Another Quick Update

Apologies for continuing to not update this website. I've been teaching the last semester and that's taken up most of my time. I have been writing elsewhere, though. I've written a few quick columns for The Conversation. This one about Jane McGonigal's dubious play-Tetris-to-cure-PTSD project/blog was pretty popular. I've also written about how the Liberal Government's draconian, scorched-earth budget effects game makers in Australia, and my presumptive hostility towards blockbuster games with Themes. I wrote a piece for ABC's The Drum about esports and videogame spectatorship. I wrote a piece for Overland's print journal that has since been republished online, where I write the letter I would have written to Susan Sontag about games criticism if she were still alive. I'm pretty happy with that one. And, for the newly launched Unwinnable Weekly, I have a "Notes on Luftrausers" post in Issue 2, which I strongly encourage you to chip in some money for. I think this is my favourite Notes post yet, maybe, and I'm so thrilled to be able to get it published somewhere.

I've also been taking advantage of my ungaming tumblr to throw out a whole heap of super rough, unfinished thoughts. The kind of stuff that probably would end up as blog posts here eventually if I had more time. It's been really liberating to just dump them there, half-formed, and get people to engage with them. I really love how the design of tumblr kind of encourages that messiness. I've been using that blog for both gaming and non-gaming things. Here are some really rough thoughts on Final Fantasy XII that I am currently fleshing out into a Notes post. Here are some thoughts on why this console generation transition is really interesting because nothing is happening. Here are some thoughts about the federal budget which was, literally, forged from satan's own toilet paper. Here are some notes on David Sudnow's Pilgrim in the Microworld, which is a really great book.

Oh yeah, let's talk about what I've been reading. I read both of David Sudnow's books, Ways of the Hand (about becoming a jazz pianist) and Pilgrims in the Microworld (about getting really good at Breakout!) and both are excellent, closely descriptive accounts of what the hands do at various tools. Both are definitely worth a read if you have an interest in the bodily, phenomenological pleasures of videogames.

I also just this last week read Anna Anthropy's new book on ZZT, written for Boss Fight Books, and it is really remarkable. It does this incredible job of transitioning from a close, detailed look at 'the game itself' as this kind of seed in the first chapter that then shoots outwards into this vast discussion of communities and an important snapshot of a particular moment in time. Not only is it a really great analysis of a game, capturing both personal and broader cultural implications, but a really significant contribution to videogame history. Here is a cool quote from towards the end of the book on exactly why that history is important. Here is Cameron Kunzelman's review for Paste.

I bought a WiiU last week for Mario Kart 8, and have since been instagram-ing countless slow-motion replays. I should have a piece up soon about how spectacular (in the most literal sense) that game is. I also finally played A Dark Room to completion on iOS after reading Cara Ellison's piece on the first Unwinnable Weekly, and it was truly remarkable. I've also gotten sucked into Pocket Trains because NimbleBit knows how to hook me.

And that is what I am up to.

2013: Some Writing

2013 is almost over. It's been a pretty intense year! My December is going to be full of travel and events and I'm going to have precious little time to spend on my usual, self-gratifying retrospective end-of-year posts. So this is going to be a bit rushed, but here is a list of some of the writing I did this year that I am still pretty happy with.

1. My interview with Spec Ops: The Line writer Walt Williams. I mostly wanted to talk to Walt about what it is like to read criticism about your own game, but our conversation went much further than that. I didn't want to dissect it into pull quotes, so instead I published the entire transcript on Unwinnable. Related, that there is a site like Unwinnable where I know I can always publish an article makes me very happy.

2. My feature on the Queer Games Scene for Polygon. I struggle to feel proud about this piece because I know it isn't perfect. I know that, despite my best efforts, it still homogenises a diverse range of creators under that 'queer' label. I know that, as a straight white dude, I wrote the article from a position of extreme privilege over my interviewees. But I also wrote the article with the sincerest intentions. The creators I speak to in this feature remain, I am convinced, the most important and exciting people making and writing about videogames today. I wrote this piece because I want other people to be excited about these people. Not in a weird, exotic animal kind of way, but in a "these are the people that are going to convince others your beloved medium is art" kind of way. I don't know. Writing it was exhausting. Seeing a select few people criticise it on Twitter even as so many others applauded it was exhausting. Knowing I could only ever do an imperfect job of this article was exhausting. Still, I know various people who have said to me they had no idea this side of games existed before reading this article, which is exactly what I wanted it to do. So I should be proud of that I guess.

3. My feature on game jams for Edge. This was a piece I was asked to write, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. I like how I try to complicate game jams and look at how they've seeped into the Triple-A space, and that blurry line between jamming and crunching.

4. My profile of Douglas Wilson for Edge. Essentially, I just wanted an excuse to meet Douglas Wilson and talk about his amazing games and research. Still pretty happy with how this turned out.

