This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including the color language of games, teaching kids history through Civilization, and more. I'm back from IndieCade! Let's see what you all left me. It's time once more for This Week in Video Game Criticism! First, some much-needed signal-boosting. I had the distinct pleasure of having dinner last Sunday with a certain Jim Munroe, writer of this year's IndieCade Grand Jury Prize recipient Unmanned, and I would be remiss in not pointing to you to his blog, No Media Kings. Next up, long-time reader Will Burgess wrote into us last week with the following:
"I am a game designer that WAS working as a producer for 7sixty Games for the past year and a half, but I got laid off this past Friday. While I am taking the opportunity to re-build my portfolio and such, I also have a lot more free time to devote to my blog."
With layoffs seeming to come from half a dozen studios a week these days, it's definitely a tough time for a lot of devs out there. Will, who has a background as a game studies academic, definitely lends an uncommon perspective to games blogging so it's really good to see him making something positive out his situation. (But we're also hoping someone has the good sense to hire him.) On to the meat and potatoes of the links this week. First up, let's make up for some lost time. Jason Johnson of Paste has caught up with what Jason Rohrer's up to these days. Next, this unmissable piece from Moving Pixels' G. Christopher Williams somehow, erm, got missed when it was first published: on brevity, death and replay value. Over on Psychology of Games, Jamie Madigan writes on how game tutorials can be harmful to player creativity. And another Jamie, of the Dalzell variety, is up to some cool business at Pondering the Pixels, predictably pondering some pixels, namely the color language of games:
"All videogames speak. Whether it be in the blunt sentences of the First Person Shooter or the nuanced tongue of the Role Playing Strategy, every game speaks with its own vocabulary: a language that teaches us how we interact. Yet many choose to speak the same dialect, born and bred and raised to speak the common language of the day, inspired by the dystopian landscape that is the regular videogame release schedule. […] Thankfully, then, not all developers are as allergic to colour as others, as if injected with some anti-allergy serum that saves them from the allergic reaction any other colour than drab elicits. And more often than not it's in the ones that take a chance with colour that we see new worlds and languages brought to the videogame vocabulary, that so often stifles itself on the origins of cover and 60 Frames Per Second."
But wait, let's talk about FPSes for a bit. For one thing, Brendan Keogh has fallen in love with a particular gun in Borderlands 2. For another, Game Church's Steven Sukkau raises the interesting hypothesis that Halo-based machinima franchise Red vs Blue is the modern inheritor of Clerks. Let's telescope outwards a bit, shall we, from first-person to third-person. Kim of Co-Op Critics has been revisiting Silent Hill 2 and The Dark Tower alongside her play of Spec Ops: The Line and has some interesting reflections on how the three connect. And going well beyond game genre into the spanning world of global politics, Robert Rath explains how a global economy interconnected with Chinese censorship standards actually feeds into North Korean propaganda with fear-mongering titles like Homefront and the Red Dawn remake, saying: "In many ways, Homefront shows the North Korea Kim Jong-un wishes he inherited." To be certain, not all games or critical themes get a fair shake their first go-around in the critical sphere. That's what is so exciting about doing This Week in Video Game Criticism, as it's a good excuse to track down the sorts of articles on the kinds of games which unfortunately got overlooked on first release. For instance, take this fantastic metanarrative reading of Kingdom of Amalur by Matt Schanuel, or this meaty, deep reading of The Last Story by Andrew High. Other games have gotten a fair bit of critical play, like thechineseroom's Dear Esther, but new perspectives and critical takes are always popping up. Take this piece from our own Eric Swain:
"Dear Esther isn't your traditional horror story because it isn't within the work itself that the scares reside. It's what you bring out of this ghost story into the real world that scares the most."
