This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including the "subculture of persistent world roleplaying" and a history of THQ logos. Let's jam with some This Week in Videogame Blogging! SWING LOW SWEET CHARIOT This week saw the demise of veteran games publisher THQ. Richard Moss takes us through a history of its logos and branding. IT’S THE ECONOMY On Tech Crunch, Tadhg Kelly has an interesting article on the inward-facing practices of "casual" games, and how their approach -- focusing on metrics -- is actually very familiar to us:
Obsessed with measuring everything and therefore defining all of their problems in numerical terms, social game makers have come to believe that those numbers are all there is, and this is why they cannot permit themselves to invent. Like TV people, they are effectively in search of that one number that will explain fun to them. There must, they reason, be some combination of LTV and ARPU and DAU and so on that captures fun, like hunting for the Higgs boson. It must be out there somewhere.
Independent developer Jake Birkett showed up on Gamasutra's Expert Blogs this week with this provocatively titled article, in which he datamines the revenue of some of his recent games and draws some conclusions about the state of mobile gaming. On Tap Repeatedly, AJ Lange asks what the real market pressures are for something like Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. Tangentially on the subject of economics, you know that game Monopoly? Of course you do. But do you know about Onopo, a version of the game which asks: what happens when you take Monopoly's gameplay and strip out all its themes and representationalism? TALK TO HIM Gamasutra's Mike Rose sits down for an interview with Richard Hofmeier, developer of 2011 indie sleeper hit Cart Life. On Rock, Paper, Shotgun, resident American Nathan Grayson interviews Jake Elliott, Cardboard Computer co-founder and half the driving force behind Kentucky Route Zero. Also on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, David Valjalo tracks down the musical talents behind 2012 indie game sensations Hotline Miami and FTL. ANALYSES On Gamasutra, Jordane Thiboust takes aim at the tall task of nailing down the various subgenres within the Role Playing Game. On PopMatters Moving Pixels, G. Christopher Williams observes how Assassin's Creed III protagonist Connor isn't just flat as a character, he doesn't even seem to be from this planet:
This assassin is on a years long mission for vengeance (and I realize that that might take up a lot of your time), but for God’s sake, he does have to think about something else once in a while. Again, this seems like what the Homestead missions are intended to do, yet, Connor’s basic inability to grasp any kind of common emotional response or behavior in the sorts of people that might allow us to see that he is more than a slow talking, stoic killer distances him further as a character rather than provides the player with any insight about him or any reason to give a damn about him.
On his personal blog, Tom Jubert draws some parallels between Little Inferno and Plato's allegory of the Cave. Likewise, Ontological Geek's Jackson Wagner has a few words about the game on the theme of entropy. And Leigh Alexander and Quintin Smith turned up on Polygon this week for a good old fashioned letter series, this time on the subject of the hotly-debated Far Cry 3. MEMORY LANE At Nintendo World Report, Nate Andrews tells the fascinating tale of three game dev brothers: Tim, Geoff and Mike Follin. And a new article online at Edge takes us along for the ride on the trail of Japan's first RPG. USE AS DIRECTED This is great: on using Proteus in the classroom. Elsewhere, Beefjack's Michael Johnson discusses falling into the subculture of Persistent World Roleplaying through Neverwinter Nights’ DM Client:
Roleplaying is kind of the ugly step-child of acting, something that is routinely mocked and locked in the basement of disdain. From the outsider perspective, it’s seen as a way for people to li
