Keogh’s argument for a more tangible games criticism, I’m also very, very happy to see the launch of another site that is more concerned with providing discourse on the medium rather than simply adding to the web’s already bloated offering of consumer reviews, previews and news. Very much looking forward to seeing how it shapes up in the future.
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Listen, I’m really sorry about what I said in the header. I overreacted. I didn’t mean it that way.
Just . . . just have a good weekend jerks.