5. My article on Grand Theft Auto V for Overland. One of my goals for this year was to write for one of Australia's literary journals, to write 'criticism about games' rather than 'games criticism', if that makes sense. I guess the website of a literary journal is close enough (the actual literary journal is happening next year!). This was technically meant to be a review of Grand Theft Auto V but it turned into a longer discussion of how despite talking loudly, Grand Theft Auto V fails to say anything of substance at all.

6. My essay on Tearaway and Sontag and Immersion. Okay, this piece only got published today but I'm still pretty happy with it.

7. My Notes series of blog posts. I really enjoyed writing my Notes posts. It started as an experiment. Okay, it started after reading Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp" and not being able to repress my desire to imitate every great author I read's style. But it turned out pretty well. The Notes format gave me the breathing room to just touch on ideas and move on to the next with no concerns for how the paragraphs flow, without having to make a singular 'point' about a game. Others have also done this this year, most notable Cameron Kunzelman's excellent post on The Last of Us. I would have liked to publish more Notes posts than I did (I still have drafts for Metal Gear Solid 3, Problem Attic, and Towerfall, but I'm also really happy with the ones I did post.

February Writing

A quick summary of the writing I did in February. As previously mentioned, I'll be writing less this year than I was last year. This is partly because I want to commit more time this year to my academic writing (both getting my PhD properly underway and hopefully getting some journal articles out the door) and also because I simply wasn't happy with the quality of my stuff when I was writing weekly pieces at multiple outlets. But even though I am writing less, I'm happier with the quality of the stuff I'm writing now, so that is good, and I have some ideas for some features I want to write in the coming months that I'm really excited about.

Anyway. Things I wrote. At Unwinnable I only have one piece this month. I wanted to look at this interesting thing that happens when I play games like Antichamber and Where Is My Heart?. Namely, I get really, really exhausted just from thinking. So I wrote about that.

At Games On Net I have two "You Know What I Love?" columns this month. The first one is about the Borderlands 2 enemy type, the Goliath, which I think is a really interesting enemy. The second one is about grinding as I've enjoyed it in several games I've been playing recently.

Also at Games On Net this month, I had the opportunity to head to Sydney for a Bioshock: Infinite press event. So I wrote a preview of that, which I'm fairly happy of (as far as previews go), and I also interviewed the game's Director of Design, Bill Gardner.

In February I decided to go back and give Dark Souls a second chance after failing miserably at it when it first came out. Subsequently, I've played the game for about fifty hours in a rather short period of time. I had lots of thoughts about how the game in general and the level design specifically communicate the world to the player as hostile and stand-off-ish. I put together these thoughts for my first even piece at Bit Creature, which is exciting.

Last month I had a "Places" piece in Edge about Skyrim's The Reach. It was republished online this month.

Earlier in the month I gave a very casual lecture about the term 'nongame' and why it is terrible and discriminatory. I wrote about it briefly here, and provided a link to the (not very good quality) recording of the (not very good quality) talk.

And that is all for this month. The only other news is that Killing is Harmless is now available on Kindle. You can purchase it from Gumroad to get the Kindle version along with the pdf and epub formats, or you can now also buy it for Kindle alone directly through Amazon.

January Writing

After taking my December hiatus (my glorious, glorious December hiatus), I've jumped back into my writing commitments this past month. Though, considering I essentially burned myself out last year (what with ten regular pieces a month, a PhD confirmation paper, a stack of features, and, uh, writing a book in my spare time), this year I'm hoping to write fewer articles but of a higher quality. By the end of last year I really wasn't completely happy with the quality of the stuff I was putting out. I was writing so much that I just didn't have the time to really edit and mature my ideas before submitting them. So this year, expect to see my articles less regularly, but hopefully the articles you do see will be of a far higher quality. Hopefully!

At Unwinnable, I've put my "Pocket Treasures" column on hold for the indefinite future. Instead, you will probably just see me writing a couple of features a month—one in the middle of the month on whatever is on my mind, and one for the always excellent theme week that Unwinnable runs at the end of the month. This month, I tried to make coherent my complicated thoughts on why Far Cry 3 really doesn't work. It wasn't so much that I thought Far Cry 3 was worse than your average shooter (on the contrary, there is a lot in Far Cry 3 that I really like. Rather, I found Far Cry 3 disappointing because it could've been so much more. It starts from such a promising place (I was really excited about it after playing the opening hours at a preview event at Ubisoft Montreal), and it just goes absolutely nowhere.

The theme week this month was "Beginnings", and I wrote about something that I've been thinking for several years now: videogame play as literacy. I think if we can consciously understand what we do when we play videogames, we will be able to form a language to better teach others how to play them. It's an idea that has fascinated me for sometime, and these short anecdotes are my first attempt to actually write anything about it.

At Games On Net I am still writing my "You Know What I Love?" column every fortnight, and still struggling not to make every column about Just Cause 2. This month I wrote about short games (largely inspired by me finally bothering to play the incredible 30 Flights of Loving) and cinematic games (inspired by my utter hatred of the far-too-common comment that videogames should be "games first" as though such a comment means anything at all).

