This Week In Video Game Criticism: From Warhammer 40k To An Apology For RPGs

"I'm sure Cliff Bleszinski and company would be the first to argue that Gears has nothing to do with September 11, and that's their right as creators. But it's our right as the audience to find our own meaning in the work. Ever since I first played Gears of War almost five years ago, it has struck me as a game that could not have existed without 9/11. Something like it, maybe, but not this game, with its unusual and potent mix of fear, uncertainty, and powerlessness."

"That's the balance to be struck with writing any sort of humor piece–what the hell is too high- or low-profile to be funny anymore? In a TWIVGB full of articles on post-9/11 war games and fetishization, the tone of the game Lockaby was writing about didn't even seem out of place. Maybe that's the full scope of the joke David's getting at: are we so jaded to turning anything–high art, low art, macabre, political, social, psychosexual–into a videogame that parodic descriptions of using a game stylus as a phallus to symbolically molest women seem a bit disgusting but at the end of the day, par for the course?"

"This dystopian future, especially in Human Revolution, may be aesthetically similar to Blade Runner, but it's obvious a corollary is present day global politics (especially in the United States). Unfortunately, the cause (and thereby the solution) to this web-like problem is never pointed at the source. Rather, in a move that feels very co-opted by the media-power at large, fingers are pointed at shadowy conspiracy theories like the Illuminati rather than at actual, present day, corporate CEOs. It's almost as if corporate power was enough to buy off the game developers, who went as far as to hint at the problems – enough so that reasonable people could draw a logical conclusion bearing to life – and then deflected and effaced the issues by creating a supernatural god-like cause to explain these events; in other words, pure fiction."

"There are other fan events based around single games, of course; both QuakeCon and BlizzCon command significant attendance. But COD: XP is not an event requested by the fans. Rather, it's an endlessly lavish production put on for their benefit by a company eager to… to give something back? Eager to humanise themselves? Eager to soften core gamer perception of a company best known for its dead-eyed annual franchise updates, high-price DLC, and the stewardship of arch non-gamer Bobby Kotick, effortlessly the most disliked CEO by gamers thanks to his apparent disdain toward them? COD: XP is, let's say, a smart way to both give back to the community that makes it wealthy and to counter a series of setbacks and unpopular decisions made in and around Modern Warfare."

"By removing civilians from the picture, developers like Bach are trying to reap the benefits of a real-life setting without grappling with the reality of collateral damage. In sparing themselves the challenge of making their games deeper and more involving, they're the ones holding back the medium. While video games have come a long way since Mega Man, Battlefield 3's sanitized environment suggests that players are still limited to the same two basic actions: running around and shooting."

"The fact that people can meaningfully talk about Crysis being both more authentic than other games and a completely fantastical action romp featuring magical powers suggests that realism is not exactly an unproblematic concept. In fact, this is a column about why we should just stop using that word entirely when other words are far more useful."

"When I grew up, some games were off-limits. Diablo was a no, because Satan was right there in the title. Grand Theft Auto was also disallowed when my parents caught me mowing down police officers and lines of Elvis impersonators with a machine gun. Mortal Kombat was banned for obvious reasons—you can rip out a man's ribs and them stab them through his eyes—but even Golden Eye was mysteriously "lost" one day after a particularly hilarious match of only shooting each other in the knee caps. I can understand the logic behind all of these decisions, but I've always been confused about why I wasn't allowed to play The Sims."

"To me, Portal 1 was very much like these films. Two female characters dueling to the deadly death on terms unlimited by the fact that they are ladyfolk? The antagonist is an inhuman freak? The protagonist strengthened by her humanity (in this case, by the fact that the player identifies very, very closely with her)? Sounds an awful lot like Alien to me. … Portal 2 changes the tone of its central relationship by stripping some of that dignity away. Glados insults Chell constantly in ways intended to be understood as cattily "female": calling Chell overweight, insulting her appearance, and so on. She seems to believe that gendered insults will be the most effective against this mute, implacable enemy, and tries a variety of them. And even though these jokes are, cheap and awful, they're fantastic."

"To read a spoiler is a nasty experience. It feel like being cheated. Yet spoilers are also a lie—they're a wikipedia summary at best. And seriously, who would compare the experience of reading something they liked to the experience of reading the summation on the Internet? To have any sense of the value of writing or any artistic craft we've got to believe that the way a story is told is infinitely more important that the paragraph that restates the major plot points."

"What is and isn't an RPG is beside the point, it's how a game appropriates the cultural understanding of what an RPG is. Video games have been using character progression through stats and experience points, a strong sense of story, and tactical strategy to draw what they can from the genre, but the heart isn't there. What we really have are action games, interactive fiction, and shooters that use the tropes developed from tabletop RPGs. There is very little role-playing to be had; rather, you are given an extremely limited amount of 'roles' to 'choose' from."