This Week In Video Game Criticism: Hidden Morality And Self-Imposed Permadeath

[This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us a fresh roundup of links compiled by Ben Abraham, on topics including subtle morality systems, self-imposed permanent death systems and games as art.] One of the more interesting pieces I read this week was from Paul Mason at the BBC’s Idle Scrawl blog (courtesy RPS’ Sunday Papers) who finds strategy videogame Heats of Iron III provides a refutation of revisionist scenarios surrounding the outbreak and direction of World War II. While we’re visiting the big news outlets, The Atlantic has a piece by Alexis Madrigal on ‘The Geopolitics of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?’ looking at, well, just that. Interestingly, he notes that, “as far as I can tell, not a single academic paper has been written about the boom in edutainment games in the 1980s and 1990s. Not one!” Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer blog wrote this week about Metro 2033 and its understated morality system, comparing the near-invisible system to a baseball pitcher with a wickedly disguised cutter. Courtney Stanton at KirbyBits continues her "Here is a Game" series with a look at Deadly Premonition. And while we’re on the subject, JP Grant has finished expounding on his SEVEN blog-post-length reasons for choosing Deadly Premonition as his Game of the Year. check em all out here. They’re all remarkably critical. In addition, Matthew Burns of the Magical Wasteland blog has gotten around to writing a response to last year’s second-most notorious “Games are not Art” piece by the N+1 editors (the first being, naturally, Roger Ebert) and Burns thinks they’ve been looking for art “In all the wrong places”. It’s a solid argument. Good things seem to be coming in pairs this week as the misleadingly named Game Design Forum has also been thinking about the same subject. “Can videogames be art?” And at the Border House this week they’ve highlighted the words of Halo: Reach writer Tom Abernathy who, simply put, said that “We’re not serving half our audience,” specifically the female half. Our own Denis Farr, also of the Vorpal Bunny Ranch blog, has been writing about characters from Half-Life 2 this week: first was Alex and Eli Vance, then came Dr Breen and G-Man’s turn. This week David Banahan at Bitmob begins a piece by talking about his wife’s relationship with Fallout 3, and the ability to save/reload at will, and ends up meditating on what the game would be like without that ability. Funnily enough, I have a little bit of insight into what that would be like as well. Speaking of permadeath, at Destructoid, blogger AwesomeExMachina is playing Fallout: New Vegas with self-imposed Permadeath as well as a raft of other self-imposed requirements. Food and water, it seemed, were the least of his worries, however, as it was the lack of HUD-based information that changed the game most significantly: "Early on, I foolishly rounded a hilltop without caution and spotted what seemed like a lone wasteland savage, standing stoically in leather, spiked armor and touting an assault rifle. I took my advantage and opened fire on the target from the safety of my hilltop. He went down quick and I strolled up to search his cargo for some much needed supplies. It was only then I discovered the kindly wasteland merchant he was guarding cowered behind the burnt husk of an old car, previously obscured by a fallen billboard." Jordan Magnuson, normally featured via his blog ‘Necessary Games’, has been busy ‘Game Trekking’ the past few weeks (months?). This seems to be about attempting to make games that reproduce something of the experience of trekking around the world. And at Edge Online, N’Gai Croal has written about ‘Drowning by Numbers, talking about that ubiquitous issue that seems less to afflict all digital consumers after a long enough time: having too many games/mp3s/files/fodlers/etc to handle. And on top of all that, how do we find things we don’t even know we like yet? At the Spectacle Rock blog Joel Haddock has written about ‘The Experience’ of games, thinking about the importance of the physical environment we play our games in, as well as the people we share stories about those play experiences with. The Buddhist Geeks podcast has a promisingly named episode out this week, with a discussion of “Gaming as Spiritual Practice” featuring Jane McGonigal. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it all yet, but I’ve heard great things! ANd over at The Escapist, the now regular ‘Extra Credits’ video series takes on “Amnesia and Story Structure” talking mostly about three-act structure. At Groping the Elephant, Justin Keverne returns to his long running series of map-analysis meets walkthrough ‘Groping the Map’. In this, the fourth instalment looking at the tenth level from Thief 2, Keverne uses his intimate knowledge of the game to tell us things like this: "What’s not visible from this rooftop is the doorway behind the servant, and the guard waiting in the room beyond. Exploration will provide an alternate means of entry into that very room, and this one encounter is an example of Thief level design in microcosm: the obvious route if rife with concealed dangers, exploration is power." Three pieces here this week make an interesting trio! Eric at The Elder Game blog asserted first that, in a fight between ‘Classes vs. Open Skill Systems’ in an MMO, classes would win out for a bunch of very practical reasons. Then, an author at the Stylish Corpse blog says “My first reaction was Noooooo! Do not say this! Do not want to hear it! Lalalala! But common sense generally recognises itself…”. And lastly, Brian Green counters at the Psychochild blog: "One of the big frustrations in discussing game design is imprecise terminology. What is a “class”? In MtG, as Tesh refers to in a comment on Stylish Corpse, is “Blue” a “class”? Well, if we’re going to shoehorn that game into the MMO paradigm, then it would be. …But, is that distinction useful for discussion? Not really, because the term “class” has a lot of emotional baggage with it. By advocating classes Eric is obfuscating his message and potentially harming those immature designers he is trying to warn since they’ll see “classes” and make a whole host of default assumptions." On to Paste Magazine where Kirk Hamilton has written one of the stronger pieces of the week, roaming across various big-ticket discussion topics that regularly get a play in critical circles. Gus Mastrapa writing at Joystick Division says we ought to forget about the Citizen Kane of videogames, responding to Richard Clark’s expressed concerns at Gamasutra regarding the upcoming Bulletstorm. Instead, Mastrapa says he'd be " fine with a Starship Troopers of video games. Not a heady work of art, but a viciously satirical piece of trash." And finally for the week, at The Last Metaphor blog the author discusses ‘Red Dead Redemption: misogyny as a male performance enhancer’ with a great run-on sentence of an opener: "Red Dead Redemption is a sexist video game that beds its “you know you want it” game play, its pervasive “hey what are you, stuck up?” artistic coercion and its penetrating thematic thrusts on the prone backs of women’s equality and respect. And what’s more, it’s a better game for it – once it leaves before morning."