[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Ben Abraham on topics including the shameful joys of Deus Ex: HR, the power of a silent start screen, and more.] Hello and welcome to #OccupyTWIVGC, where we're interested in the best and brightest alternatives to the video game review hegemony! Down with the 100 point scale! Up with rich description and analysis! Onward to an imaginative and constructively critical video game future! Beginning our week of occupation and reclamation we start with the incredible engineering-and-technology informed criticism of id's Rage that's come out of the excellent Dead End Thrills blog. Yes, it's a collection of beautifully treated screenshots from Rage, but it's also more – it's a giant photo essay, and some prescient future-thinking about games engines and the direction games are taking:
"Calling the tech 'revolutionary' seems a little premature when so much seems geared to Rage's old habits, its look harking back to the likes of Myst and Riven. But it is disruptive tech which, at a time when games are still struggling with parallel processing, provides the clearest indication yet of how old techniques – sparse voxel octrees and the like, which in id Tech 6 might bring this game's uniqueness to geometry as well – can show us the way forward. On top of that, Rage is a disruptive game. It reminds us how far we've erred from the thrills of 'run-and-gun' into pedestrian 'stop-and-pop'; how we've lost the rhythm of the firstperson shooter; and how look and feel are still more important than gimmicks and Gamerscore."
At The Brainy Gamer blog, Michael Abbott summarizes Richard Lemarchand's Indiecade Keynote about 'Beauty and Risk'. Our own Katie Williams wrote this week a great piece on 'Peter Molydeux' (sic) for Kotaku Australia. Molydeux many will be familiar to many of you as the satirical twitter account parodying the weird mix of enthusiasm and outrageous claims that his namesake, Peter Molyneux, is so well known for. And if that's not enough for you, there's extra material to read at Williams' own Alive Tiny World blog. Jonathan McCalmont writes this week about 'The Shameful Joys of Deus Ex: Human Revolution' in his typically evocative style:
"DXHR's myriad eccentricities form a thematic whole that casts a rueful eye over the miseries and frustrations of modern life. The game begins this examination with a meaningful departure from the culture of generosity and empowerment created by the first two games in the Deus Ex series, before ushering in an atmosphere of frustration, claustrophobia and willing submission that closely resembles the mind-set required to survive in a system dead-set on grinding you into the dust."
Meanwhile at Joystick Division, James Hawkins tackles the military shooter genre and airs his reservations, pointing out that generally "stories about war have to be about something much more than combat to be widely accepted as fair, legitimate works of art." Hawkins doesn't find that to be the case in videogames, and wonders why:
"Black Ops never once portrayed the Vietnamese as living, breathing people. In the storied history of the Call of Duty franchise, or in the Battlefield or Medal of Honor franchise for that matter, never once have we seen the opposition as people. We shoot them as people, they stumble and roll across pavement as people, yet their humanity is categorically absent from our encounters with them."
As a small aside, I've always thought it was an overlooked corollary of the games-as-art position that if games are art, and if art affects people, then we should be open to seriously considering what the effects of video game art might be. There's nothing that says they must all be good effects, and the ease with which the "games cause violence" discussion is waved away by some of the same advocates doesn't gel with a real belief in the affective capacity of art. The Erics at Nightmare Mode had a couple of posts this week, with Eric Lockaby writing the third part of his 'Your Homosexual Lover Is In Another Castle' series (I think this is one that needs to be read from the beginning), and our own Eric Swain writes to argue that 'Atmosphere is not enough', comparing both Limbo and Another World. He notes
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