[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including finding art in sports video games, and a discussion about death, motherhood, and Creatures.] What time is it? … What year? … No… Then we don't have much time left! We HAVE to release This Week in Video Game Criticism before it's too late! Let's hit the ground running. We start with Jim Rossignol, interviewing Jim Rossignol, with such hard-hitting investigative journalism as:
"RPS's Jim Rossignol: How much are you charging for this deathtrap? Jim Rossignol: $5. I wanted to charge $7500, but I realize that people need distracting from the basic horror of their existence. I mean we're all definitely going to die, quite grotesquely in some cases, and anything that can be done to get people to think about colors and pleasant noises instead of the infinite abyss of their own doom is worth doing, I would say."
For a weightier interview, sure to be good reading material while the irradiated Earth cools, we go to Hardcore Gaming 101 and John Szczepaniak's interview with Agness Kaku, translator for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and the Katamari Damacy franchise. Here is a sample before you head into the vault:
"It's like a molasses [game design has] been caught in all this time. I think in the early days the medium was quite limited, so the language you used, whether it was graphics or game control, or just the actual text, was in line with that. All was kind of good. But very quickly the medium outstripped the language, and in the meantime it's just continued to gabble in this stuff grabbed from poor movies. Or just arbitrarily stuck-in comic book pieces. I don't know when it's going to get out of this. I'm sure some people have experimented, but as long as everyone sits around… A polite way to say it is a mutual congratulations society. As long as this keeps going on it's not going to get better guys, it's really not."
Our mutated descendants might not have much use for football when they're trapped in the still-warm subterranean tunnels near the Earth's core, but in case we do, two pieces this week have turned their attention to the intersection of sports and games. The first, from Scott Juster, remarks on how much more like sports than board games video games happened to be. The latter, from the ever-erudite Tom Bissell, suggests that if there is art in games, there is art in sports games as well:
"Whatever art is, it must be, in some way, beautiful. Acts of physical beauty performed within rule-set confines are not art, but acts of mental beauty performed within only slightly less rule-set confines (like, say, a sonnet) are. Is that really how we're going to play this? It doesn't sit right. Here's what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn't deserve any art."
Eric Schwarz attempts to take a fine-toothed comb to that infamously nebulous term 'immersion.' Sentient machines intent upon enslaving mankind in perpetual simulacra, take note. And now for a moment, we refer back to a simpler time, a happier time… last week, when Raph Koster asserted that narrative was not a game mechanic. He clarifies further this week: "Narrative Isn't Usually Content Either". This may leave some games depending heavily upon what Koster deems "feedback" in a curious position. Take Mafia, or as Joel Goodwin likes to call it, "The Don of Cutscenes". And when they excavate our servers from the ruins of bomb-blasted wreckage, I hope it's Drew Millard's portrait on 50 Cent, man, icon and game avatar that they uncover first.
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