This Week in Video Game Criticism: Tell It from the Mountain-top

This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Zach Alexander on topics ranging from the structure of A Machine for Pigs to all about a certain Mountain. Before we get into this week’s Big Topic, a few pieces might set the stage for productive conversation. Zoya Street dug through Nobuki Yasuda’s work to extract how players describe games in Japanese. Are games “fun”? Are they “interesting”? Mark Filipowich talks about engaging with a work and how that work communicates to an individual. Both of these topics are embedded in the discussion that follows. First, There is a Mountain A game called Mountain recently came out. Cameron Kunzleman discusses Mountain over at Paste, which is important for understanding the conversation that follows. Stephen Beirne took a couple of shots at the concept of “interactivity”. Raph Koster responded, the conversation flooded over to Twitter, and then Raph wrote another post addressing interactivity as well as Mountain. Michael McMaster took the discussion around Mountain down a different path in an essay on Medium titled “On Formalism”:

Brendan Keogh used McMaster’s post to understand his own feelings on Mountain. Meanwhile, Austin C. Howe gave a short but sweet two-part rebuttal to one of McMaster’s headier claims: On Mountain and On Text Vs Form. Time and Time Again On the less philosophical side of things, Alex D. Jones compared the passage of time in Mountain to another game called Durations. Mattie Brice talks about the lens through which she has been critiquing text games based on their use of time and pacing. Extra Credits has a new episode talking about how games elapse at different paces to signal if they are “traditional” or “weird”. Aevee Bee jumps over from time into “space”. She wrote a great primer on the fighting game tournament EVO 2014, looking at a few of the featured games and how they define the control of space. Over in the meat world, Joseph Leray writes about soccer and the act of diving to communicate injustice. Robert Yang talks about communication through code in a “post-mod culture”. Shoulds and Shouldn’ts Shawn Olson argues that imbalance in games shouldn’t be taboo. Dag Hammarskjold argues anti-climactic endings shouldn’t be taboo. Nick Dinacola agrees, but says we should probably leave complex moral anti-climaxes until the end of a game. Leigh Alexander asks if “joy” in games is actually more adult than violence, contrasting games like Flower and Katamari Damacy against games like Mortal Kombat. If you want more on the faux-adulthood of violence, Liana Kerzner puts GTA V’s“satire” on blast, while Patricia Hernandez investigates a GTA V “bikerclub”. On the other hand, if you want some more joy in your life, Heidi Kemps’ journey to find the secret origins of a lost Sonic the Hedgehog level is an incredible read. Foreign Correspondence Joe Koeller reports in from… uh, the Alps? Foreign correspondence covers the last month or so this time around. A new issue of the local games bookazine WASD is out. There's a substantial preview available to make your buying decision easier, and articles have already started appearing on other sites, such as this introduction to licensed firearms in shooters by Michael Schulze von Glasser, or an anonymous free-to-play insider getting even. On that note, students from an online journalism program have been trying their hands at games criticism on the site, and the sum of their work is well worth a look. Maria Kutscherow wrote about Beyond: Two Souls as an autobiography co-created between player and game. Robert Glashuttner talks Valiant Hearts, serious games, and simplified history. We mentioned Nina Kiel's Gender in Games book before, but now some preview sections have finally made it to her homepage. Also, Helga Hansen reviewed the book for Herzteile. Slightly old news at this point, but Valentina Hirsch has a response to the lack of female assassins in Assassin's Creed: Unity. In more recent news, Robert Bannert recently wrote about the stereotypical depiction of men in games, concluding that cliches are simply an essential part of storytelling. Sanczny swiftly responds with an analysis of his arguments. Structure of Games Nick Lalone lays down some "Principles of Simulation", going through what works and doesn’t work when creating a simulation. Luke Pullen talks about the world-simulation Civilization and what it’s structure entails, in particular calling out “the way that colonisation prevents rather than incites native uprisings”. Simon Winters talks about how Earthbound’s unique Mu Training sequence and the structure it uses horrify and confuse the player. Sam Zucchi talks about horror in Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs. William Hughes talks about the function of repetition in games. William Hughes talks about the function of repetiti -- sorry. Katherine St Asaph gives a rundown of a New York Times article on Interactive Fiction (“There’s a distinct whiff of the trendpiece”). Merritt Kopas has more details about how great hypertext is. Lindsey Joyce examines The Last Of Us by looking at the role of Ellie. S. Delling Dyre talks about how romance and sex are always intertwined in Bioware games. Miguel Penabella talks about how difficult it is to get proper preservation of video games. Finally, Samantha Allen talks about the difficulty of teaching someone the intricacies of Mario Kart 8. As always we greatly value your contributions, and we encourage you to submit links to us via Twitter mention or our email.