This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including the inaccuracy of "brown shooters," and why gameplay must die. It's time for This Week in Video Game Criticism! So let's get right into it. Medal of Honor and the War Game Writing in his regular Critical Intel column, Robert Rath laments the "brown shooter" cliché that has taken over the military action genre.
"The tragedy of the grey-brown palate is that it doesn't reflect reality. Speaking as someone who grew up in Hawaii and has hiked World War II battlefields around the Pacific, I can tell you for a fact that Saipan isn't a dim jungle under a faded denim sky. Pearl Harbor doesn't have grey water capped with red-shot clouds. The men who hit the beaches at Normandy and Guadalcanal didn't see the battle through an antique camera lens, they saw the horror and, yes, sometimes the beauty too, through eyes as sharp and color-sensitive as ours. The antique film aesthetic is fundamentally incompatible with games as a medium for one simple reason: In a movie we're watching history, but in games we're there. Private Ryan's motif assumes that the audience is an observer, but in games, we're a participant."
The Heart and Soul of Dishonored Eric Schwarz follows up his previous article on Dishonored's failings by noting where he believes the game shines. Meanwhile, Robert Yang takes us through a rigorous analysis of the game's much-discussed Heart mechanic. Patricia Hernandez, however, pauses to reflect on how empty Dishonored –and indeed many games– feel:
"As Corvo landed his final blink, all I could feel was a thrill. Not so much of reaching my summit, but instead of conquering the night, of conquering my skills. A sense of control that came with doing whatever I wanted: the city was mine. But as I looked around from above, everything under me looked empty and unpopulated. I thought about the kingdom under the tyranny of the lord regent, I thought of the great whale beasts that we killed to fuel our everyday conveniences—both things that I never really got to see in the game. I'm more acquainted with the rats of Dunwall, with the books of Dunwall than its actual everyday citizens."
Up a Creek with Assassin's Creed III Dr. B of Not Your Mama's Gamer (while caveating that she is still going through the game) criticizes some problematic racial and narrative implications in Assassin's Creed III's choice to start the player out not playing the biracial Connor Kenway, but his white father Haytham:
"Ubisoft pulled a bait and switch, it promised us (ok me…but it is all about me, right?) one thing and then proceeded to deliver us something else. With all of this Haytham in my face and in the construction of Connor as an assassin, he (Connor) becomes less of the Native American badass and more of the assassin who harnesses/overcomes/incorporates his savage side to do what all of his great white ancestors have done. Kill Templars (and anyone doing their bidding) rather than a man on a mission to right the wrongs that have been committed against his people (despite his own connection to them via bloodline). And then, right before I started this post it struck me. I know why Haytham just sticks in my craw! He is the personification of the infamous letter of authenticity that precedes every slave narrative. Yes, I recognize that Connor is neither African (American) nor a slave, but the feeling is still the same. Connor, as Ratonhnhaké:ton, is unworthy of being an assassin. He is tainted. He can only be an assassin (and avenge the deaths of his Native people?) as Connor Kenway, the son of a white man and not the son of a Native American woman. While Ubisoft tries to play up his Native heritage he is another instance of the great White savior coming in to save/avenge the lowly savage."
Knowing X-COM: Enemy Unknown Over on VentureBeat, Rob Savillo spends a bit of time musing on what makes you care for your soldiers in X-COM. Binary Domain On Gameranx, Brendan Keogh praises Binary Domain's unexpected depth:
"Binary Domain is one of those deceptively smart games that I initially ignored as just-another-shooter. When I finally played it recently, however, I was surprised to find a plethora of subtle and nuanced things happening alongside the absurd action and archetypal characters. Binary Domain wants to tell you about class struggles, about climate change, about Japanese nationalism and insularism, about posthumanism, and most of all, about discrimination and othering."
Let's Do the Time Warp Again! This was a good week for retrospectives on older and/or overlooked titles. Let's have a look. Over on Unwinnable, Tanner Higgin muses on Red Dead Redemption's location between space and ideology:
"I think of RDR as meditation on the American politics of space and territory. With keen attentiveness to what the U.S. and Mexico border region landscape signifies historically and culturally, RDR reveals itself to be not only about exploration and the achievement of a pastoral individualistic ideal, but the human cost required to maintain that myth."
Edward Smith shares a compelling tale of one man's time spent "going mental" in Fallout 3. And on Play the Past, Jeremy Antley writes on Skyrim, "Medieval+," and the game's validation of folklore through alchemy. Matthew Schanuel
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