This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from philosophy in Pillars of Eternity to a new series aimed at demystifying MOBAs and eSports.
This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from philosophies of life and death in Pillars of Eternity to a new series aimed at demystifying MOBAs and eSports.
Of Play and Spectatorship
At Videogame Tourism, Eron Rauch is embarking on an exciting new series dedicated to demystifying Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas (MOBAs) and helping to explain their appeal as a spectator sport on a global stage.
Meanwhile, in discussing eSports' grassroots cousin in the international fighting game community, Ian Danskin attempts to pin down (video) how an 14-year-old game like Super Mash Bros. Melee has garnered a fandom and competitive scene based around its players testing the limits of the game's systems.
Of Lore and Character
At Literally Games, Michael Hancock offers a dense but engrossing piece comparing the lore of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and others. Heavy spoilers lie within, but here's a taste:
[Eugene] Thacker's discussion on Life doesn't "solve" Pillars of Eternity or vice versa. Instead, I think they both illustrate how complicated our concept(s) of life can be, that it's possible to conceive of ways of approaching life beyond black and white abundance and absence.
At PopMatters Moving Pixels, Jorge Albor admits he was left feeling a bit cold from The Chinese Room's Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, in part because he felt no real sense of closure for its characters.
At The Mary Sue, Jessica Lachenal chats a bit about the significance of the quiet interludes (what we might refer to as "pillow shots" in film) in Life is Strange. Meanwhile, at Gamasutra, Katherine Cross has a look back at Life is Strange developer Dontnod's premier title, Remember Me, and how its meticulously rendered villains fall short on the character detail necessary to make the player care:
There was precious little behind her, no conviction, no grand sense of ideology, scientific or political, that seemed to drive this indisputably powerful woman. You know who she is, where she is, but not why she is. She is sketched in such a way that should leave her far more compelling than a mere Gallic neo-Eichmann, pulling her assigned lever in this corporatist republic’s machinery of terror.
What most of the best villains elaborate or express in their characterization is a roadmap of thought that allows you to see how they became who they are. This need not be expressed in a tedious dump of expository back story, but rather simply showing (if not always telling) why these characters do what they do.
Embodied Horror
Sticking with Gamasutra for a moment, Alex Wawro has a front-page piece on the psychological toll that studying and rendering hyperreal violence (and other grotesqueries) can have on designers and animators working in the games industry (Content Warning: graphic violence).
Moving over to Not Your Mama's Gamer, Samantha Blackmon questions why Fallout Shelter not only erases queerness, it also enforces some highly specific attitudes regarding pregnancy:
There was so much about the mechanics of this game that not only privileged heteronormativity but also reproduction. Only heterosexual sex is allowed, heterosexual sex always leads to both 100% happiness and an apparently viable pregnancy, and said pregnancy must be protected at all costs, even when there is a direct threat to the woman carrying the fetus. Um, wow. That is some very real shit right there.
Also in the vein of unfortunate implications, at Kill Screen, Zach Budgor and Jess Joho have a conversation on Supermassive's 'interactive horror movie' Until Dawn and how it plays upon (and into) the gendered tropes and clichés of the slasher genre.
Past to Present
History Respawn's Bob Whitaker engages with historian Matthew Gabriele in his latest episode (video). It's nominally about Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3, but moreover, it's a conversation on our pop cultural fascination with Europe's Middle Ages.
On the subject of fantasy (and its broad Tolkienification in modern fantasy), Go Make Me a Sandwich's wundergeek crunches the numbers on depictions of men, women and non-gendered characters in Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition source books. In short: better than before, but still a long way to go.
And talking about history from a coding perspective, The iBookGuy recently released an excellent presentation on the hardware limitations to render color on the Commodore 64 (video), and how game developers creatively worked around these constraints.
Back at Kill Screen, Dan Solberg recently paid a visit to Chicago's Bit Bash indie game festival, and in particular looked at its layout as a work of gallery curation and sound design:
Although the games in this space had their own little external speakers, the house and electro pop booming from the stage assumed each game's soundtrack save a few levels-peaking sound effects here and there. By overlaying the space with music, each game's embedded audio may have been replaced, but it also afforded a consistent, party-centric tone that blended play sessions into as a more holistic festival experience rather than pockets of individual gaming instances. [...] [T]he festival catered to a variety of gaming interests without having to go the "white cube" route of homogenized presentation.
Further Reading
Interested in more? The latest issue of Arcade Review, brought to you by our own Zolani Stewart and Lana Polansky, is now live for your consumption.
Unwinnable Weekly remains the most compelling weekly periodical in games, and this week's cover story about a couple's relationship strained by an unassuming Nintendo game is well worth the dive.
Finally, over at FemHype, Jillian has compiled a fantastic reading list of articles concerning diverse representation in games, including a few you may've missed on these pages!
Did We Leave Anything Out?
As always, we're extremely grateful to all who send in their recommendations to us each week, whether by email, mentioning us on Twitter, or whispered into the ears of moths like Gandalf. They all make it to us eventually, and though we can never include everything, these roundups would not be half the resources they are without you!
Critical Distance is proudly funded entirely by readers like you! If you like what you see and want to help fund future features like the ones above, consider pledging a small monthly donation through Patreon!
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