This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Mark Filipowich on topics ranging from the 'ludocentrism' of games discourse to a different take on Eric Zimmerman's 'Ludic Century.'
Such Mechanic. Very Game.
A veritable games-crit supergroup came together on Twitter to discuss ludo-centrism, or the domination of play in critical discourse. Special thanks to Landon S for capturing the chaos in a storify.
Lulu Blue on her blog, erogamzo, elaborates on the interplay between play and context as the most crucial point of focus:
Much like a face drawn from lines, game systems carry assumptions made by their creators. If a man sets out to draw a woman and he idealizes a certain beauty standard, he's likely to draw women which conform to this beauty standard. If the same man sets out to make an rpg, he's likely to fabricate a world which systematically expresses these ideas about women as well.
As a part of her argument, Blue explains just how the relationships between systems and context inevitably push ideology to the surface.
Daniel Parker speaks the devil's name into the mirror three times in a related discussion and offers his own take, suggesting that compromising narrative to offer an illusion of play cheapens a game:
Games that employ post-cutscene design ideology tend to be marketed as 'immersive experiences' with 'living, breathing worlds.' Bioshock Infinite is not a living, breathing world; it is a flashy museum with freaky animatronics.
The Buyer Knows Best
Media philosopher Ian Bogost ended 2014 skeptical of Eric Zimmerman's "ludic century," suggesting that instead of dominating our culture, maybe games should just be a small part of our ever complicating lives:
We don't have to scorn games (or comics, or YA fiction) to feel a little embarrassed at the prospect of a century with them at the center of the media ecosystem. And on the flip side, we don't have to discard games (or comics, or YA fiction) to scratch our heads at the wisdom of feeling satisfied by them.
At Kill Screen, Ray Graham explores depictions of torture in light of exposed CIA documents and wonders how culpable games are in the widely held (but misinformed) belief that torture is an effective method of gathering information.
At Sufficiently Human, our own Lana Polansky writes that game design is too wrapped up in the fantasy of wealth accumulation to actually communicate anything meaningful. According to Polansky, the time may be to look outside of big-budget commercial games for a meaningful conversation.
Through a Glass, Darkly
Over at Salon, Arthur Chu interviews Tanya DePass, creator of the #INeedDiverseGames hashtag, about gaming's insulation, representation and diversity:
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