This Week In Video Game Criticism: From Learning Curves To Gamification BS

"In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym—albeit a somewhat vulgar one—for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit. Gamification is bullshit."

"…claims such as [Tadhg] Kelly's ultimately misrepresent beauty, associating beauty and play less with art and the values ofaesthetics than with artifice and the politics of popularity."

"The Zulu were, however, the most obvious of the African. Like the Babylonians, Meier probably used them in the game because, first, he needed an Africa civ that wasn't Mediterranean Egypt, and second, people knew who the Zulu were. Recognition was the important thing here. The default name for the first Zulu city in Civ 1 and 2 was Zimbabwe – which is not even a Zulu city. It is, however, the center of a great Bantu kingdom of the middle ages and if you see the Zulu as the most prominent of the Bantu people, then I guess you can squeeze it in. The Bantu migration through southern Africa marks that language group as one of the most widespread in the world; Rise of Nations in fact uses the Bantu as a faction with the special power of Migration. So you get to build one city over your cap and cities are much, much cheaper to begin with. If you want a quick landgrab, the Bantu are the proper faction in Rise of Nations."

"I think part of it comes down to most games, I feel like can still be drawn down to the male power fantasy of saving the world effectively. When you do that, there are only certain types of characters that make sense for that, right. You're not going to have an elderly woman save the world. If you did, and you pulled it off and it's awesome, you're amazing. So, I think when we don't try to do things that are out of our comfort zone, we fall back into comfortable patterns. And like you said, the lack of diversity just in the general industry, at least in North America… I think how to solve that is a much harder and bigger question. I think it's having more minority people in video games recognized. I don't mean necessarily calling them out because they're a minority. Rather that in general, game creators are not recognized. Besides a handful, people don't really know them. And I only know of a couple that I can think of that aren't usually white males."

"Even a game that has some excellent tendencies within, in terms of race and gender, can fall down in its universe construction. While taking on the universe from the deck of the Normandy, has Commander Shepard ever met a female salarian? (No.) What about a female turian? (No.) And of course no female krogan. 'There are reasons,' one argues. 'The salarian matriarchy system! The genophage! Well, Garrus used to have a turian girlfriend!' Those aren't reasons. Those are in-character explanations for a design choice that a team at BioWare consciously or unconsciously made. [...] A game can include female characters galore, and yet still find itself an example of incoherent world-building that doesn't take gender or sex into account in any way."

"Duke Nukem Forever is a bit like reviewing your adolescence. You are being asked to tell the drunken, spray-tanned uncle that his moment has passed, or you have caught your high-school teacher sipping margaritas as gargantuan as his loneliness at Applebee's. Duke is having his Norma Desmond moment. "I am big. It's the pictures that got small." There is a tendency to think of modern games as acontextual—to ignore their past. We trick ourselves into ignoring those previous iterations, such as the gap between Metal Gear and Metal Gear Solid, because frankly they do not matter so much. This is the future. We are beyond those childish days, and their constraints no longer shackle us. Duke Nukem Forever is the diametric opposite. It is hard to conceive of its present without the past. Without the weight of expectation, the embarrassment and thrill of adolescence, the tinge of the illicit, Duke Nukem Forever is nothing."