This Week In Video Game Criticism: From endless war to weapon sponsors

This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Eric Swain on topics including Medal of Honor's weapon sponsorships, to how games contribute to the idea that endless war is normal. Welcome back. Kris is on break this weekend so I'm here to fill your TWIVGC needs in the meantime. The Extra Credits crew finishes up a two-parter talking about mechanics as metaphor using the flash game Loneliness to weld to discussion together. CNN has done a number of in-depth articles on several subjects with how games are intersecting with real life in interesting ways; from South Korea's Pro Gaming/Game Addiction dichotomy to gamifying the prison system to great success. This week the community blew up in response to Borderlands 2 lead developer calling a skill tree in his game 'girlfriend mode.' Our own Eric Swain says a few words on various aspects of the whole situation before creating a list of all the responses he could find. That wasn't the only controversy this week. EA recently launched its Medal of Honor Warfighter official website with links to weapons manufacturer sponsors where you can buy the real life counterparts to the weapons in game. Ryan Smith of Gameological brought attention to it. He ended his piece by saying,

Violence in video game, particularly war games was a major theme this week. Patricia Hernandez criticized the current military themed games for contributing to the idea that endless war is normal. "War is routinized, war is a spectacle, war is sanitized, war is surveillance." Tadhg Kelly compares video games to porn and the lessons it can learn from it when bigger/better/faster/harder is no longer enough. Zoya writing for The Border House asks, "Should game developers avoid triggering players' PTSD?" Meanwhile, Kyle Carpenter, at Medium Difficulty, talks about the real price of game violence and how we talk about them matters, "not because they dictate how is going to go on a rampage, but because they're a part of a larger cultural mechanism which dictates how we view both military and private violence." Denis Farr on the same site turns his eye towards Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story and the meaning of the experience by the game forcing your responses through a filter to match each AI's world view. Bit Creature had a pair of great posts this week. Drew Paryer's piece on the game that only lets you play one time in the face of the end of the world, One Chance. And Richard Clark on Happy Street and what it has to say about happiness. Skyler at Nightmare Mode wrote about the early DS game Contact and what is has to say about free will. Alan Williamson, meanwhile, bring up the topic of writing for free on the internet and how it devalues everyone else's work. At PopMatters, Jorge Albor talks about "The Extremes of Human Systems." Looking at John Krakaer's book Into Thin Air, Albor looks at how games fail to combine their human systems with their game ones. G. Christopher Williams talks about game difficulty in "The Pleasures of Playing in an Economy of Pain." He explores the change in focus of games over the decades and why we would play difficult games. Jim Ralph considers the same subject over at Ontological Geek. Michael "brainygamer" Abbott asks, "Why we JRPG." Michael "sparky" Clarkson says you can't lampshade camp, because camp has to be some part sincere. Line Hollis writes on the characters of the Dragon Age series and how they are defined by the role they are given. No matter who their master is, their role remains the same. They cannot escape it. Adrian Forest decides to write for his blog, Three Parts Theory, again on the changing nature of city space from above and from the ground and the transition between the two as exemplified in the Prototype games. Jamie Dalzell at Pondering the Pixels blog, decided that 'Journey is a Game About Fear.' Rob Parker writes a personal account that ends up talking about Tribes: Ascension, but there is more to it. And finally I'm closing out on something fun. Two somethings in fact. A short movie by Eran May-raz and Daniel Lazo on what our future looks like with the new "iPhone." And some ukiyo-e woodblock prints of video game characters. We accept links every week sent to our twitter account or via email. Don't forget to submit.