This week in Video Game Criticism: From sexuality to not finishing Mass Effect 3

"The illusions of non-player characters complicated to the point that we could legitimately say we had "fallen" for Alyx Vance, Garrus Vakarian or a horse. They made the perfect motions and looked us in the eye and said what we wanted to hear. But each year we age, these creatures seem more dead than living. We notice their tenuous walk, as on a high wire; the way they numbly repeat themselves and react only to the right things in the right ways at the right times; their glassy eyes. This brings up some difficult questions: Why do we care deeply about such a character, if her love for us is predetermined at birth? If one day this person can feel on her own, how are we supposed to trust that person? But shouldn't we trust that she cares about us?"

"I mean, really, that's why I was there, right? It wasn't about defeating Saren, or the Illusive Man, or the Reapers, and it's especially not about saving Earth. Naw. Mass Effect is about the characters and their stories. Like Ike from Fire Emblem says, "I fight for my friends." […] I thought about the void I felt every time after finishing media that was important to me, how difficult it was to follow up on. I thought about how desperation would keep me reaching blindly to try to follow it up, anyway. Why should I brave that? No more loss, no crappy ending, no blind, hungry search for something to fill the void. Instead, I crystallized the game and everyone in it at a good moment."

"I'm not arguing for an essentialist reading, some Protestant vs. Confucian face off (that's silly), or saying that the labor-as-play model doesn't work in a number of contexts (it does) – because really, the territory has yet to be adequately mapped. There has been precious little study of games in pre-20th century East Asia, slightly more regarding digital games in East Asia, and the Western press/blogging community takes a sneering and insulting attitude towards the Asian market (with the necessary exception of Japan, of course). It has always really rubbed me the wrong way – just because you might have no interest in playing XYZ game doesn't mean it isn't valuable to discuss it. Turning up our collective noses at Korean or Chinese games (for a quick example) because they're long, slogging grinds is short-sighted at best."

"Consider this a worldwide wakeup call. If we want improvement – honest to god improvement – if we want our videogames back, once and for all, we have to overcome our insanity and reclaim them. We need to stop excusing new franchise entries every single year because "well, I guess they're still kinda fun." We must shun the "cinematic" and the "setpiece" and instead demand actual game design again. All gamers, from the couch-sitting high schooler to the journalist playing a review copy from her office, have to snap out of the dementia we're locked in and start actually loving videogames again. Forcing ourselves to find something to like in each new gritty FPS isn't being accepting and open-minded, it's fucking Stockholm Syndrome."

"The norm in 2012 is for shots to arrive on the screen with a silent crash, a new configuration of motion, light and perspective thrust on the audience, producing what film editing guru Edward Dmytryk called a "mental hiccup," or speed bump. Each of these disruptions, flowing not from dramatic necessity but from a fear of losing the attention of a superficially engaged viewer, is an act of sensory violence. And, like actual violence, it can imprint the victim. The past decade of having our eyes dragged across millions of violent ruptures in even the gentlest narrative situations has encoded us with this expectation. So now big commercial films run at ever-higher speeds over thousands of speed bumps, catering to an audience the creators seem to think of as frantic shoppers. The time it takes to watch the chemistry blossom between two actors in a two-shot, or for a powerful realization to light up a face in close-up, is a luxury they don't believe they, or we, can afford. The most violent, flashy video game does minimal violence to our sense of temporal and spatial continuity; it's a built-in property (virtue, really) of the medium. The user is the protagonist and so must remain properly oriented to his environment as much as possible. In this sense, Mortal Kombat is far less "violent" than Bridesmaids."

"In the bifurcated sexual epistemology of 21st century Western culture—a world of gays and straights, men and women, closets and streets—Commander Shepard had to come out, an action that necessarily implies that he was hiding it before. […] It reflects a larger trend in queer activism today that tries to harness libertarian and neoliberal economic and political values to craft a new defense of sexual freedom ensconced in the rhetoric of personal choice. […] And it's a political strategy echoed by BioWare itself, a sentiment Mac Walters reflected when I spoke to him—the effort to give every Mass Effect player the fullest sense that their Shepard truly is theirs. It's a clever way to beat "traditional" conservatives at their own game. […] As Zeschuk said to Kotaku when explaining the choice: "If there's a political bent to it, it's very Libertarian." My point here isn't to point out the silly rhetorical similarities between videogames and contemporary politics, or even to make some grandiose statement that perhaps videogames as the consummate medium of the 21st century have unwittingly enshrined some neoliberal mindset by demanding everyone obsess over "choice" in the first place. Really, it's just to note that the concept of "choice" is a much easier thing to advocate for—in games as in real life—than something genuinely queer.""