I have been writing "A Sum of Parts" columns for Gameranx, but none of them are online yet, so I will edit this when they go up.

On this blog I wrote a videogames reader that I can point at when people ask me what books I would recommend reading about videogames. Also, if you missed it, I wrote a few paragraphs each about my top twenty-five games of the last year.

In other news, Killing is Harmless has now topped 1400 sales, which is bewilderingly incredible. More exciting for some of you, though, is that Daniel has almost finished ironing the bumps out of the Kindle version, and we should be finally getting it onto the Kinde store in the not too distant future. So that is exciting.

And that is it for January!

A Sum of Writing

Here is another writing update to keep this blog kicking.

This past month I started a new column at Gameranx called "A Sum of Parts" where I am spending an entire month and four articles dissecting and examining a single game. The point of it is not necessarily to say something more profound about the game as a whole, but to draw more attention to the 'bits' that make that whole work. To get things rolling this month I started with Driver: San Francisco. There is so much I wanted (and still want) to say about this fabulous game that it was a privilege to have the chance to get those thoughts down somewhere.

To start with, I flipped my old Unwinnable piece to say that not only are videogame worlds dreamlike, but dreamworlds are gamelike, and I discussed how Tanner always constructs goals for himself that he can only achieve through less efficient means. Second, I looked at one of Driver SF's more interesting and bizarre missions: the second-person challenge where you are following the car you are controlling, and looked at what that says about the player-character relationship. Third, I looked at the reoccurring motif in the game of the media influencing Tanner's thoughts and the design of the game, most noticeably through the phrase "Eyes on the city". And, finally, I looked at what Janet H Murray called "actively creating belief". I think it is a really powerful concept for understand how videogames are interpreted more broadly, and I tried to explore it through the ways both Tanner and the player convince themselves that Tanner's dreamworld is 'real'.

So that's it for Driver SF writing from me for a while. If you have been reading that series, I'd love to hear your feedback, be it positive or negative. Anything you would like to see me do differently with future games?

In other writing, a couple of pieces I have floating around the quaint old world of print media have found their way online. There's this review of Lone Survivor from PC Powerplay, and this studio profile of Supergiant Games (of Bastion fame) from Edge that I wrote after visiting the studio during GDC.

In addition to that, my regular Unwinnable writing (including this article about playing with TVs) is still happening, as is my "You Know What I Love?" column at Games On Net (this month I wrote about diegetic HUDS and songs).

Finally, if you follow me on Twitter, you may be aware that I have been enamoured by a certain Spec Ops: The Line game, and you might be wondering why I haven't written anything about it yet. The Line is one of those games that speaks so well for itself, as a critic I am not too sure what else there is to say about it. Sure, I could write an article about what it means to be able to see Walker's face reflected on a targeting computer, but you already know what it means. It's not because the game is blunt with its message; it is because the game is so good at saying exactly what it is trying to say, so what do you need me for? So, that is why I am yet to write any articles about it. The most interesting articles about The Line have, in fact, been the pieces that are highly negative of the game, because they are saying something the game isn't saying (even if I disagree with the vast majority of them). So writing positive criticism of the game and its themes has been a challenge for me. There is just so much to say but nothing that the game didn't say for itself.

So instead of writing an article or two exploring The Line's already well explored themes, I am experimenting with writing a much longer... thing. I am doing what I am tentatively calling "a critical reading" of The Line where I am writing my way through the game, chapter by chapter, scene by scene (I even more tentatively thought about calling it "embedded New Games Journalism but yeah, no). It isn't simply a walkthrough and it isn't simply lip-service fan-fiction (Christ, I hope it isn't, at least). Instead, it is starting with the themes that the game is exploring, and going through the game with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass to look at how everything in the game contributes to that theme. I'm not writing about what The Line means (though that is certainly a part of it) so much as how it means.

It's going to be long; I'm currently averaging about 2000 words a chapter. Too long for an article, or even a series of articles. Instead, I am planning on putting it together as an e-book and perhaps selling it online for a few dollars a piece. Maybe through MagNation or something similar. I don't know the first thing about doing this, but we'll see how it goes. And, if it is successful, critical readings of games (or whatever I decide to call this) might be something I do more often in the future. We'll see! But yes, that is where all my The Line writing is going, and hopefully you can expect to see that surface towards the end of this month. Hopefully. In the meantime, I will still be around the internet, doing what I do.

The Haps

Well, it's been a while since I have posted anything here at Critical Damage so I feel like I should post a quick update as to what I have been up to around the internet and beyond.

Firstly, I imagine you saw my somewhat emotional blog post from about a month ago about videogame culture's (videogame cultures' is perhaps more accurate, I guess) rape culture and sexism. It... got a little bit of attention. I started this blog in 2009. About half of the 80,000 page views I've had since then are on that post. For those playing at home, that means that post has had nearly 40,000 views. So yeah. A little bit of attention.

