Videogames, criticism, and culture

Batman: Arkham City Revisited

May 23, 2012 – 9:00 am, by Daniel Golding
   

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’m traveling for four weeks, returning in mid-June. During this period, I’m running a series of articles that take another look at some of the bigger releases of 2011, reassessing their impact outside of the release-schedule hype.

While it was widely critically acclaimed at the time, in retrospect Arkham City feels like it went in the wrong direction. As a sequel to Arkham Asylum, which still stands virtually alone as a classic in the superhero genre, Arkham City understandably seems to have felt the need to go bigger and louder in all directions.

Arkham Asylum was, in many respects, the worst kind of game to be a sequel to: the unexpected success. Where the first game had the benefit of being a relative unknown, the second game had nothing but raised expectations to meet. While Rocksteady are still to be commended that they did not fill the obvious expectation of adding an unnecessary multiplayer mode, Arkham City still fell foul of trying to outdo the achievements of the first. Read More »

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The Salvation Army and games for board members

May 18, 2012 – 5:53 pm, by Daniel Golding
   

Today, the Salvation Army released a game, playable in your web browser, to tie in with their Red Shield Appeal.

This is how John Herring, direct marketing director at the Salvation Army Australia, spoke about the need for the game in an article at B&T:

“Gen X and Y has always been elusive for us as they tend to lean more towards the latest environmental cause or celebrity-endorsed charity.

“The challenge was getting their attention to let them know of the work we do and the people whose lives we help improve”.

The result is a platformer-style game where players use a Mario-like character (with mustache, overalls and hat) to interact with ‘depression’ themed items, such as giving sad (black) dogs bones, opening locked doors with keys, and avoiding pounding boxing gloves. At the end of each level, the game provides a ‘Donate Today’ button. There is a small box at the bottom of the game which provides snippets of text advertising Salvation Army activities.

This deeply average advergame suggests an organisation neither understanding videogames nor their targeted markets. It is not a very good game, and it does not seem very effective in engaging the player about the Salvation Army. Read More »

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NOTES: Froggies and Souvenirs

May 18, 2012 – 8:40 am, by Daniel Golding
   

In fortnightly ‘Notes’, Game On presents a short, curated collection of games and links that don’t fit elsewhere.

Games: 

It’s the big name, heart-rate raising iPhone games like Ski Safari, Jetpack Joyride and Ziggurat that usually get the loudest praise from me. In practice, though, I obsess over these games for many weeks before gradually dropping off—they take dedication to play, despite their burst-play mechanics. I can’t play Ziggurat before I go to bed because if I do, I won’t sleep for hours.

It’s the contemplative games, then, that get the most consistent play from me. I use them as a routine and ritual, to organise my mind. I have a Solitaire app on my iPhone that’s seen more hours of play than any other app by some margin—a margin I’m loathe to reveal to anyone, in fact.

So it was with some excitement that I found Froggies recently, an iPhone and iPad game by Ondrej Sedlacek, a Czech developer who was raised and educated in Australia. It’s a neat spin on Peg Solitaire—have all frogs jump each other to leave one standing—that uses different frog types to complicate things. Some frogs can move one space without jumping, others can be jumped over twice without being removed. Read More »

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REVIEW: Fez, and the backwards glance

May 16, 2012 – 8:38 am, by Daniel Golding
   

When Fez’s cute two-dimensional puffball, Gomez, opens a chest to claim a secret item, the camera rotates around him, his excitement visibly growing. When finally the item is revealed, Gomez leaps into the air, his mouth agape with pleasure.

This animation is a pixel-perfect representation of nostalgic joy. The obvious reference point here is the Zelda series, which routinely features similar ‘what’s in the box’ type moments. I like Zelda, and most of the other ‘80s and ‘90s games that Fez plays on.

But Gomez’s smile is empty and hollow. It is less a naive expression of nostalgia than it is a simpering, mincing appeal. He has nothing else to say, so he just grins.

Read More »

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This game is twenty years old

May 10, 2012 – 8:30 am, by Daniel Golding
   

I was young enough in 1992 that when Wolfenstein 3D came out, I either didn’t know what it was or wasn’t allowed to play it. Nonetheless, it was still one of the first videogames I ever saw, on a neighbour’s computer some years later.

Wolfenstein turned twenty years old on the 5th of May, last Saturday. To acknowledge this, Wolfenstein has been made available as a free web-browser game. If you haven’t played it in a number of years—or have never played it—it’s fascinating to return to. In addition, there’s a special edition of the Bethesda podcast with id Software’s co-founder and Wolfenstein programmer, John Carmack, doing a ‘director’s commentary’ for the game (a strange term in this case, but okay).

Looking back on it now—and from my conversations with those who’d never seen the game before now—it does very much feel its age. At the same time, there’s something quite remarkable about such a formative game being two decades in age. Wolfenstein was in many respects a landmark, but a landmark that came well into the history of videogames. Atari, arcade cabinets, Nintendo, Shigeru Miyamoto, the Gameboy—these things were already well established by the time of Wolfenstein. And it was, in its own way, a sequel of sorts, being inspired by the Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein of nine years previous. Read More »

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Some contradictions

May 3, 2012 – 5:58 pm, by Daniel Golding
   

American Public Media's 'Budget Hero' game.

