Month: February 2014

Employ­ing exam­ples of new media uses as well as his­tor­i­cal case stud­ies, I want­ed to show how new tech­nolo­gies, on one lev­el, con­tribute to the fur­ther indi­vid­u­al­iza­tion and lib­er­al­iza­tion of urban soci­ety. There is an alter­na­tive future sce­nario, how­ev­er, in which dig­i­tal media con­struct a new def­i­n­i­tion of the urban pub­lic sphere. In the process they also breathe new life into the clas­si­cal repub­li­can ide­al of the city as an open, demo­c­ra­t­ic ‘com­mu­ni­ty of strangers’.

We tend to hope that we will find the per­fect game; that there is some for­mu­la for cre­at­ing the best, most addic­tive game pos­si­ble. And when­ev­er we have a new hit, those hopes get pro­ject­ed onto it. In recent times, the per­fect game has been thought to be games like World of War­craft, Far­mVille, Can­dy Crush. And then anoth­er game comes along. Charles Pratt and Tad­hg Kel­ly have made sim­i­lar points. But I think it goes fur­ther: peo­ple play Flap­py Bird because it flies in the face of what every game design­er knows at this point. Not because play­ers care the least about what game design­ers or the­o­rists like myself think, but because the shared con­ven­tion­al wis­dom of How You Shall Design Your Game is mak­ing games sim­i­lar, and play­ers know a breath of fresh air when they see it.

Flap­py Bird pro­vides sol­id evi­dence that sim­ply tun­ing a game well can be far more impor­tant, in terms of the player’s ulti­mate enjoy­ment, than adding clever mechan­ics or beau­ti­ful art.

About five min­utes into the game I had to attend a brief­ing for the day. Not just that, but I had to find the exact right desk to stand at, and stand on the prop­er side of the desk, before the brief­ing would start. Until I found it, oth­er char­ac­ters would peri­od­i­cal­ly yell at me for being in the wrong place. Once I man­aged to fig­ure out the arbi­trary cor­rect set of actions to take, I was reward­ed with a slow, dia­logue-heavy cutscene about Drugs that did not ulti­mate­ly pro­vide any rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion about my quest. This would prove to be an omi­nous por­tent of the game as a whole.

In Feb­ru­ary 2014, there was not much con­tro­ver­sy for many game devel­op­ers, espe­cial­ly indie game devel­op­ers — the inter­net was harass­ing Dong Nguyen for mak­ing a game, which is unac­cept­able. Many peo­ple do not sup­port how Nguyen has been treat­ed, and have said so. It is always impor­tant to remem­ber resis­tance to a mob.

When we ask our­selves whether the Xbox One or PS4 ver­sion of Call of Duty is bet­ter, we’re choos­ing not to ask our­selves why we’re even still play­ing a game like Call of Duty long after the series stopped try­ing to be cul­tur­al­ly or polit­i­cal­ly rel­e­vant. When we focus on the amount of pix­els that are being used to ren­der Lara Croft, we over­look the implic­it creepi­ness of the game industry’s andro­cen­tric obses­sion with cre­at­ing such an “obses­sive­ly detailed” ver­sion of some­one like Lara Croft in the first place. And if we con­tin­ue to nit­pick over just how “obses­sive­ly detailed” this young woman’s vir­tu­al body is, we for­get that the real con­tro­ver­sy of the new Tomb Raider came from its uncom­fort­able par­tic­i­pa­tion in rape cul­ture. To bor­row a quote from Evge­ny Moro­zov, work like this refus­es “to eval­u­ate solu­tions to prob­lems based on cri­te­ria oth­er than efficiency.”

when a mys­tery show is about dis­pos­able female bod­ies, and the women in it are eye can­dy, it’s a drag. What­ev­er the length of the show’s much admired track­ing shot (six min­utes, uncut!), it feels less hard­boiled than soft­head­ed. Which might be O.K. if “True Detec­tive” were dumb fun, but, good God, it’s not: it’s got so much grav­i­tas it could run for President.

These gar­gan­tu­an Lego blocks flat­tened glob­al cap­i­tal­ism and erased human labour from indus­tri­al his­to­ry in the process; they are the per­fect tool for an eco­nom­ic sys­tem only inter­est­ed in short-term, pop-up solutions.

The Cas­tle Doc­trine is a state­ment game, to be sure, but the state­ment seems to be that the only way to win is to not play The Cas­tle Doctrine.