I've been meaning to post a follow-up to it. Mostly I want to write about how utterly naive I was when I posted it, thinking that it wouldn't cause such a commotion. I want to write about how so many female writers had already made the exact points I made in that post and have been making it for years (and have made them far more succinctly) yet it took a straight white guy to say something to really cause a shitstorm. I want to write about how the privileged misogynerds that disagreed with me went to lengths to prove the faults in my post, whereas when a woman writes something the same commenters go to lengths to prove the faults with them as people. No one sent me death or rape threats. No one designed a game where players can bash me up. I want to write about how the response to my piece and the relative decency of it just goes to show the inequality in videogame culture and the privilege I have as a male to talk about such things. A privilege that many others among us, those most affected by this shit, don't have.

Hopefully there will be a chance to write that article in the near future, but the first post was so utterly draining (physically and mentally) that I just haven't been able to yet. Still, it's been really good to see the discussions of inequality and rape culture and the such in videogames persist since the Hitman: Absolution trailer. Which is not to try to claim I started it. Many others wrote things before me, alongside me, and after me. But it definitely feels like we are reaching some kind of critical mass in this discussion. Some kind of tipping point. At least, I really hope so.

Beyond that, I've been really busy with writing elsewhere on the internet. I have three regular writing commitments now. At Games On Net, my "You Know What I Love?" column continues fortnightly. Which, uh, I would be linking to here but the most recent Games On Net redesign seems to have destroyed all my URLS. Hrmm. Well, you'll have to believe me they are there. Meanwhile, over at Unwinnable (which is fast becoming my favourite website for consistently strong videogame criticism) I am writing weekly pieces. Often these are iOS review-things under the column heading "Pocket Treasures", but sometimes they are other musings. And, starting this week, I have another weekly column over at Gameranx called "A Sum Of Parts". Here I am spending each month looking very specifically at several themes/elements of a specific game. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to spend an extended period of time (and word space) on elements of a single game, rather than doing a quick, general overview of the game. I'm starting the column off this month with Driver: San Francisco which, having just finished my second playthrough, is fast becoming one of my favourite games of all time. You really need to play it.

With these three regular pieces, I feel like I've made some kind of transition of late from videogame 'journalist' to 'critic'. It's a pretty blurred like and the two terms overlap pretty dramatically, but I feel like I have finally found a balance where I can primarily just write meaningful things about games without focusing on whats relevant to 'news', and that makes me happy. I still do write some pieces that would perhaps fit better under the category of 'journalism' than 'criticism' (such as a profile and interview I have with Jonathan Blow in the August issue of Hyper magazine), and some pieces that really straddle the two (like this piece for Edge magazine about Journey, Proteus, and Dear Esther), but by and large I feel like my focus is now squarely on producing videogame criticism. Whatever that is.

Which is largely probably because of the PhD I started at the beginning of this year, but have yet to really speak about here. I won't go into too much detail here, but ultimately I am concerned with forwarding a videogame phenomenology (or ontology, or aesthetics, or whatever term I decide I like next month) that can help construct a more robust academic videogame criticism. As literature has literature studies and film has film studies, I want videogames to have videogame studies. A field focused on the study of videogame texts and their meanings. I want videogame criticism to be a thing, more of a thing than it already is, and I guess my non-academic work is reflecting that.

And finally, you should go and grab a copy of issue 7 of the zine Ctrl+Alt+Defeat. I have an article in there about Just Cause 2 as my 'comfort game', but the reason you should pick it up is to read Kris Ligman's superb article about Skyrim and hoarding. It is a magnificent piece of New Games Journalism with an immaculate blend of personal story and game description. So much New Games Journalism gets this balance wrong and ends up saying nothing at all; Kris manages to get it perfect and says something meaningful and special about both the game and her personal experience. I really can't recommend it enough. You can look at the issue in your browser here, but I strongly recommend going here, registering, and just grabbing a free PDF (or paying some money for a print copy if you really feel like it).

So that is where I am at with things presently. I don't always update this blog when I publish articles elsewhere, but that is something I should get back into the habit of doing. Though I do have this poorly formatted page of all my writing that I try to keep up to date. I also always link to my work on Twitter, if that is something you use. So yes. Those are the haps.

Some Writing.

by Daniel Purvis

A quick post on a few pieces of mine that have appeared around the place this past week.

A piece I wrote several months ago has finally appeared on Kill Screen about the Modern Warfare trilogy and how despite its ultimately mediocre story, it tells it remarkably by understanding how easily interchangeable playable characters are. The artwork accompanying the piece (above) is by the ever-awesome Daniel Purvis. Purvis is hands down my favourite illustrators working in the videogame press and it's always a privilege to have him illustrate one of my pieces.

I wrote about Fez at Unwinnable, talking specifically about how the game made me think about what it must be like to experience a world beyond the one your own senses is able to perceive.

