[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including the charm of Arma II's popular zombie mod DayZ, and discussions about rape culture in games.] With E3 upon us, it's time once again to take steady aim and shoot a bullet straight through the heart of what drives us to write about these games of ours. It's This Week in Video Game Criticism! Let's start out on a high note. Leigh Alexander profiles the Kickstarter-facilitated reunion of graphical adventure veterans Scott Murphy and Mark Crowe. Drew Toal introduces us to the curious house rules of cheating at Scrabble for charity. And Kill Screen artist Daniel Purvis delivers a self-reflection on getting out of and back into gaming. But many authors elected this week to also get right into the guts of things. Eric Schwarz declares Diablo III an abusive relationship while Josh Bycer presents us with a breakdown of the attributes of bad game design. Combining the two themes in a tale of "Vicodin Visions," Grantland's Tom Bissell performs a ludonarrative dissection of Max Payne 3:
"Ludonarrative dissonance, a term first coined by the game designer Clint Hocking, arises whenever a video game's fiction says one thing and its gameplay says an opposite thing. Some designers and critics regard ludonarrative dissonance as a core problem in modern game design. Max Payne 3, quite possibly the most ludonarratively dissonant video game ever made, amounts to 12 and a half hours of game fiction and game action throwing empty champagne bottles at each other."
Sounds quite pleasant! On themes of games and virtual spaces, Robert Yang suggests reality underserves the history we "remember" through games:
"Most tourists don't say anything critical out of reverence, but the French have chosen to mar their version of Omaha Beach with a really awful metal sculpture that permanently scars the shore and ruins the subtle relationship between the original landing monument and the land. [...] It's just there, stuck in the sand, like another German beach obstacle that exists solely to be in the way. Well, it's supposed to evoke flames to symbolize youth or something, but its odd height leaves it just barely over human scale yet much shorter than a monumental scale — so it's a monument that requires a nearby plaque, poorly typeset, to explain itself and give it the monumentality that it still doesn't have and will never have. Clearly the "real world" has failed Omaha Beach. It's up to video games to give it space."
Speaking of grandeur of and interactions with spaces, much has been made of survivalist ARMA II mod DayZ. Our favorite Sneaky Bastards pinned down the game's charm thusly:
"Despite its player-driven stealth gameplay, DayZ is not an emergent game. Emergence is something defined by the interaction of systems, whereas the ones that govern DayZ are as basic as can be. It goes beyond emergence, appealing to and being a reflection of raw human behaviour."
Quintin Smith, in a piece for Eurogamer which echoes his memorable Rock, Paper, Shotgun series on Russian cult hit Pathologic, also attests to the game's allure through the utter brutality of its play. If you're hungry for more like I am but can't brave the currently overcrowded servers, James Dalzell provides another engrossing tale of his play experience, and blogger J Wilbur has set up Day Z Diary to serially deliver the chronicle of his game in novel form. From the extreme hardships of the zombie apocalypse to a more overarching treatment on player action in games, Dan Olson furnishes us with this great video essay on that old "are games art?" hobby horse, asserting that not only is the (sometimes overwhelming) potential for failure not unique to games, it is in fact integral to communication and media. And Roger Travis returns to the subject of player choice in Mass Effect, saying:
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