This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including spatial freedom, industry maturity, permadeath, and more. Sorry, what's that? It's time for This Week in Videogame Blogging already? You mean, only the best and most interesting games criticism, analysis and commentary on the web? Well all right then-- let's get started. AROUND THE WORLD We start rather unassumingly at Kotaku, where guest contributor Hussein M. Ibrahim, one of the writers behind At7addak.com, criticizes Western games' depictions of Arabs in shooters: “A lot of shooters aim for realism using current real world conflicts or inspirations. Medal of Honor and its cooperation with actual navy seal soldiers comes to mind. That's fine, but a lot of times the ‘authenticity' is only on one side.” From there, we hop on over to the Philippines, where educator Lukas Velunta has just launched Kambyero, “the first Filipino publication dedicated to discourse on video games.” And where better place to start than with an essay on his own gaming origins? It's a little known fact we here at Critical Distance welcome non-English contributions, provided we have a decent overview from the submitter about the article's subject. With that in mind, our next article hails from France, where Sachka Duval proposes that Ron Gilbert's The Cave is more like a cathedral. In the author's words:
[The Cave] resembles a moral Christian tale without any psychology or social realism, like the ones illustrated in a cathedral’s stained glass windows. The article suggests that, by doing so, the game inadvertently shows the emptiness of the bad/good endings structure of many recent games.
The last stop on our tour brings us to Nairobi, where Joe Keiser shows us through the local knockoff games market. If you don't unironically love these, something is wrong with you. WARFIGHTING Over on The Escapist, Robert Rath hits another one out of the park with this article tracing the US military’s history of involvement with Hollywood, and the relative freedom games have instead:
Ironically […] the action games that mimic summer blockbusters actually tell stories most military action films would never get away with. Just in the Modern Warfare series, we see members of the U.S. military die in an atomic blast, gun down civilians in order to maintain their undercover identity, torture targets for information and bring down a rogue American general. Splinter Cell: Conviction has Sam Fisher hunting down conspirators within the U.S. government. Even the infamously pro-military Medal of Honor (2010) includes an ugly portrait of a desk general who accidentally calls air support on his Afghan allies. In other words, even the most jingoistic games criticize the military more than the blockbusters of “liberal” Hollywood.
Rath also goes on to highlight how recent events have perhaps made the US military warier of their cozy relationship with the entertainment industry. A very worthy read. COMPLETE FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT Samantha Allen (whom you'll see pop up a few times in this roundup) showed up on The Border House this week with an essay questioning the rhetoric of complete spatial freedom as the evolutionary end-point of game design:
Different styles of movement produce different emotional effects and both should be available to us as players and as game-makers. To regard “fun” as the ultimate litmus test for the success of a video game is to sell short the emotive capacity of the medium itself. Games can return us to an innocent state of childlike play but they can also, in the words of Merritt Kopas, teach us that “being an other can be painful and horrible.”
DON’T YOU DIE ON ME Coming to us from Pixels or Death, here's a pair of interesting, opposing viewpoints on the role of character permadeath. Tom Auxier would rather go without, while Ben Chapman contends the player only cheats herself by avoiding it. WOULD YOU KINDLY Samantha Allen (told you she'd be back) also appeared this week in a guest post on This Cage is Worms, with a measured response to both Mattie Brice's “Would You Kindly” and Jonas Kyratzes's “Would You Kindly Not.” The article, titled appropriately “Can We Kindly,” advocates for “a careful conversation […] about the role that experience plays in games writing.” BUT CAN ART BE GAMES Why yes, says Alexander Feigenbaum. And here's an interesting essay on Pippin Barr's “Duchamping” of the medium in Art Game. Samantha Allen (say her name three times and click your heels) also turned up on Kotaku this week to pose a different hypothesis: maybe games are like a certain kind of sex. Writing in his regular Moving Pixels column, Nick Dinicola poses that Journey
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