My last "You Know What I Love?" piece at Games On Net (almost a fortnight ago now) was all about playing games slow, and the unique satisfaction inherent in a game designed for such a play tempo.

And for the Australians among you, in the latest issue of Hyper (#224, with Max Payne 3 on the cover) I have an extensive preview of Medal of Honor: Warfighter that tries to address my uncomfortableness at the game's claims to unrealism. It includes a face-to-face interview with the game's executive producer, Greg Goodrich which I am quite happy with.

So there you go. As always, would love to hear what you think about any of these pieces.

Swinging and Shifting

I had a few articles published this week that are unrelated other than for the fact that I am really happy with all of them.

The first is over at Unwinnable and is about how Driver: San Francisco's use of the "it's all just a dream" trope is used to great effect to, paradoxically, reinforce the diegesis and coherency of the game's fictional world. I absolutely loved Driver: SF when I played it earlier this month. It is one of those games that just got my mind spinning and I have like half a dozen different articles I want to write about it. If you missed it late last year, I strongly recommend going back and playing it. It does so many interesting things very well. Also, I must say I was more than pretty happy with being able to use an entirely apt Wolf Parade song as the article title.

The second article is at The Conversation, a website funded by and run by a collection of Australian universities. It's not quite an academic website per se, but a website where journalistic articles and discussions can take place about academic research. I wrote about some research that claims to show gesture-based controls are "more immersive" than traditional, button-based controls, and why I find that very hypothesis highly problematic. This was the first thing I've ever written beyond the enthusiast gaming press, and it was a really interesting challenge to write about these things in an accessible way--accessible to both non-academics and non-videogame players. I think it turned out okay.

And in the world of print, I have two articles in the latest E240 issue of Edge Magazine. The first is a feature article called "Just Being There" (at least, that is what it was called when I sent it off to the editors; it could have changed!) and is about how games like Journey, Dear Esther, and Proteus are challenging traditional (I would say archaic) definitions of what a game 'is' but deliberately pushing at the borders of such definitions. I've seen a low-res screengrab of the article from when I had to do the captions and the visual design is incredible. I'm really excited to grab my own copy of the magazine when it finally makes its way to Australia.

The second article in the magazine is a studio profile of Bastion developers Supergiant Games. Greg Kasavin et al were nice enough to have me over to their lovely new studio space during GDC last month. I'm really happy with how this piece turned out, too. They are a fascinating group of developers with a really interesting and grounded approach to game design. Hopefully I conveyed this successfully in my piece!


If you read any of these pieces, I'd love to hear what you think.

Alone Together in Journey

I have a new article up at Unwinnable this week about being alone with a companion in Journey. For me, the beauty of Journey was how the co-op just made the pilgrimage feel even lonelier than a single player experience could. It's a hard (perhaps even futile) thing to try to explain, so instead I just described my own experiences with four different companions across two games. I'm really happy with how the piece turned out and would love it if you gave it a read.

2011: The Best Of

I'm not normally one for writing reflective "The Year That Was" posts but, well, 2011 deserves one. It was a pretty giant year for me. I somehow managed to scrounge up a press pass and get across the world to the Game Developer's Conference at the start of the year; I wrote a thesis; I played more great games than I can fit in an upcoming "Top 20 Games of 2011" blog series (stay tuned!); and, perhaps most importantly, I somehow stumbled over that blurry line between "random videogame blogger" and "freelance videogame journalist/critic/what-have-you".

I've been fortunate through 2011 to have the chance this year to write a vast variety of articles for a vast variety of outlets, including such prestigious outlets as Edge and Ars Technica that I never could have imagined I would one day write for.

So I thought I would write this quick post to recap on some of my favourite pieces of writing from the past year. In other words, those few articles I wrote that I can actually stand reading myself.

"I Think They're Mad: Inside A 48 Hour Battle To Build The Best Videogame" (Ars Technica): Easily my most successful piece of writing this year (well, ever) and easily the one I most expected to fail miserably. When Truna asked me to cover this year's Fab 48 Hour Game Competition, I'm not sure why I instantly assumed that meant "record the entire 48 hours in one epic article". It wasn't until I was on my way to QUT's Kelvin Grove Campus with computer, sleeping bag, and spare clothes that I realised she has probably just meant for me to visit for an hour and write up a quick story.

Going into it, I had no idea what I was going to write or how it was going to turn out. I had sent Ben Kuchera at Ars a rambling pseudo-pitch of an email saying I would try to write a kind of liveblog equivalent of an article. A kind of subjective "as it happens" thing. I don't think I've ever written a pitch with so many instances of "kind of like" in it. Still, he asked to see a first draft once I had it written up and actually knew what the hell it was I actually wrote.

So I wrote it. I walked around and spoke to people while scribbling in a notebook, then rushed back to my laptop and tried to write out a rough draft narrative of everything I had witnessed, and then I picked up my notebook and went out again. And again. And again. It was a while before I had any real focus or idea of just what I was doing or aiming for, but things started to fall into place once I made the decision to just focus on a select few teams rather than trying to cover all of them. Fortunately, one of the teams I chose won overall--I have no idea how I would have concluded this otherwise!

