Critical Distance: This week in videogame blogging #1

Are we about to enter an “age of games”?

(Photo By Bioshock Infinite: can it really be called a â?oliving, breathing worldâ??? )

Critical Distance is proud to bring to the New Statesman a new weekly digest of its popular This Week in Videogame Blogging feature, which promotes the best, often little-known, incisive criticism and cultural commentary on interactive media. This week, we discuss the “ludocentricism” of games discourse and Ian Bogost tackles the idea that we are entering the “age of games”.

First up: a diverse body of games critics and scholars came together over Twitter to discuss the domination of play in critical discourses on games. Lulu Blue further elaborates on the interplay between play and context as the most crucial point of focus:

Much like a face drawn from lines, game systems carry assumptions made by their creators. If a man sets out to draw a woman and he idealizes a certain beauty standard, he’s likely to draw women which conform to this beauty standard. If the same man sets out to make an RPG, he’s likely to fabricate a world which systematically expresses these ideas about women as well.”

Elsewhere, Daniel Parker offers his own take, suggesting that compromising narrative to offer an illusion of play cheapens a game:

Games that employ post-cutscene design ideology tend to be marketed as ‘immersive experiences’ with ‘living, breathing worlds’. Bioshock Infinite is not a living, breathing world; it is a flashy museum with freaky animatronics.”

At Sufficiently Human, our own Lana Polansky writes that game design is too wrapped up in the fantasy of wealth accumulation to actually communicate anything meaningful. According to Polansky, the time may be to look outside of big-budget commercial games for a meaningful conversation.

At Kill Screen, Ray Graham explores depictions of torture in light of exposed CIA documents and wonders how culpable games are in the widely held (but misinformed) belief that torture is an effective method of gathering information.

Media philosopher Ian Bogost ended 2014 skeptical of Eric Zimmerman’s “ludic century”, suggesting that instead of dominating our culture, maybe games should just be a small part of our ever complicating lives:

We don’t have to scorn games (or comics, or YA fiction) to feel a little embarrassed at the prospect of a century with them at the center of the media ecosystem. And on the flip side, we don’t have to discard games (or comics, or YA fiction) to scratch our heads at the wisdom of feeling satisfied by them.”

Lastly, some further reading for the week. The latest issue of Zoya Street’s game e-zine Memory Insufficient has hit the shelves, tackling alternative and speculative histories of games. The newest StoryBundle compiles ten great ebooks ranging from veteran games journalist Leigh Alexander’s Clipping Through to deep dive analyses of Jagged Alliance 2 and Super Mario Bros. 2. Finally, renowned interactive fiction author Emily Short has compiled a massive list of IF competitions, anthologies and shows for your perusal.

There is much more available in this week’s full roundup at Critical Distance! Tune in again next week and be sure to follow us on Twitter @critdistance for all the latest and greatest games writing from around the web.