Critical Distance is proud to bring to The New Statesman a weekly digest of its popular This Week in Videogame Blogging feature, which promotes the best, often little-known, incisive criticism and cultural commentary on interactive media. This week, we discuss the cinematic conventions shared by True Detective and videogames, tackle the narrative challenges of the medium, and explore a Kanye West fan game which may double as a cult recruitment tool.
We start at Kill Screen, where Sam Zucchi riffs on the narrative defining tracking shots of Daredevil and True Detective, comparing them to the camera in action games, and it’s not pretty:
Yet the very elements that tracking shots can transmit are too often the very same elements that action games neglect, producing their opposites: linear environments instead of complex ones; buggy, stodgy action instead of grace; the lazy expression of a vicarious power fantasy instead of legitimate tension.
At Offworld, Leigh Alexander asks “why are the stories in video games so bad?” while Jon Peterson writes about the cyberpunk’s blurring between reality and fantasy by not the players, but by enforcement agencies who perhaps can’t tell them apart.
Elsewhere on the subject of reality and fiction, Drew Toal writes of two games recently released that both take place in Victorian London, but only one of them gets it right. And at Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez takes a deep dive into a secret area of the fan-made Kanye West videogame, Kanye Quest, which some players purport is a cult recruitment tool.
At MotherBoard, Soha Kareem takes on “The Dirtiest Job in Video Games”. Over on Gamasutra, Katherine Cross writes about game manuals functioning as alternative game mechanics:
The manual becomes, here, another vector for expressing [Kikopa Games’] Minkomora’s aesthetics and sensibilities, conveying the game to you as you read it. Simple though it may be, lacking my beloved appendices and subsections, it still effectively conveys a strong sense of what Minkomora is and means, lending character and colour to the game world before you even set foot in it. It also shows a path to digital distribution for cost-conscious developers; you no longer need to expensively print copies of a manual in order for it to perform these functions.
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Kotaku’s Jason Schreier ventures into “The Horrible World of Video Game Crunch” in which workweeks of 80 or more hours for developers are common. Meanwhile, game artist Blake Reynolds comes to terms with pixel art and his desire to communicate with his audience in a language they understand, even if it means foregoing the form he loves.
On FemHype, Doc Martens gives a harrowing account of a family member’s sudden terminal illness and how games helped them to process the experience:
I can’t hack and slash my way through cancer no more than I can pummel my coworkers when they are driving me crazy to deal with stress. But I can hack and slash 10,000 attack squads, armored golems, Cactuars, and Master Tonberrys [in Final Fantasy] instead, watching my character’s attributes and my gil keep climbing higher.
Finally yet importantly, Carolyn Petit looks at how a graphic novel challenges the convention of videogames:
Why do we simply accept that so many games present violence as the only way to solve a problem? Why do we accept so many narratives about brave heroes fighting evil and rescuing the girl without ever questioning how the narratives are constructed precisely to leave us with no room to ask questions about whether the bad guys are really so bad or whether what we’re doing is really so good?
There is much more available in this week’s full roundup at Critical Distance! Tune in again next week and be sure to follow us on Twitter @critdistance for all the latest and greatest games writing from around the web. Critical Distance is a reader-supported publication. If you like what you see and want to help support this ongoing free content, consider pledging a small monthly donation to our Patreon.
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