So "I Think They're Mad" was a surprise hit and, in retrospect, I think I was mad to ever attempt it. It made Ars Technica's "Favourite Gaming Stories of 2011" list and even has an ebook version available for purchase if you are so inclined. I went into it expecting to come out with a 5,000 word ramble that I would just stick on this blog and have read by nobody. Instead I came out with 25,000 words that received nearly unanimous (and entirely unexpected) praise.


"Videogame Criticism, Videogame Journalism, Journalism about Videogames, Videogame Criticism: More a Rant than a Manifesto" (Critical Damage): Some of my most popular writing seems to be my angriest. I'm not quite sure why that is. Maybe the rapid, off-the-top-of-your-head writing one tends to when they are angry closely reflects my usual writing behaviour of writing rambling draft after rambling draft. I wrote this rant after the second day of the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in Melbourne in response to a panel that didn't really go very well. I wasn't the only person to write criticisms of the panel in the weeks after Freeplay, but I think I was the first (and, let's be honest, the drunkest).

The panel was meant to be about videogame journalism, and all four panel members were utterly deserving to be on the panel, and I would go to another panel with exactly the same synopsis with all four of them again in a flash. The problem was that the panel got quickly sidetracked into territory it was never meant to go into and a whole lot of problematic claims ended up being made without being challenged. So my responsive rant should not be (and hopefully was not) seen as an attack on the panel members, but as a response to the incorrect things that were said about topics the panel was never meant to cover.

I wrote my first draft of this post on the stairwell of a Melbourne backpacker's hostel at 2am, more than slightly drunk after the Freeplay after-party. I wisely listened to some friends on Twitter who told me to sleep on it before I post it, so the following morning I sat in Federation Square and read it aloud to my brother, Glynn, who wisely recommended I deleted about 50% of the expletives. I then posted it, packed up my computer, and chilled out in Melbourne for a day while waiting for my plane home to Brisbane.

It spread like wildfire and I instantly regretted posting it so soon after Freeplay's end as, on the whole, Freeplay was (and always is) an utterly positive and uplifting and inspiring event. I instantly regretted that the first big article to come out of it was my hugely negative rant. But, still, it had to be said and it had to be said while it was still fresh in everyone's minds. So, in the end, I'm glad I got it off my chest.


"Bastion Review" (Paste): I loved Bastion. I played it through twice in three days and felt absolutely compelled to write about it. I wanted to say everything about it and I wanted to say it now. Fortunately, Paste still needed a review so I had an outlet. This is one of those reviews that practically wrote itself. I found exactly the right words for everything I wanted to say and exactly the right paragraphs to fit it all in. This is perhaps the only review I've ever written that I didn't look back at afterwards and note all the things I forgot to mention.


"Modern Warfare 3 Isn't An Un-Game, John Walker. You Are An Un-Player (And That Is OK)" (Kotaku Australia): Another angry rant. This piece was a response to an article by Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker where he wrote a largely negative rant about Modern Warfare 3 and how it was an "un-game". I read it, and it made me kind of furious. It seemed to me like he had begrudgingly gone into the game with the intent to not enjoy it and to make it break. He seemed to want to play it in a way that Modern Warfare 3 was never meant to be played so he could blame the game when it didn't work. So I was ranting about this on Twitter when Mark Serrels, Kotaku Australia's Editor, DM'ed me and asked if I would be interested in writing a response piece. I said maybe, as I had quite a few other articles to work on. But, by the end of the day, I was emailing Mark my responding rant. Truly, it is easier to write when you are angry.

Some context I think this piece deserves: I was responding to John's article as it appeared on Kotaku. I had missed the point that it was a republished article from Rock Paper Shotgun where it had a different title and was, essentially, just John's review of the game. I felt a bit like a jerk when I realised this, that I had written this response to someone's subjective review of the game. But still, this absolute dismissal of games that aren't about the player being in a position of power by videogame criticism is a huge bugbear of mine so I am glad I wrote a response.

John then wrote a response to my response on Rock Paper Shotgun, which really just reiterated many of his opening points. Still, I think all three posts make for a really interesting dialogue. It is an argument, to be sure, but it remains a very civil one, and I think we can agree to disagree. Also, while I didn't respond to John's second post, Jim Sterling did at Destructoid, and he says pretty much what I would have said if I did respond.


"Character Building" (Kill Screen: The Intimacy Issue): So I can't link you to this article as it is in print. If you want to read it you will have to go buy Kill Screen's The Intimacy Issue, which is really a thing you should do anyway. And, really, if this wasn't in print I probably never would have written it. The idea of putting such a personal article on the internet where an "in real life" friend of family member might easily stumble across it would have absolutely terrified me--as it has terrified me enough to never even mention this article on the internet before now. The internet might be great for anonymity, but it can't beat print for discretion.

