This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics ranging from the runaway success of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood to the respectability politics of how we talk about HipHopGamer. Cult of Celebrity Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is a massive moneymaker, and it's provoked quite a bit of discussion. On The Daily Dot, Samantha Allen lauds the game and its central figure for flouting the highly gendered negativity being directed at it:
Kim Kardashian is surfing this wave of male tears all the way to the bank. In a world with limited opportunities for famous women as they age, Kardashian broke the Internet simply by lending her likeness to a single mobile game. And to read Kardashian as a vapid figure who does not deserve her fame is to fundamentally misunderstand the ways in which women exercise agency within the sexist constraints of celebrity culture.
At Paste, Gita Jackson goes one further by pointing to how the by-now familiar mechanics of the free-to-play genre reflect the game's subject matter:
My avatar is whisked from engagement to engagement to engagement. Literally -- as soon as I leave a cover shoot, I get a "call" from my "agent" with another offer with the implication that I should run over now. At these engagements, each action takes a bit of energy. When you run out, but try to continue, the game tells you that you are tired. It does seem tiring. [...] For Mrs. Kardashian West, however, this isn't a diversion. This is her reality. She doesn't have a choice on whether or not she is scrutinized. She had a choice when her sex tape was released—be forever known as a woman who had a sex tape, or try and take control of that situation. She no longer gets to have "off the clock."
Let's Talk This article by Dan Grilopoulos on Eurogamer delving into the origins of Minesweeper could have gone further into today's competitive scene, but it is still an interesting piece on the ubiquitous software. In it, he interviews the original developers behind the game and Microsoft's better-known plagiarism. Back on Paste, Ansh Patel interviews Arvind Raja Yadav, game designer of the recently released Unrest, a game set in ancient India. (Full disclosure: I am a backer of this game.) Meanwhile, at Sufficiently Human, Critical Distance contributor Lana Polansky and alumnus Zolani Stewart get into discussion over several recent topics, including Brendan Vance's "On Form and Its Usurpers," our flash-in-the-pan obsession with Mountain, and our problem with technological ahistoricity. Or as Lana puts it: "Be skeptical of the narrative of the new... the constant distraction of the immediate." A Matter of Interpretation At Sinister Design, Craig Stern asserts there are, indeed, 'wrong' interpretations of games, or at least interpretations unsupported by the body of information within and surrounding that work:
If the creator of an artistic work leaves gaps in the work for the player to fill in, then yes, the creator will have to expect that players will fill in those gaps themselves–but this does not change our conclusion. The player's interpretation must still be consistent with those elements for which the game does not leave gaps. Otherwise, the interpretation will be built upon false premises–which is to say, it will be wrong. [...] [T]he "no wrong interpretation" theory does not just promote interpretations from marginalized voices; it provides cover for unsupported interpretations from every perspective, including racist, homophobic, and misogynist perspectives. For instance: some have interpreted the inclusion of a gay character in Dragon Age Inquisition as a cynical bid on Bioware's part to push "the gay agenda" [...] If it is not possible to provide a wrong interpretation, then that loathsome interpretation must also be "not wrong."
In a direct response to Stern, Stephen Beirne contends that there is a middle path to walk between authorial intent and the critic, or player, as authority:
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