Brendan Shared A Link

A non-exhaustive archive of articles and essays I deem worthy of reading and remembering.

[ungaming]

Boost is the speed pickup from WIPEOUT and the turbos from MOTORSTORM with the thumb-feel of OUTRUN’s timeless drifting. Punching the boost sends players hurtling across VANQUISH’s wide open spaces at a just-barely-manageable pace, with remarkable precision of control; the sole restriction being the precious but rechargeable fuel players’ consume. Players can shoot, melee and even enter cover from Boost, and much of the game’s greatest goosebump-inducing moments and finest tactical triumphs come from exactly this sort of layering of behaviors. The world of VANQUISH is exactly as claustrophobic as the player wants it to be. Through Boost, three-dimensional space is distorted and becomes an expression of the player.

VANQUISH RETROSPECTIVE by Adam Saltsman - Pastebin.com

This essay on Vanquish is, hands down, my favourite piece of games criticism this year. Scarily, it was written not by a full-time critic but by a developer. It has shaken my confident stance that you don’t need to be a developer to be a good critic, it is that good.

The framing is problematic, the whole “ALL the critics didn’t get this thing” kinda framing, but even critics and academics (and me) do this all the time without thinking so I really don’t mind at all. This might offend some critics but whatever.

But man. The analysis of every single element of Vanquish. The weapons, the boost, the slow-motion, the scoring. The connection to a design history of Mikami (I’ve always talked about Vanquish as a Japanese take on a Western genre, without appreciating that that ‘Western’ genre was largely birthed by Mikami in the first place). The whole beautiful discussion of Speed Racer (and, yeah, equally problematic generalisation of film critics) to frame it all. There is nothing about this essay I don’t love.

Vanquish is one of the games that was on my shortlist of games-I-could-potentially-write-another-book-about (Driver: San Francisco and Binary Domain are the other members of that list). Vanquish is no longer on this list. Everything has been said about that game, and said better by Saltsman. It’s almost exhaustive in its critique.

Anyway. I love this essay enough to practically write a short essay about it. Good games criticism, for me, should be of the form “I really love this game. This is why I love this game in very specific and descriptive language.” That is exactly what this does. It’s exactly the kind of essay I want to write.

Maybe I need to learn game design.

(via ungaming)

[dropouthangoutspaceout]

Well I just saw this list of the bloggers who have blogged enough to get blog attention for Critical Distance: a blog about video game blogging. There’s lots of great blogs on there, from a consistent collection of folks I know to be both great people and at the same time great writers. Give it...

[brendansharedalink]

Things that Daniel Joseph did write this year. Also a link to Critical Distance's 2013 roundup. 

[brendansharedalink]

Metacriticism

Got emailed the following question: 

Can you recommend any writings that are more general and perhaps introductory to the subject of game critique/theory?

This was my response:

For theory, I would start with the books I list here: http://critdamage.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/a-videogames-reader.html (sneaky tip, search for pdfs of expensive academic books you can't afford on libgen.info)

For non-academic critique, the essays I list in http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2012/12/where-find-good-videogames-criticism are a good place to start reading. In particular, Kieren Gillen's manifesto on New Games Journalism is a good place to start thinking about this stuff: gillen.cream.org/wordpress_html/assorted-essays/the-new-games-journalism/

Also L Rhodes Ludorenaissance interview series at Culture Ramp is superb: http://cultureramp.com/the-ludorenaissance/

Also Jenn Frank on Medium talking about critique: https://medium.com/play-time/dd2d4df6b94

Cara Ellison on 'subjective' game criticism: http://caraellison.co.uk/commentary/condemnation-iteration/

Also if you went back through the older BrainyGamer podcast series, there is one where Michael Abbott interviews Chris Dahlen and Jamin Warren about the launch of Kill Screen where they say a whole lot of interesting things about writing about games, and I think the second half is an interview with Tom Bissell about Extra Lives which is good too.

So that is where I would start!

[clockworkworlds]

You Are A Receiver

If you asked me 24 hours ago about Receiver, I could’ve told you everything about it except that it would scare the hell out of me. Please read more about this game from a year and a half ago, below.

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[dropouthangoutspaceout]

Pretty great thoughts on a game I’ve been meaning to play for a while. 

[brendansharedalink]

Austin Walker focuses on the Everything Else of a game that is usually narrowly looked at for a single mechanic, to fascinating results.

[skatebee]

The desire for procedural content goes hand-in-hand with the ideology of the ‘perfect game’. The perfect game is a mixture of all of my favourite games. You can probably look at any RPS comment thread to find people writing their own recipes: the islands of Assassin’s Creed 4, with the combat system of Battlefield 3, with the animal encounters of Far Cry 3, and the gun generation of Borderlands 2, but better. The encounters of King of Dragon Pass, combined with the characterisation of Crusader Kings 2, with the construction of SimCity, and the religion systems of Civilization 4.