"Character Building" is about the darkest years of my ongoing struggle with anorexia through the lens of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. That perhaps sounds like a strange connection, but it was a realisation of what I was doing to CJ's body in the game that first forced me to accept what I was doing to my own body.

I am neither as proud nor as terrified of any other piece of my writing.  I am so glad that I worked up the courage to write it, and that I had the editorial support in Chris Dahlen to turn it into something so much more than just another confessional. But I am also terrified that it exists out there for people to stumble across, read, and know about me. I guess acknowledging its existence on the internet, finally, is a part of getting over that terror.

Anorexia was something I had wanted to write about for quite some time (what writer isn't consistently tempted to write about their darkest secrets?), but I never had the place or the context to do it in. Who would have thought that a videogame magazine would have given me the chance to finally get it out?

And perhaps that, more than anything, is what I have gotten out of 2011. Not an excuse to play more videogames, as the joke so often goes when you tell people you write about videogames, but a chance to just write and write with a purpose.

There is an old Brainy Gamer podcast (I'm not exactly sure which one) where Michael Abbott is interviewing Chris Dahlen and Jamin Warren about Kill Screen, and one of them says (and I paraphrase) that if you are serious about writing about videogames you need to approach it primarily as a writer, not as a gamer. It sounds so obvious, but it was not something I'd ever thought so explicitly before. Later that day, I wrote my first pitch to Kill Screen and took some of the earliest steps towards seriously trying to write about videogames.

I am doing this not because I love videogames (which I do) but because I love writing. So if you read anything I wrote (including this) in 2011, thank you for giving me a reason to write.

Linear Writings

I have a couple of new articles around the place you may be interested in. Firstly, over at Games on Net, I have devoted my latest "You Know What I Love?" column to the Modern Warfare series. It's... a complicated kind of love. This is as close as I will get to a response to John Walker's response to my response to his review. Also, did you see Jim Sterling threw a hat into that particular ring, too? He says a lot of things I agree with.

Secondly, I wrote a piece for Paste about a very memorable choice in Ico that, really, wasn't a choice at all but that doesn't matter.

I'm pretty happy with how both of these turned out, and they have a lot more in common than I realised they did when I first started thinking about them both. In each I am essentially arguing for that same old thing I'm always arguing: for videogame criticism to stop putting so much onus on the player and instead look at the interrelationships of acting and being acted upon present in all games.

So hopefully I've said something interesting about that.

Moments

The State Library of Queensland has a place called The Edge, which is like a (for lack of a better word) mutlimedia wing of the library. It's pretty cool! People can go there to use the computers and other digital equipment and they host all sorts of funky events. For the last month or so they have been running a program specifically focused on games, and as part of this, people have been invited to write guest blogs for their website. People including me!

I decided at first that I wanted to write something about 'moments'. I have this idea that has nagged me for a long time that videogames are about moments. That it isn't about the overarching story or goals or even the mechanics of a game that really hold our attention and that keep us coming back to new games over and over again. Rather, I think it is the hope that we will create moments. These crazy, half-authored/half-chance coming-togethers of player and machine. Essentially, we play videogames in case something cool happens.

So I thought about how I would write something about this and in the end decided that, rather, I would just describe two memorable videogame moments (for me, at least). Two moments that, for very different reasons, epitomise why I love playing videogames: for those moments that everything just works to get an emotional reaction out of me.

So the first blog I wrote was about Portal and the second blog was about Modern Warfare 2. I intentionally chose fairly well-known games since I don't think I am writing for a particularly game-savvy audience. Still, hopefully you get something out of them. I'd be interested to see what people think of them!

Also, for the three or four of you that have been reading my blog for some time, you might notice these blogs are similar to a series of blogs I was writing a while back by the same name. So there you go.

And in unrelated news, I have teamed up with George Kokoris from Microsoft Game Studios and Shane Liesegang from Bethesda Studios and together we are writing a letter series as we simultaneously play through the classic shooter Marathon. We've each written an introductory post and next week will begin playing the first few levels. Please follow along with us. Maybe even play along!

THESIS: "Partners in Crime: The Relationship Between the Playable Character and the Videogame Player"

If you have been following me on any kind of social media network this year, you've probably heard me mention once or twice that I've been writing an Honours* thesis in Communication and Cultural Studies at The University of Queensland. Well, I submitted it about a month ago and today the marks finally got released. It would seem I got a First, which essentially means I received some mark above 80%. So this is great!

And now that marks are finalised, I can finally let you fine people read it, if you wish. If you want it, and if I have done this correctly, you should be able to get it from this link.

If in all my social media network rantings I never actually mentioned what I was doing, here is my abstract:


This thesis creates a space for videogame criticism to account for the playable character’s role in the shaping of the player’s experience. Just as the player defines certain actions and characteristics of the playable character, so too do the character’s actions and characteristics shape the player’s experience. The two exist in an intimate coupling where intention and action start with neither actor but in the flow of information and agency between them.

