This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from an Ovid's Metamorphoses of ragdoll physics to the recurring themes in the games of The Chinese Room.
Nasty, Brutish and Short
Robert Rath, famous for his Critical Intel column, appears to have found a new home at Playboy, discussing Call of Duty consultant P.W. Singer's very FPS-inspired novel Ghost Fleet:
Ghost Fleet is what Call of Duty would be like if it put on a tie and went to Capitol Hill.
And that's exactly what Singer is doing. The defense establishment has taken keen interest in the book, leading him to make the rounds in Washington. [...] The government wants to explore the real-world lessons from Ghost Fleet, with particular focus on how it can avoid the security vulnerabilities the U.S. Navy falls prey to in the novel.
At Science News, Rachel Ehrenberg shares a brief yet fascinating article on Diplomacy the tabletop-turned-online game, which researchers have taken to in order to measure human behavior and 'tells' precipitating the game's characteristic acts of betrayal. While the results are nothing too grand -- the researchers found their model could predict when one player was about to betray another 57% of the time -- it's a first tentative toe being dipped into an exciting field of behavioral study in games.
At Offworld, Daniel Starkey speaks bracingly about his childhood living in poverty, in which theft -- including piracy of computer games -- was one of few avenues open for impoverished youth looking to acquire cultural capital:
Poverty is often cyclical because it traps its victims in intellectual dead zones. We know that without stimulation, without challenge, the mind, like the belly, starves.
I don't pirate games anymore, and I don't support pirating games if you can afford to buy them. But when I needed it, piracy gave me hope.
Meanwhile, The Guardian has published a teaser for Simon Parkin's upcoming book, Death by Video Game, in which he explores the multiple factors behind highly sensationalized cases of players dying after long playing binges. You can preorder a copy of your own on The Guardian's web store.
We Were Here
At FemHype, Rem calls for more nuanced representation of asexuality in games. Meanwhile, in Aevee Bee's ZEAL magazine, developer and games educator Robert Yang muses on the way we model bodies in games, in which their dynamism (or possibly, embodiment) is frequently overlooked:
Animations are essentially flipbooks; when we flip through the individual pages or frames quickly, we create the illusion of motion. Computer animation helps automate this process by taking human-authored "keyframe" poses and generating the "in-between" frames, or even entire animation sequences through motion capture. Then game engines loop through these sequences of poses to transform bodies along predictable trajectories. When you walk in a game, you're basically looping over those same 2 choreographed steps over and over.
What's totally missing is a logic of transformation. When do our bodies change, and why?
(Content Warning: Yang's article includes some discussion of sexual topics -- and a few gifs which might be considered unsafe for work.)
At Fusion, Patrick Hogan pays a visit to some of the abandoned virtual colleges left over from the Second Life hype train. It's strangely nostalgic -- I actually had a class on Second Life back when I was studying for my bachelors -- and that dovetails nicely with our next article, from C.T. Casberg at GameChurch. Commenting on the upcoming Final Fantasy VII remake, Casberg cautions that nostalgia can be a sort of intellectual and spiritual trap:
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