This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Mark Filipowich on topics ranging from Sam Barlow's Her Story to an interview with Keiji Inafune.
Binders Full of Stories
Sam Barlow's Her Story is the subject of a number of pieces this week. Kimberley Wallace's interview with the creator about the process of creating it for Game Informer seems like a good place to start.
Over at Not Your Mama's Gamer, Alisha Karabinus describes her own experience with the game’s many Layers of Identity and Meaning:
In any narrative experience touted as a detective game, players and potential players might make a few assumptions, the first being that they’ll be playing as a detective. Early on in Her Story, players who poke around the interface might discover this isn’t quite the case. Once that initial assumption was broken, I found myself questioning everything in the game, and I don’t just mean in terms of narrative. We're supposed to question everything said in the interviews, I think, but very early on, I began to question things on wholly different levels.
Christian Donlan seems to agree, praising how the mystery story plays with its sequence of events:
[I]ts searchable, hypertextual jumbling of its own narrative feels unique and timely and eminently nickable. As does the fact that simply putting the story together is enough here: most of the play that takes place in Her Story happens in your own head as you reconstruct the events and try to interpret them.
Of course, praise for Her Story is not universal. Ed Smith argues that it follows detective fiction's tradition of unrealistically romanticizing crime and criminals:
There is a crime being committed in Her Story, but it isn't Hannah's. It’s that of yet another crime fiction writer, conflating melodrama with found-footage, documentary, or any otherwise "real" aesthetic, and in doing so helping affirm the idea that society should lock up its criminals and throw away the key.
Give Peace a Chance
Rock, Paper, Shotgun writer Marsh Davis revisits Deus Ex: Human Revolutions to discuss how it and games in general promote an oxymoronic relationship to power (video), where the player both holds all the power but is framed as an oppressed person.
At Vorpal Bunny Ranch Dennis Farr seems to agree in his analysis of Marvel Heroes 2015. While Marvel has recently diversified its canon, games based on its universe still fail to accurately represent power dynamics:
Part of what seems to make the mutants, and the X-Men in particular, so appealing is their use of their powers and fighting a struggle that they always seem to surmount (not without casualties). This makes most games about them into a power fantasy, though the minority status is relegated to barks from enemies calling them less than human.
Writing for FemHype, Sheva believes that the constant use of violence stems from the association between violence and masculinity. The author argues that violent masculinity is at the core of how gamers define games:
Refusing to classify non-violent video games as video games is an act founded in masculine insecurity, and it not only discourages innovation in the medium, but also disqualifies innovative new games from inclusion in the medium.
Lastly, Michaël Samyn of Tale of Tales implores that violence begets violence in writing that violent videogames and violent culture are a self-perpetuating spiral that developers and players are all too willing to ignore:
I'm sure there's enough studies that disprove the correlation between violent games and violent behavior to allow us to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that we're not responsible, that we have no idea, that "Wow isn't this a weird coincidence? There's violent games and there's violent gamers and the two are completely unrelated. What are the odds?"
Learning
