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anonymous

BioShock Infinite: an intelligent, violent videogame? - Read - ABC Arts | Australian co... - 1 views

www.abc.net.au/...s3733057.htm

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Infinite has the difficulty of an inherited legacy: people like to point to the first BioShock (2007) as an example of how videogames made in studios by hundreds of people and financed by corporations can be artistic. It was, in a way, a beacon of hope for those who dreamed that the sheer industrial scale at the peak of the videogames business could translate into something worth taking seriously.
  • BioShock Infinite is a videogame with ideas. Set in 1912, it’s in part inspired by The Devil In The White City, Erik Larson’s 2003 novelistic account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
  • The city is beautiful, and possibly unparalleled in terms of visual design in a videogame: along with the expected white American neo-classical architecture, we get an astounding array of poster art and fashion, taking in both the decline of the strong silhouettes and Gibson Girl aesthetics of the 1910s, and the Art Nouveau movement, as well as Kinetoscopes similar to the illusionistic films of Georges Melies.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Columbia, according to Infinite, is to have set sail at the 1893 Fair, thus opening up a ripe array of potential themes stemming from real world history and politics, all of which get at least lip service in the game: Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, racism, and religious conflict.
  • This all occurs, as with the first BioShock, within the framework of a first person shooter.
  • The first major choice that players of BioShock Infinite are presented with is whether they would like to publicly punish an interracial couple or not. You may choose to throw a ball at the couple, who are tied up in front of a crowd at a fair, or you may choose to throw the ball at the man who is asking you to do so. The outcome of your choice is mostly the same.
  • Let’s think about that for a moment. BioShock Infinite, the game that many would hope to point to as an example of how art and subtlety might be found in expensive, mainstream videogames, sets up its moral stakes by asking the player if they would like to be a violent bigot.
  • Would you like to be for or against?
  • This is thunderously stupid, and an insipid example of how terrifyingly low the bar is set for ‘intelligence’ in mainstream videogames
  • In taking the game seriously, I want to be as clear as possible: BioShock Infinite uses racism for no other reason than to make itself seem clever. Worse, it uses racism and real events in an incredibly superficial way—BioShock Infinite seeks not to make any meaningful statement about history or racism or America, but instead seeks to use an aesthetics of ‘racism’ and ‘history’ as a barrier to point to and claim importance.
  • puts the lie to the claim that by engaging with these themes, BioShock Infinite is the place to find substance in mainstream videogames.
  • At the real Wounded Knee, over three hundred Native Americans—the Lakota Sioux—were massacred. Many of them were unarmed. Some of them were children. These were real people, with real lives and real families. The victims were buried in a mass grave, and many of the US Cavalry who led the massacre were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a decision that remains shameful today.
  • I am certainly not saying that a videogame has no right to engage with such events. What I am saying is that when you use such a horrific historic event in art—in any media—you have a responsibility to get it right, to use it to say something worthwhile, to make the invocation count.
  • Wounded Knee, I believe, is not something you get to invoke in 2013 without also making a statement of sorts. The idea of publicly punishing interracial relationships, something that of course has happened in reality, is also not something you get to invoke in 2013 without making a statement.
  • “[Letting] the player decide how they feel,” is not respecting your audience’s intelligence in these situations; it is a cop-out of the highest order.
  • For a game that so explicitly aimed to take on racism through its 1912 setting, the politics of BioShock Infinite are defined by evasion.
  • Such nihilistic disapproval is the absence of a political position masquerading as shrewd criticism. It may seem worldly, but it allows BioShock Infinite to be controversial to no-one by treating everyone with equal contempt.
  • Let us get one thing straight, then: despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art. It is a history-themed first person shooter, and it deserves no more or less respect than any other first person shooter.
  • You can argue that the faults of BioShock Infinite are the latest and most unfortunate result of the first-person genre that found bedrock in both Doom (reflexes and gore) and Myst (architecture and mystery) in the mid-1990s, two sharply different trajectories that have been bound into problematic convergence ever since. While the two genres remain fruitfully exploited in separation, all attempts at marrying the two—and thus discovering the elusive union of the shooter’s popularity and the exploration game’s more literary aspirations—have remained ill considered. In a way, mainstream videogames are still completely dumbfounded by Edge magazine’s famous 1994 criticism of Doom: “If only you could talk to these creatures.”
  • Maybe this is really the central problem of the game—how do you merge any kind of intelligent thematic exploration while taking unrestrained pleasure in shooting people in the face?
  • Where do those two circles converge in a Venn diagram?
  • By its conclusion, BioShock Infinite quickly forgets that it ever engaged with ideas of racism and American Exceptionalism in favour of a tangled Christopher Nolan puzzle plot about time travel. This is the sound of a thousand popguns going off, taking up the silent report of a giant cannon that failed to fire.
  • it remains difficult to point to a single videogame that is both artful, subtle and a successful mainstream videogame, and BioShock Infinite only muddies the waters further.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Can mainstream videogame makers present an artful, intelligent thematic exploration about real world history within a game dominated by scenes of unrestrained violence, asks Daniel Golding."
anonymous

