This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Zoya Street on mechanics of traversal and closeness.
Games are often about traversal, metaphorically or literally. Many mechanics are, at their core, about closing the gap between self and other, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, and critical writing on games often walks the same ground.
Epistory: Typing Chronicles | Lena LeRay, Extant Human
Lena Le Ray addresses how a game can be educational without feeling like homework, by creating a game-world as a context in which new knowledge feels familiar.Steam’s Hot New Cam Girl Game Is Kinda Boring | Kotaku
Patricia Hernandez reviews a resource management game where the resources in question are porn performers, arguing that its mechanics lead to little more than a series of cold, self-involved transactions.Working with puzzle design through state space visualization | Gamasutra blogs
Rune Skovbo Johansen provides a guide to using open-source visualisation tool PuzzleGraph, which looks like a great resource not just for development but for critical analysis.Erik Twice Reviews » Chess – AAA
A surprising exercise that perhaps more of us should try out, this review of Chess manages to give words to a game that is so embedded in European culture that it seems at times beyond description.
“We are so used to it we might not notice, but Chess is a very modern game in some regards. Instead of fighting to the death or strangulation like in most abstracts, the win condition is the capture of a single, practically unarmed piece. This is huge! It enables a wide range of plays and the threat of the game ending in a single move introduces a lot of fun and tension. And the pieces? They are all a bit strange. The Bishops move diagonally despite the game being vertically-bound. The Knight can move through other pieces but doing so makes it alternate between white and black squares. Pawns form the backbone of the army yet are barely capable of harming each other. There are a lot of curve balls in Chess that makes it feel fresh and exciting.”
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