Thursday, May 29, 2008

Welcome

Welcome to Critical Damage! My goal for this site is to make critical analyses of different aspects of computer games that are generally overlooked or taken for granted by the general audience. By this I mean looking at things such as (for example) the role of the silent protagonist in game-series such as Zelda or Half-Life, or the narrative devices used in Halo, or whether Grand Theft Auto 4 is immature crudity or intelligent social criticism. Basically, i want to go beyond the typical "This game has cool graphics!" technical assessment of games and look at the elements more typical of any other medium of storytelling--such as film or literature.

Hopefully I can manage to do this in a professional and interesting way, without taking all the ingrained fun of cool graphics and leet explosions out of games.

If it is important to know, I am a 22-year-old student, almost finished a BA in Creative Writing and Japanese. Before this, I spent eighteen-months in an IT and Multimedia degree before realising I have little interesting in the technical side of gaming, only the storytelling side. I began playing games with Sonic The Hedgehog 2 and Alex Kidd on the Sega Master System II and haven't looked back since.

So that's about it, really. Hopefully I can keep committed to this and publish some interesting article that people might find worthy of reading.

No comments: