Quotes

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.

“A yo, Michelle was gonna beat on Barack for taking dat selfie with dat chick at the Mandela wake! Whateva da fuk a selfie is! What’s a selfie, some type of bailout?” yelled Dontay from the kitchen, dumping Utz chips into a cracked flowery bowl. I was placing cubes into all of our cups and equally distributing the vodka like, “Some for you and some for you …” “What the fuck is a selfie?” said Miss Sheryl. “When a stupid person with a smartphone flicks themselves and looks at it,” I said to the room. She replied with a raised eyebrow, “Oh?” It’s amazing how the news seems so instant to most from my generation with our iPhones, Wi-Fi, tablets and iPads, but actually it isn’t. The idea of information being class-based as well became evident to me when I watched my friends talk about a weeks-old story as if it happened yesterday.

It’s time for us to remember that civic and commercial innovation can thrive on the local level as well – not just globally. The argument against Balkanization, made by US-based technology giants, has always relied on some perverse notion and at times fundamentalist notion of utopian cosmopolitanism: if only we are allow maximum interconnection, intercultural contacts will get established, people in Mali will discover people in Montana, everyone will suddenly care about African warlords like Joseph Kony, and so on. Yet, perhaps, it’s time to question whether the pursuit of this cosmopolitan agenda has served us well. We wanted to build a global village – only to end up with a global panopticon instead. There’s little evidence that people in Montana are any more concerned about Mali than two decades ago. At the same time, the cosmopolitan impulse – strategically played up by Silicon Valley in seemingly noble initiatives like Internet.org (a Facebook-led effort to get the remaining five billion people connected) has stopped us from experimenting with communication models that, while possibly less integrated at the global level, would promote different values locally.

I think the best games do this. Cara mentioned the FPS example, but to be frank, it applies to anything: card games; beat-em-ups; sports; real-time-strategy. The first read has to be clear, broad: grokkable, and also aesthetically enticing. Once enticed, you need that detail to repeat, to be fractal, to be backed up by substance. And then, as you delve deeper, into expertise and experience, there’s still depth to reward you, but it never clashes against that first read you had, the thing that sucked you in.

Yes, we “play” games like we do sports, and yes, games bear “meaning” as do the fine and plastic arts. But something else is at work in games. Games are devices we operate.