This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from philosophies of life and death in Pillars of Eternity to a new series aimed at demystifying MOBAs and eSports.
Of Play and Spectatorship
At Videogame Tourism, Eron Rauch is embarking on an exciting new series dedicated to demystifying Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) and helping to explain their appeal as a spectator sport on a global stage.
Meanwhile, in discussing eSports' grassroots cousin in the international fighting game community, Ian Danskin attempts to pin down (video) how an 14-year-old game like Super Mash Bros. Melee has garnered a fandom and competitive scene based around its players testing the limits of the game's systems.
Of Lore and Character
At Literally Games, Michael Hancock offers a dense but engrossing piece comparing the lore of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and others. Heavy spoilers lie within, but here's a taste:
[Eugene] Thacker's discussion on Life doesn't "solve" Pillars of Eternity or vice versa. Instead, I think they both illustrate how complicated our concept(s) of life can be, that it's possible to conceive of ways of approaching life beyond black and white abundance and absence.
At PopMatters Moving Pixels, Jorge Albor admits he was left feeling a bit cold from The Chinese Room's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, in part because he felt no real sense of closure for its characters.
At The Mary Sue, Jessica Lachenal chats a bit about the significance of the quiet interludes (what we might refer to as "pillow shots" in film) in Life is Strange. Meanwhile, at Gamasutra, Katherine Cross has a look back at Life is Strange developer Dontnod's premier title, Remember Me, and how its meticulously rendered villains fall short on the character detail necessary to make the player care:
There was precious little behind her, no conviction, no grand sense of ideology, scientific or political, that seemed to drive this indisputably powerful woman. You know who she is, where she is, but not why she is. She is sketched in such a way that should leave her far more compelling than a mere Gallic neo-Eichmann, pulling her assigned lever in this corporatist republic’s machinery of terror.
What most of the best villains elaborate or express in their characterization is a roadmap of thought that allows you to see how they became who they are. This need not be expressed in a tedious dump of expository back story, but rather simply showing (if not always telling) why these characters do what they do.
Embodied Horror
Sticking with Gamasutra for a moment, Alex Wawro has a front-page piece on the psychological toll that studying and rendering hyperreal violence (and other grotesqueries) can have on designers and animators working in the games industry (Content Warning: graphic violence).
Moving over to Not Your Mama's Gamer, Samantha Blackmon questions why Fallout Shelter not only erases queerness, it also enforces some highly specific attitudes regarding pregnancy:
There was so much about the mechanics of this game that not only privileged heteronormativity but also reproduction. Only heterosexual sex is allowed, heterosexual sex always leads to both 100% happiness and an apparently viable pregnancy, and said pregnancy must be protected at all costs, even when there is a direct threat to the woman carrying the fetus. Um, wow. That is some very real shit right there.
Also in the vein of unfortunate implications, at Kill Screen, Zach Budgor and Jess Joho have a conversation on Supermassive's 'interactive horror movie' Until Dawn and how it plays upon (and into) the gendered tropes and clichés of the slasher genre.
Past to Present
History Respawn's Bob Whitaker engages with historian Matthew Gabriele in his latest episode (video). It's nominally about Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3, but moreover, it's a conversation on our pop cultural fascination with Europe's Middle Ages.
On the subject of fantasy (and its broad Tolkienification in modern fantasy), Go Make Me a Sandwich's wundergeek
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