To account for how meaning is produced in videogame play the videogame critic must account not only for the player’s agency and actions but also for how the player is acted upon. Players interact with videogames textually as fictional worlds embedded with actual imperatives that afford and constraint different styles of play. While most videogame scholars acknowledge the role of the playable character as a vehicle through which the player navigates and configures this world, rarely is its mediating effect on the player fully recognised. In discourses surrounding videogame play it is not unlikely for the terms “player” and “character” to be used interchangeably when discussing the agent that acts within the videogame’s fictional world. This uncertainty as to just who is acting highlights a gap in the existing literature on playable characters and their significance towards the production of textual meaning.

Engaging with actor-network theory and cyborg theory to understand videogame play as cybernetic, this thesis demonstrates how the playable character’s nonhuman agency—independent of the player’s intentions—can be accounted for. It explores how the agencies of both player and playable character intertwine and mediate each other to form a hybrid actor, the player-character, which is the actual actor that navigates both the actual and fictional worlds encompassed in videogame play. Finally, through a textual analysis of Grand Theft Auto IV, this thesis demonstrates how the player-character hybrid can be deployed to account for the playable character’s role in the production of the videogame text’s meaning.


So there you go. If this sounds relevant to your interests, please give it a read and let me know what you think.

(*For those of you in countries where university doesn't have an Honours year, it is this kind of bridging, research year you do right at the end of your undergraduate degree, usually (though not always) if you want to go onto postgraduate work. So this isn't quite on the level of a Masters or PhD dissertation, so don't expect such a thing!)

You're Playing It Wrong!

I have an editorial up at Kotaku Australia which is a response to an editorial that Rock Paper Shotgun's John Walker wrote on Wednesday. In this editorial I might say one or two crazy things like "Modern Warfare 3 is my favourite game of 2011" and "You are playing it wrong!". So nothing too crazy.

I won't waste your time repeating what I say there here, but I felt I needed to write this as I am tired of a game's worth being measured in "freedom". I think there are plenty of valid criticisms to be leveled at Modern Warfare 3, but not being able to be a leader or to choose where you go isn't one of them. Talk about it's (arguable) glorifying of war or the complete lack of female characters or the implausibility of its plot if you wish. You can even talk about how it is or isn't well paced and how the set-pieces are or aren't well directed, but judging it simply for being a linear game is wrong, I feel.

And certainly, Walker's piece did make some of these valid criticisms, and that is cool! My disagreement should be seen as specifically towards those bits of his article that discuss the game is terms of choice or lack thereof. Such as his title.

Related, here is an old blog post I wrote last year when I played the first Modern Warfare and was utterly surprised at how much I enjoyed it despite my complete lack of agency.


UPDATE: Walker has now written a response to my response to his post on Rock Paper Shotgun. While moving away from a form of game criticism obsessed with player freedom and privilege is central to my interests and studies, I'm kind of over forwarding this very narrow debate centered on a single game. So instead of repeating my arguments in response to Walker's repetition of his own and continuing this ad infinitum, I'll just leave this as my closing remark and walk away:

If someone is reading a book you despise or watching a film you hate, you might tell them that it is a horrible book/film, but you wouldn't tell them that it isn't a book/film. Yet we seem to do this all the time with games. I hate this. If any videogame regardless of its quality does not fit within your definition of what a videogame is, the problem is with your definition, not the game.

Dark Souls: A Time To Grind

I wrote an article for Gameranx about temporality in Dark Souls and how it justifies the centrality of grinding within the game's play. Some disagree with my rather broad definition of "grinding", but I am really happy with the piece, regardless. It is an idea I have been musing on for a few weeks and was planning on just throwing up here on the blog, so I am glad I was able to give it a proper home.

Time and games is fascinating. It is something my Honours supervisor kept returning to this year throughout my thesis, but which ultimately I did not have the time to look at. So many different games deal with time in so many different ways. Lots of people are saying lots of interesting things about how videogames deal with and disrupt space, and I'm looking forward to when time and temporality are given the same appreciation.

New Writing: Open Worlds and Game Jams

Two pieces of writing I have been working on recently went live today. Firstly, I wrote this article over at Games On Net in which I try to distill my thoughts on why I am so excited about Skyrim. There is something special about a new open world that I really wanted to catch the soul of. I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

And over at Ars Technica is Part One of my sit in of the Fabulous 48 Hour Game Competition. I spent practically the entire forty-eight hours at this thing and watched energy transfer from developer to crafted game like a zubat suck HP. Or some analogy like that. It was a thrilling weekend and I'm really excited with how this piece turned out, so please go over and read Part One and stay tuned for parts Two and Three, which I will add links to from this post when they go up. Also, over at the game competition's blog, a few of the games are already online and available to download and play, if the article makes you curious.

In other news, my Honours thesis is due on Monday, so in the coming weeks you can expect a link to that, too, if you have any interest in my academic writing.