The Future Is Not Accelerating - 0 views

io9.com/...the-future-is-not-accelerating

shared by anonymous on 06 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • Unlike computers, which we invented, the Earth's processes are something we can only understand through observation. And we need time to do it. Maybe not millions of years, but certainly not just a century either.
  • There is another kind of slow time that we often ignore in our rush to hurtle into tomorrow at light speed. This is called species time. It is the amont of time that a species, like say Homo sapiens, is likely to exist.
  • This is particularly important when you start to think about a reasonable timeframe for the development of space travel and solar system colonization.
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  • What if our space probes and the Curiosity rover are the equivalent of those reed boats thousands of years ago? It's worth pondering. We may be at the start of a long, slow journey whose climactic moment comes thousands of years from now.
  • Let's return to the one timeframe that we can all grasp easily: the length of a human lifespan, which under ideal circumstances is around 75-85 years.
  • I think it's obvious why we want to measure the pace of the future using technology, and make computer scientists our guides. Technological change is both familiar and easy to observe. We want to believe that other scientific and cultural changes can happen in similarly observable way because generally we think in human time, not species or geological time. Put another way: We all live in a hyper-accelerated timeframe. Slow time is essentially inhuman time. It is what exists before and after each of our individual lives.
  • That said, it's undeniable that technological change and fast human time can profoundly affect events unfolding in slow time.
  • Still, we can't expect all the efforts we make in our short lifetimes to pay off in our lifetimes, too. You will not live to be 200 years old. I repeat: You will not live to be 200 years old.
  • Maybe our grandchildren will have a chance to take a life-extension pill. But not us. And that has to be OK. Making scientific promises we can't keep will do a lot of harm. Ultimately it undermines the public's trust in both science and people who prognosticate about it.
  • We need to think about the future as a set of overlapping timelines. Some events take place in human time. Others exist in the slow time of Homo sapiens or the planet's carbon cycle — or even the Milky Way's collision course with Andromeda.
  • In a sense, we are trapped in accelerated time.
  • anonymous on 06 Dec 12
     
    "H. sapiens evolved about 200 thousand years ago. So we're pretty early in our species life cycle. I know we like to think of ourselves as special creatures, and to be fair it does seem like we are the only superintelligent life that's ever existed on Earth. But it's worth keeping in mind that despite all our accomplishments, like electric blankets and cities and videogames, that we are still part of a species whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years."
anonymous

Can't play, won't play | Hide&Seek - Inventing new kinds of play - 0 views

www.hideandseek.net/cant-play-wont-play

videogames ideas

shared by anonymous on 08 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Gamification, as it stands, should actually be called poinstification, and is a bad thing because it’s a misleading title for a misunderstood process, although pointsification, in and of itself, is a perfectly valid and valuable concept which nonetheless needs to be implemented carefully with due concern for appropriateness and for unintended consequences, just as actual gamification, namely the conversion of existing systems into functioning games, is also a valid and valuable process which carries its own concerns, but which now cannot with any clarity be referred to as gamification since that term is already widely associated with the process of what should more properly be called poinstification, and which we therefore propose be instead termed ‘luding’, mostly because it sounds a bit like ‘lewding’.
  • anonymous on 08 Nov 10
     
    "'Gamification', that said, can go take a long walk off a short pier. I'm heartened beyond measure to see that it's been deleted from Wikipedia. 'Gamification', the internet will tell you, is the future. It's coming soon to your bank, your gym, your job, your government and your gynaecologist. All human activity will be gamified, we are promised, because gamifying guarantees a whole bunch of other buzz-words like Immersion! and Emotional Engagement! and Socialised Monestisation! You'll be able to tell when something's been gamified because it will have points and badges. And this is the nub of the problem."
anonymous

