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.