This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from a Kill Screen review of Adam Sandler's Pixels to the strange emptiness of Arkham Knight's city streets.
At the Crossroads
The good folks at Medievalists have shared coverage of a recent conference talk by University of Leeds PhD candidate Victoria Leeds, concerning the overlap between the medieval/quasi-medieval imagery of games like Skyrim and their embrace by white nationalists.
Meanwhile, History Respawned co-host John Harney speaks with Boston University’s Dr. Renata Keller on Tropico 5 (video) and the backdrop of US, Cuban and Caribbean politics which inform the game. And in painting a portrait of Middle-Eastern gamers enamored with American military shooters, Offworld's Maxwell Neely-Cohen muses on the gulf between real war and its refactoring as entertainment:
It's a strange contradiction. Militaries, governments, and armed groups recognize the power of the medium, and throw money into it, when the very medium could be limiting their ability to mobilize force and attract willing participants.
'Keep Your Politics Out of My Games'
At Kill Screen, Matt Margini offers up an enjoyable scathing review of prepackaged nostalgia blockbuster Pixels, criticizing its regressive sexual politics and male nerd aggrandizement:
This is not a movie that builds up to the revelation that these slob-nerds who ruled the 'cade in 1982 -- Sandler, James, plus Josh Gad and Peter Dinklage -- ought to rule the world in 2015. Let me reiterate: Kevin James is already President. There is no persecution. There is almost no opposition from the camp of "traditional masculinity," save some disgruntled barks [...] Almost the entire movie is a seamless, uninterrupted handjob for the small group of chubby (sic) white men whose skillset is demanded by the aliens. Everything revolves around them, everything confirms their worldview, and everything rewards them.
A short-but-sweet piece, in Gamasutra's Member Blogs Nicholas Lovell points out how a particular mechanic in Fallout Shelter reinforces cultural attitudes about women in combat. Likewise, Kotaku UK's Nathan Ditum notes certain continuities between EA developer remarks on the inclusion of women players in FIFA 16 and systemic sexist attitudes:
EA has clearly taken pains not just to include women's football, but to do it well. There is a sense both in Channon's fraught rhetoric ("If we don’t get it right...") and in the predictable hostility triggered by the announcement trailer itself that extra scrutiny will be applied to the women's game in FIFA 16. It can't just be there, it has to be beyond obvious reproach. The standard, in other words, is higher for women than for men -- men belong in this world, and women are new, optional arrivals.
(Content Warning: both of the above articles include some cisnormative language.)
Design Notes
At Eurogamer, Christian Donlan looks to Her Story and another recent independent title, Lifeline, for the personal relationships they build with their players. Meanwhile, at Paste, Mark R. Johnson has elected to mark the 35th anniversary of Rogue with a lucid explanation of the roguelike genre and its modern descendants.
Here's a three-hit combo from Gamasutra's developer blogs, the first from game composer Winifred Phillips who wonders if it can really be argued that all players are musicians -- and points to a few titles where they at least come close. With an eye to gameplay, Matthew Jenkin asks his fellow developers if, in seeking to address a 'bad' player behavior (like save scumming or "turtling"), they aren’t in fact creating a worse problem. And lastly, Deus Ex designer and amiable uncle-type Warren Spector has made his Gamasutra Expert Blog debut with a friendly ramble on why Telltale's games may not meet his definition of "game," but they're no less magic.
There's a China Doll in the Bullpen
Developer Richard Rouse III argues that both game developers and games journalists fetishize the practice of crunch, to dangerous effect:
In the worst cases our tendency to fetishize and brag about overwork allows teams to be exploited by predatory management practices, like unscoped feature creep or substantial changes in direction without adding time or budget to the project. Obviously overwork to make up for bad planning should (and often is) seen as a failure. But that overwork is partly made possible by our industry's acceptance of overtime as "what it takes." [...] Once you start thinking that way, people will take advantage of it.
At The New Inquiry, Bea Malsky looks to how casual games such as Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Diner Dash teach the player to view often-invisible "women's work" as real labor under capitalism:
When Silvia Federici wrote Wages against Housework<
No tags.