Theme is Not Meaning (Part I) - 0 views

www.designer-notes.com/?p=237

gaming videogames evolution

shared by anonymous on 29 Nov 10 - Cached
  • anonymous on 29 Nov 10
     
    "This disconnect leads to some interesting questions. Does a game's designer have the right to say what a game is about if it doesn't match what's going on inside the players' heads? And if the designer doesn't have this right, then does a game's official "story" ever matter at all because it can be invalidated so easily? Isn't a game about what one actually does during play and how that feels to the player? Ultimately, designers need to recognize that a game's theme does not determine its meaning. Instead, meaning emerges from a game's mechanics - the set of decisions and consequences unique to each one. What does a game ask of the player? What does it punish, and what does it reward? What strategies and styles does the game encourage? Answering these questions reveals what a game is actually about."
anonymous

Inside the Box - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Suellentrop-t.html

videogames gaming generations

shared by anonymous on 27 Nov 10 - Cached
  • Ebert wrote, “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”
  • Ebert was restating a claim he made five years ago that “no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers.” And he’s right about that, for now.
  • (Of early game designers he writes, “These men’s minds were typically scattered with the detritus of Tolkien, ‘Star Wars,’ Dungeons and Dragons, ‘Dune’— and that was if they had any taste.”)
  • anonymous on 27 Nov 10
     
    "Video games have created what must be the biggest generation gap since rock 'n' roll. Sure, a generational rift of sorts emerged when the World Wide Web showed up near the end of the last century, but in the case of the Web, the older cohort admired and tried to emulate the younger crowd, rather than looking down on them with befuddlement or disdain. With games, a more traditional "Get off my lawn" panic has reared its head. " By Chris Suellentrop at The New York Times Book Review on June 18, 2010.
anonymous

PlanetSide 2: what we know so far - 0 views

www.pcgamer.com/...anetside-2-what-we-know-so-far

videogames planetside

shared by anonymous on 02 Aug 11 - Cached
  • The majority of your customization is done through the amazingly large skill trees.
  • Skills, also called certifications, are trained very similarly to EVE Online (over time, and continuing while you’re offline), but also go faster when you’re actively playing.
  • Skills “will affect everything” in PlanetSide 2.
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  • There is not a single use of instancing in the entire game
  • Unlike PS, you can capture any territory at any time, but you do get “significant bonuses” to capturing a territory adjacent to your own.
  • SOE is really pushing the idea of wanting to make PlanetSide 2 into a full “sandbox” game in the future
  • Expect to see a lot of influence from top modern shooters
  • The developers mentioned several times that they want to allow players to design their own structures in the future.
  • anonymous on 02 Aug 11
     
    "This information will be pretty straight-forward; we'll host more in-depth discussions on the site later today with our interviews of SOE president John Smedley and PlanetSide 2′s creative director Matt Higby."
anonymous

Ian Bogost - Gamification is Bullshit - 0 views

www.bogost.com/...gamification_is_bullshit.shtml

videogames gaming

shared by anonymous on 08 Aug 11 - Cached
  • 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.
  • Bullshitters are many things, but they are not stupid. The rhetorical power of the word "gamification" is enormous, and it does precisely what the bullshitters want: it takes games—a mysterious, magical, powerful medium that has captured the attention of millions of people—and it makes them accessible in the context of contemporary business.
  • For the consultants and the startups, that means selling the same bullshit in book, workshop, platform, or API over and over again, at limited incremental cost. It ticks a box. Social media strategy? Check. Games strategy? Check.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn't matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.
  • Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.
  • anonymous on 08 Aug 11
     
    "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." By Ian Bogost
anonymous

Kingdom Rush - 0 views

armorgames.com/...kingdom-rush

games whimsy videogames towerdefense

shared by anonymous on 29 Jul 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 29 Jul 11
     
    From Armor Games, a new Tower Defense Game that's supposed to be pretty good.
anonymous

My Commodore Revival - 0 views

comm64.blogspot.com

commodore videogames gaming amiga c64

shared by anonymous on 01 Aug 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 01 Aug 11
     
    This is a great blog by an old Commodore/Amiga fan (like myself) wherein he tries to rekindle the love. He posts quick, breezy items. The blog's more of a public notebook where he shares impressions along the way.
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