This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including the Xbox One as Entertainment Altar, the queering of Silent Hill, and more.
Catharsis comes in Mystery House not when the mystery is solved but when you start attacking the house itself. Later in the game, you must pull furniture and masonry apart, let fires burn holes in the floor and smash down walls with a sledgehammer. You are not exploring the house at this point: you are violating it. And after all it's put you through, seeing this house destroyed is a welcome brutality.
[W]hat Alexander calls the "charming minimalism" of Candy Box is actually a core gamer dog whistle; its ASCI art suggests Dwarf Fortress, not Bejewelled, and its wizards, moats, castles and Doctor Who vendor are unambiguous geek signals. For Clark, these signs serve to convey the idea that this is not Farmville – that it's designed for a narrow, web-savvy audience and "not some imagined 'mass market.'" Part of that image is the assumption that the game is satirising social games. "But it's not, really, in the substance of gameplay," says Clark; "it's re-appropriated those systems and put a different set of clothes on." As Keogh puts it: "It's a social game without cutesy graphics or a 'share to Facebook' button, so it’s okay to be seen playing it."
[G]ames, with the birth of the modern period, achieve direct, actionable linkages to the production of truth, which also coincides with the rise of liberalistic practices of which capitalism is a part. As capital facilitates the mass production of games, themselves cultural artifacts, these forms of entertainment that were previously limited to the shared 'public' sphere become absorbed and encapsulated in 'private' spheres by the rise of a new type of cultural actor; the gamer. The gamer, in turn, sees in games a way to cultivate a utility and beauty, but only if the the uncultivated others, located in the 'public' sphere of activity, can be successfully distinguished from the die Wissenden (gamers). This is facilitated by a creation of the 'private' garden of games.
IT'S PRONOUNCED CROSSBONE
So the Xbox One was unveiled last week. More than a few writers took a turn gnawing on this Xbone, in particular the reports circulating regarding its used game functionality, but also just, well... everything about it.
Gamasutra's editor-at-large Leigh Alexander bolted out the gate early with this editorial on why the Xbox One is out of touch with reality:
We are tired of buying consumerist fantasies. This isn't revolutionary. This is arrested development, the last gasp of the console generation, dropping names and making obeisances to live actors and television and film personalities as if this were still a prior age's clutch backward for creative legitimacy. It is a movie-soundtracked prayer to stop time.
The Xbox One, with all its creepy Kinect-spying, TV interaction weirdness for the seventeen people who still ever watch TV as it's broadcast, and dog-based shooters serves a useful purpose. It takes the industry's fervent ambition to prevent the natural, beautiful human desire to share to a clearer, more immediately offensive place. It highlights the freedom we've already given up. And perhaps it will shake us enough to start resisting at last.
That's all for this week! Join us next time for more of the best that the ludodecahedron has to offer!
Crossbone gives an edginess factor to it. I wonder if MS really was that smart. When I thought of X-bone, I be honest, was thinking of a different 'bone' more along the lines of the current MS policies of #dealwithit and "you are backwards"
