Week In Review: August 2-8, 2009

[Erik Hanson]

Did that mid-summer lull I was promised finally hit, or have I just been skimming more than usual?

Pardon the dust this week as I both attempt to remember how the internet works and try to find a way to streamline the production process. I'm considering hiring an intern. I pay mostly in hostile judgments and derogatory remarks.

Frank Forrestall (Gamasutra Blogs) looks over the past decade of games and sees flickers of spirituality that he associates with more mature art forms. link

Scott Juster (Experience Points) implies that, if Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare seems to progress away from a thoughtful treatment of modern war and towards a more generic, less thoughtful "They're the bad guys. ... Shoot 'em" mentality, such a progression may make it an accurate depiction of modern war, and the War On Terror in particular. link

Andrew Doull (GameSetWatch's "The Amateur" column) looks at how game narratives function to move the player forward, and how the use of traditional narrative techniques in games can be self-defeating--especially when coupled with marketing. link

Jeff Tidball tracks the evolution of RPGs since the beginning of modern war games, and sees that the mechanics of genre are still progressing. link

Maybe it's because I was just reading Nick Montfort's (Post Position) post describing what he sees as something of a progression of dynamism in interactive text, but Doull and Tidball's stories next to each other trigger an image in my mind of a sort of parallel evolution of interactive stories and competitive strategy games, such that the two are undergoing convergent evolution, which in turn is the genesis of ludonarrative dissonance. ... Did I just hear someone say, "Duh"? link

Jorge Albor (Experience Points) begins to unpack Link (especially in Majora's Mask) as a sort of ultimate social chameleon of the flaneur tradition. The comments draw out the flaneur's classic, paradoxical existence as both everyone and nobody, as stems from Link's rewinding time and undoing all his good deeds. link


Brett Douville (Brett's Footnotes) looks at how mini-mechanics can provide flavor that reinforces character and narrative elements. link

John Constantine (MTV Multiplayer) catalogs recent games that allow, yet discourage, the easy mode. link

Journal Of Virtual Worlds Research publishes Vol 2 #2: 3D Virtual Worlds For Health And Healthcare link

Dave Gottlieb (Gamers With Jobs) reviews time dynamics in games and ludo-narrative dissonance of saved games. link

Phill Cameron (Resolution Magazine) points out a crucial difference in the choice of 1st and 3rd-person perspectives. link

Jay Barnson (Tales Of The Rampant Coyote) continues a recent conversation seeking to define the RPG genre, and questioning "role play" as a misnomer. link
Brian "Psychochild" Green's previous take: link
Original post by Zubon (Kill Ten Rats), seeing games advertised as containing role-playing or RPG "elements." link
Scott Juster and Jorge Albor (Experience Points) are also wondering what defines the RPG genre, and what it means to include "RPG elements" in another game. link

Aaron Miller (Anyway Games) notes that environmental ornamentation and memorabilia conveys information about cultural values and associations. link

Adam Bishop (Gamasutra Featured Blog Post) urges that time constraints and opportunity costs in time are meaningful elements of game design. link

Jim Rossignol (OffWorld) traces the history of jetpacks in games. link

Matthew Kaplan (Game In Mind) looks again at the lack of minority groups in games, this time focusing on the curiously few elderly characters in games. link

Michael Abbott (Brainy Gamer) begins to explore the pedagogical abilities of Rock Band 2. link

Tim Dean (Trembling Hand) questions the term "massive" as applied to MMOs. link

Justine Keverne (Groping The Elephant) looks at meaningful actions in games, but instead of simply lamenting a lack of meaning or merely rehashing some of the constrictions that have been recently proposed, Justin points out how specific games remove the inherent meaning in some key mechanics and dynamics. link

Nick Dinicola (PopMatters' Moving Pixels) looks at the new ways players interact with game worlds via our first-person bodies. link

Many voices have said that Infinite Undiscovery is a game that doesn't make sense. Perhaps it was the challenge of proving them wrong that convinced Simon Ferrari (Chunking Espresso) to put on his narratological hat and explain how the game might make be coherent after all. link

Sean Sands (Gamers With Jobs) explains that game visuals are important, but it's the style and creativity that matter, not the polygon count or number of shaders. link

David Carlton (Malvasia Bianca) isn't sure he saves for the same reasons as others do. link
I think I'm a bit like David. I save because I don't trust something. I don't trust my character(s) to stay alive, and I believe the game's design will punish me by making me grind back through completed tasks and battles. Blech. For the record, I also refused to busy-work in math class as a kid--once I understood the concept, I would stop. (I was punished for that, too.)

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Michael Mateas, Steven Dow and Serdar Sali have an abstract up at Expressive Intelligence Studio, attempting to define "agency" in games. link

Critical Distance looks back on Duncan Fyfe's Hit Self_Destruct blog. Part 1, Part 2, & Part 3
It's been a pleasure to read Hit Self-Destruct over the past year or so that I've been in this crazy game. I hope to continue to see Duncan elsewhere in the future, and wish him nothing but the best.

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As always, feel free to contact me (here via note or comment, or @erik_a_hanson on Twitter) if you would like to point out something you think I missed, or if you'd like me to check out a site to add to my weekly review. And be sure to check the VGHVI events section, both as a reference and to add any events you think are worth including. Feel free to add new events or let me know what's missing!

[Roger Travis]

Several things in there that seem to me, broadly, to be about the rise of a sort of mannerism in game design. Most interestingly for me, key designers like the Bioware folks and Cliff B, who absolutely throve on genre are now pretending they never believed in it at all.

*shh* I think Denis Dyack is absolutely right that our gameplay fetish is going to pass into the night without a glimmer of a wake behind it. (Well, no, he didn't say that, exactly--but that's image he brought to my mind.)

[Erik Hanson]

You're lucky these comments are a relatively quiet corner of the internet, Roger, throwing out a claim like that!

In my list of things that I would have written about if I didn't think it could be summed up in a couple sentences, there's an entry that looks a bit like this: Understanding that games have both (formal) ludic elements and (informal) narrative and aesthetic elements, there is an analogy to painting to be made. Abstract art can do wonderful things by sticking mainly to the formal elements of visual art, but staying abstract means working in a necessarily confined imaginative space. The addition of elements beyond the formal creates not only interesting applications and more tangible mental footholds to an otherwise ephemeral message. Subjects, stories, contexts and allusions are all extra tools in the artist's kit, and they allows the artist not only a wider range of abilities, but also a greater degree of control and focus.