[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including Cooking Mama as performance art, how Skyrim is a place we inhabit, and more.] Achoo! It's too cold for my liking over here. Let's warm up by the fire with a nice fresh supply of game criticism, theory and commentary. It's This Week in Video Game Criticism! The man I usurped to get this gig, Ben Abraham, is back again this week with a compelling video essay in which he questions our fondness for the term immersion. This follows on a theme in recent weeks in respect to Jenova Chen's master thesis, and is also echoed in Tony Ventrice's feature on Gamasutra on flow in mobile media. Also hailing from Gamasutra, Ara Shirinian investigates how we might use psychology to design intuitive graphical user interfaces. And Jorge Albor takes the subject to the dark side in ruminating on the use of psychology to develop alienating structures and creatures:
"[T]he same visceral reaction that we have to Giger's work or the synthetic/organic husks of Mass Effect 3 mirrors a reaction that future generations are intended to have when they meet the WIPP's warning markers. There is horror found in artificial yet unreadable architecture."
Responding to John Walker's essay on the perceived runniness, shall we say, of games' subject matter, Joseph Hilgard contends that we're looking in the wrong places for gaming subject matter we can sink our teeth into:
"If we want our games to provide us with real nourishment, I would argue that the last thing we need is last year's shooter wrapped in some awkward story about love and loss, or yet another indie platformer about the inevitability of mortality. We don't need superficially serious themes. We need new and interesting games which provide novel and challenging forms of play."
Ed Smith also voices misgivings in a critique of last year's Catherine, where systems fail the nuance about relationships it aspires to. Meanwhile, Kyle Chayka says we can find the art in games from a more unconventional place– perhaps in reading Cooking Mama as performance art?
"There's a satisfaction in the rhythmic nature of the different tasks that have to be performed, and there's always the goal of pleasing Mama and besting your previous score. But there's also the abstract satisfaction of having created something, or the simulation of something, that someone else is going to consume. Like Tiravanija's curry, the gyoza or omelets that we make in Cooking Mama aren't composed for ourselves; they're created for the mystery person on the other side of the theoretical table, whomever we choose to fill that space with."
Also daring to be unconventional, Jim Ralph proposes that Skyrim is in fact a place we inhabit:
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