When we finally have our perfect game, the essence of pure design, then all we will need is the promise of procedural generation to make our experience perennially fresh. As soon as someone can make interesting procedurally generated worlds and narratives. Interesting procedural content: this culture’s hovercars.

[brendansharedalink]

The most prevalent arcade convention is the communication of the spectacle. Most fighting games are focalized through the frame of the event spectator. Many stages are settings where crowds watch and cheer, sometimes in large stadiums and settings that imply the fight as an organized spectated event, a prizefight or a tournament match. Most settings are also either outdoors, during the daytime, or set regions of the world that are known to have dense populations. One of the most significant things about Mortal Kombat 4 is how it de-prioritizes the spectacle event, as it doesn't communicate spectacle but solitude. No one is watching you in Mortal Kombat 4. There are no signs of other people. Most of its settings are strictly indoors and badly-lit, empty and low on objects that move or make noise.

The Fengxi Box: On Mortal Kombat 4

Zolani S on Mortal Kombat 4 and what he finds interesting about the game.

[skatebee]

After co-presenting How To Destroy Everything at Freeplay this year, someone asked me in response: “If we don’t have strict definitions of what a game is, what’s stopping someone from entering a website [to some game festival like the Freeplay awards or IGF]?”

I want to deconstruct exactly why...

[brendansharedalink]

Scathing dismantling of every aspect of the games industry.

[skatebee]

I’m not being smug here. Well—I am—but not in that way. I don’t pretend to be above this. This does look photorealistic to me. And so did the last Killzone game. And so did, idk, TimeSplitters. At the time. I’m not exempt. And come next generation, this is going to look antiquated. Not because we’ll have a new standard of 1000 vertices per circumference of a cross section of a cement cylinder, but because the next cement cylinder will be made of voxels, or some other hot-button technology. I’m a Computer Graphics undergrad; whatever it is, I’ll probably be INVENTING it.

[brendansharedalink]

The first few paragraphs of this are the best thing I've read about NEXT GEN. The rest is just great for its own sake.

[brendansharedalink]

Liz Ryerson walks us through the first episode of Doom in a really in-depth video series, exploring the level design and atmosphere and secrets and the difference between different designers and a whole lot of great stuff. Worth watching.

[brendansharedalink]

Robert Yang - Level Criticism (No Show 2013) (by No Show Conference)

(Today is the day I watch lectures on Youtube while playing Pokemon apparently.) This is Robert Yang's lecture from No Show Conference 2013 about Level Criticism, mods, post-mods, Let's Play videos, and Half-Life. 

Sad he doesn't get to go into Half-Life more, but I guess there will be more time for that in the future.

[brendansharedalink]

Finally watched the video of Ben Abraham's lecture on the history of videogame journalism and the words we use. Really good stuff.

FURTHER READING: Ben's talk reminded me of this great journal article in Game Studies by Graeme Kirkpatrick, where he traces the etymology of the word 'gameplay' through 1980s and 90s UK game mags. 

[mammonmachinezeal]

Gone Home is pretty coy.

I appreciate this sort of thing as someone who made a lot of jokes about speedruns and noscoping a game where the most difficult task is finding a light switch without peripheral vision. I think I’m a little happier having gone through the game knowing just enough about...

[brendansharedalink]

[altgamescrit-deactivated2016040]

Survival, Horror, and 868-HACK

Mike Schiller looks at Michael Brough’s 868-HACK

[samcrisp-deactivated20160118]

How To Destroy Everything, Or, Why Video Games Do Not Exist (And How This Is Great For Everyone)

This is the transcript of a talk given by Marigold Bartlett and Stephen Swift at the 2013 Freeplay Independent Games Festival.

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[brendansharedalink]

This was the greatest talk of Freeplay '13. Two of the smartest students I know carpetbombing truthbombs and jumping from one complex thought and blog to the next. Maybe stuff you already know if you read the blogosphere a lot, but incredibly great work threading it all together for the audience that was there. Loved it. 

[brendansharedalink]

The rain sounds like a hundred toy pianos, jangling softly overhead, adding texture and weight to the thin grey lines drizzling in front of me. A small creature catches my eye, and I get up. It is white, indistinct—maybe a rabbit, maybe a frog—but before I can reach it, it hops away shyly, cheerfully blipping like a power-up from a Super Mario game. I walk down to an inlet and find an assembly of crabs that waddle along to the groggy sound of an African talking drum without much care for me. These layers of sound shift in and out of the music of the game, spots of sonic colour that project above Proteus’s gentle hum. Proteus’s music is alive and unrepeatable, further blending the already muddled meanings of ‘play’—playing a game, playing a song, playing an instrument. Playing Proteus.

Listening to Proteus · Meanjin · Literacy in Australia · Melbourne University Publishing · Classic English Literature Books · Australian Literary Journals & Magazines

Dan Golding on Proteus and a history of music being used to produce spaces and environments. A beautiful read.