This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including how certain games reinforce prejudices through play, conflict minerals in gaming, and more. It was a dark and stormy night. A night… for This Week in Video Game Criticism. First up, something you might've missed: over on Harper's, Christopher Ketcham brings us this great feature on the antimonopolist origins of Monopoly. Elsewhere, also on the subject of games and economics, Tim Fernholz tells the story of Valve reaching out to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis to bring stability to their Steam and in-game economies. On FAIR, J.F. Sargent breaks down several ways in which games, as systems, reinforce prejudices through play. Here's one example Sargent lists:
"Elder Scrolls: Skyrim features the option to choose to be one of the 'Redguard,' a dark-skinned people whose culture closely resembles the Moors, and receive an 'Adrenaline Boost' perk to augment their ability to run and jump beyond that of other races–which reflects obvious stereotypes about African-American athleticism. Earlier games in this same series also gave the Redguard a penalty to intelligence, which meant that playing as a dark-skinned character was mutually exclusive from playing as a smart character, forcing you to 'role-play' a racist stereotype. White characters faced no such limitations."
Maddy Myers takes a look at women in horror games, focusing on the protagonists of Lollipop Chainsaw and They Bleed Pixels. Dishonored continues to inspire a great deal of writing throughout the blogosphere, from a wide spectrum of perspectives. This week brings us articles from such writers as Jim Ralph at Ontological Geek, Rowan Kaiser at Gameranx, and G. Christopher Williams and Scott Juster, both of PopMatters Moving Pixels. This week also saw a fantastic new Gamasutra blog post from former Dishonored dev Joe Houston, on why he's going indie. Also turning up on Gamasutra, Eric Schwarz discusses why X-COM: Enemy Unknown didn't work for him. Kotaku's Jason Schreier writes on the seductively "perfect" little world of Persona 4. Meanwhile, Brendan "Hotshot" Keogh continues his "A Sum of Parts" column on Gameranx this week with a second essay on Binary Domain, this time on its treatment of posthumanism. And not to be outdone in terms of ambitious analyses, this week Play the Past's Roger Travis brings us an interesting interpretation of Halo as an analogue for Homer's Odyssey. Several high-profile indie games continued to spur discussion this week. First, Terrence Jarrad laments how treating Journey "like a game" ruined his experience. Then, our own Eric Swain, writing for Moving Pixels, analyzes why Papo & Yo failed to connect with him. Over on The Creator's Project, Leigh Alexander profiles Ian Bogost's latest project, the iOS game/religious altar Simony. And on his Tumblr, Chris Chapman provocatively likens Peter Molyneux's Curiosity to a Skinner Box experiment. Metagame has finally released to a few quite attention-worthy pieces, including this review by Nico Dicecco at Medium Difficulty, and this feature by Nils Pihl on Gamasutra. Moving on from the subject of specific games to more overarching trends and themes, Craig Stern at Sinister Design praises unpredictability in turn-based systems. Back over at Medium Difficulty, Hari MacKinnon explores the avatar as self/other. And on Ontological Geek, Hannah DuVoix asks: if games face the unique problem of obsolescence even within their own franchises, how can publishers correct for that? On Nightmare Mode, Mattie Brice reflects on a talk she attended at last month's IndieCade and the larger reality of "the magic circle." At that very moment, somewhere in his secret base in the Antarctic, John Brindle writes in defense of the "juvenile" term 'videogames':
"Accepting 'videogame' with our whole hearts precludes being ashamed of our medium. It is populist and demotic, familiar to everyone. It accepts – neither defends nor apologises for but accepts – the history of the medium so far. It sounds like a word by 8-year-olds for 8-year-olds. And as critics we must banish the idea that only those po-faced seriousness are worth our time. We should make a virtue of trashiness, embrace the garish, valorise the vulgar, fuck the haters. Clearly, videogames are about instructing computers to hallucinate vast mazes of desire which channel the human will to knowledge through strange and beautiful paths where Princess Petit a will always have another crystalline castle to get lost in – but, equally clearly, they are also about travelling through time and capturing monkeys in a big net."
Meanwhile at his own blog Problem With Story, Patrick Stafford suggests something pretty controversial: we play games too quickly. Lest you think the Rab Florence Affair was well and truly behind us, we have a couple new pieces this week that call for a more moderate response. First, music blogger David Rayfield turns up at Kotaku Australia to remark on how other industries respond to critic-publisher faux pas. Then, writing once more for Gameranx, Rowan Kaiser suggests that the problem is, rather, too little honesty and too many standards:
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