This Week In Video Game Criticism: From counter-terrorism to Dear Esther

"Perhaps this is what living in a post-9/11 world is for Americans. Perhaps modern military tactics have become so clandestine as to have become impossible to discern from the very thing we are fighting against. These are our military heroes in videogames: men who break international law with the same flippancy that you might jaywalk or loiter. Flash to E3 and watch as Sam Fisher rips information out of people before slamming his blade into their necks. Go back to Modern Warfare 2 and listen as the general tells you that 'You will lose a bit of yourself, but you will save countless lives.' What we're talking about here is brutality in the name of the nebulous demigod of democracy, beset by evilness all over the world. We're inundated constantly with the message that anti-terrorism is fought by terrorism and torture."

"This journey through the caves is marked by three falls, a parallel to Christ's three falls on the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Suffering, which leads to Golgotha. Further symbolism is found at the bottom of a pool in the caves, where Roman coins are scattered, an allusion to the story in which Christ draws a Roman coin from the mouth of a fish to pay the tax, saying, 'Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's,' an apparent response to the tension between rationality and transcendence witnessed before in the game. The player also plunges into and re-emerges from water three times within the caves. The sacrament of baptism, as well as its death/rebirth symbolism come to mind. The fall into the caves has gravely injured the narrator's leg, breaking the femur, and the last leg of the journey is make in excruciating pain, up the side of the mount to the aerial. Like Christ's accent to the top of Golgotha, the narrator knows that he will die once he reaches the summit. However, in doing so he in some way realizes that his suffering was not in vain, that it came from a place, not of coincidence but of overwhelming purpose."

"A friend saw me playing Cart Life the other day and compared it to Clerks after a few seconds of observation. It's absurd, but almost perfect. Cart Life is a grittier Clerks, realized in interactive form. Except it's entirely different. Clerks also focuses on the mundane, but Cart Life's is an active, frenetic kind of banality. Cart Life doesn't stop at boring. It understands that the mundane can be both exhilarating and boring at the same time. Working Melanie's coffee stand is exciting because of the feverish pace and relentless progression of time, but it's boring because game actions are interpreted as multi-tiered processes. Cart Life, unlike every other game ever, doesn't believe a single keystroke adequately represents a significant action. The act of pouring a cup of coffee is broken down into its component mental and physical parts: 1) Remember what the customer ordered. 2) Make small talk. 3) Make correct change. An intense empathy emerges from these methodical motions, and it's a specific kind of empathy that can only emerge from a game. You get to the point where you repeat a task so many times that it's muscle memory, like breathing, and you could probably still improve, but your improvement would be negligible. You've plateaued, and this thing you keep doing everyday may not be the most important or impressive thing in the world, but at least you're performing some discernible service, fitting into society in some way, fulfilling some expectation, maybe improving someone's day, and while you're doing it at least, you forget about other important things and feel like everything might be ok and some things could even be beautiful."

"In reality, the elitist notion of a pure, hardcore games culture is a fantasy. There is no such thing as a video game culture hermetically sealed-off from the rest of the world. Of course there are concentrations, where or when individuals focus on some things over others, but cultures do not exist in Tupperware containers sitting neatly organised on shelves. By being a gamer, I do not stop being a man, a university lecturer, a mediocre sports fan, an American, an immigrant, a husband, a son, a musician. I am not a one-dimensional creature that is composed entirely of, and sustained by, video games. I am not defined by gaming and only gaming. That anyone should want to be is morbid. That anyone should demand it of anyone else is evil."

"The worth of my writing and advocacy is constantly augmented by my relationship to money. In order to keep up with critical conversation, I must constantly buy games. And not the cheaper ones, but the sixty dollar hits that many of my peers get for free. I feel compelled to constantly add to the sprawling Steam library and Kickstarter backing lists. Despite the growing debt, I have to get a new TV for my consoles, buy a gaming rig, and consider obtaining one of the latest handhelds. And for what? Gaming criticism, the one bastion for minority writers in games media, isn't seen as valuable enough writing to pay."

"In exegesis, which means to 'lead out of,' the reader diligently examines every aspect of a text in order to discern the actual intended meaning. The reader then applies the actual meaning of that text to his or her own personal life, whether it is instruction, a type of life philosophy, or some kind of biblical warning. Eisegesis, on the other hand, means to "lead into" and refers to the reckless appropriation of a biblical text to one's own assumptions and whims. Practiced readers will recognize this as a helpful distinction for reading any text; it is better to get something out of a text than it is to read something into a text, particularly when that text is meant to be an infallible guide to life, the universe and everything. Even when a text is mere entertainment or art that implies a subjective response on the part of the consumer (and videogames certainly fall into this category), simply reading into that artifact whatever meaning I like is self-serving. […] Personally-skewed games writing doesn't have to be that way. Paramount to writing any kind of good personal essay is the necessity of absolute honesty on the part of the writer. The reader needs to be able to trust the writer, or else the piece becomes a deceptive and useless hypothetical. The ironic nature of the personal essay is that through the sharing of a subjective experience, the reader stumbles across some form of objective truth. This may not happen if the writer is lying or stretching the truth, and it will not happen if the reader discovers or senses the lie."