Today, some quotations about governments, funding and videogames:

Interactive entertainment is increasingly becoming a more significant part of our cultural and creative production and will therefore play a more important role in expressing our cultural identity. The creative and technical expertise that the sector generates has the potential to make a significant contribution to Australia’s innovation economy.

The Federal Government’s Convergence Review, page 74. The review recommended, amongst other things, that “Interactive entertainment, such as games and other applications, should be supported by an offset scheme,” (page xviii). It also stated that the “national cultural policy, currently being developed, will explore ways the government can support Australia’s creative industries to optimise their commercial capacity, pursue trade and investment opportunities and bring innovative content to new audiences.” (page 74)

Louise Herron, another committee member and chair of the Major Performing Arts Board, said she thought Mr Crean “was hoping for some money” for the policy. “The Minister really believes the arts are important, but the difficulty is money.” Kevin Brennan, a cultural policy expert who is on the steering committee, said: “The days of bolstering up the arts budget are over. It’s very difficult for politicians to find money and justify it.”

Read More »

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NOTES: Ski Safari

May 2, 2012 – 9:17 am, by Daniel Golding
   

‘Notes’ is a new fortnightly section for Game On that presents a short, curated collection of games and links that don’t fit elsewhere.

Games:

When I first decided that Ski Safari would be the featured game in this fortnight’s notes, I felt like I had uncovered something few others had seen. At that stage (the day of release), there were 55 players of the game globally, according to my iPhone’s GameCenter leaderboards.

Now, there are 105,645 players of Ski Safari, the game has been featured as game of the week on the App Store and has had glowing write-ups at a number of major outlets.

That doesn’t change the fact that Ski Safari is an outstanding little game, though. It is such a satisfying design, and even though it builds on a number of previous games it still feels fresh and original. The only reason you might not want to play it is my intimidatingly good high score of 976,810 points. It’s also an Australian game, published by the Brisbane-based Defiant Development (thanks to Nick in the comments who pointed out I’d neglected to mention this first time around).

Articles: Read More »

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It’s Coming Round Again: finding the evils of the videogame

April 30, 2012 – 9:05 am, by Daniel Golding
   

A still from Friday night's Catalyst story.

It’s coming around again. You can feel it. Videogames seem to ebb and flow within the public imagination—sometimes pilloried, sometimes praised, sometimes forgotten and made invisible. Every time videogames come into focus, however, there’s a strange tension between a need to represent videogames as a thing that people undeniably do and enjoy, and a need to fit into previously established media narratives of what videogames might mean.

Consider two recent examples. On Friday night, ABC TV’s Catalyst ran a story about videogame addiction. It was, for the most part, unsurprising. It had slow motion montages of videogames set to scary music. It had emotive language: “the playgrounds of our brave new cyberworld,” with children “even now wiring their brains for future entrapment.” It had dramatic reconstructions of children being priggish to their parents while playing videogames. It even had Associate Professor Doug Gentile, whom you might remember from a similar turn in an episode of Jo Frost: Extreme Parental Guidance. Read More »

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DIALOGUE with Paul Callaghan, Part Three: Permanence and the Expression of Design

April 27, 2012 – 9:10 am, by Daniel Golding
   

Paul Callaghan and I are having a dialogue this week on Game On about the cultures surrounding videogames. Paul is the director of Melbourne’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival, a writer and a game designer. Part one of the dialogue can be found here, while part two may be found here.

To: Dan Golding
From: Paul Callaghan

Hi Dan,

I absolutely take your point about the non-existence of a global-videogame culture. You only have to look around Australia at the various activities and personalities in each city to see a microcosm of that process in action. Through industrial, creative, economic, cultural, geographical, as well as a million other forces, the values of those localised cultures form.

To explore your question “is the videogame a potent enough form to shape each of these cultures in certain directions?”, I don’t think so. Just as videogame culture is so diverse, so is the expressive nature of the types of experience we can craft through videogames, both reflecting and informing aspects of the human condition.

Art, all art, can’t help but change us. That’s what it is designed to do. We are who we are because of the mix of stories we tell each other, the experiences we have, the values of the culture around us, the geography of the space we grow up in, the endless mix of moment to moment. Videogames are the same. They change us. In the parlance of the mainstream, they rewire our brains, giving us tools and metaphors for thinking and new lenses and ways of looking at the world. But, as with all art again, they can just as easily present ideas that aren’t accurate or true, or that are downright false in order to encourage us to work against our best interests—essentially acting as a form of propaganda. If games can do good, as is so frequently argued in their defence, then they can just as easily do harm.

Read More »

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DIALOGUE with Paul Callaghan, Part Two: The Enemy at the Gates

April 25, 2012 – 9:30 am, by Daniel Golding
   

As I noted earlier in the week, Paul Callaghan and I are having a dialogue this week on Game On about the cultures surrounding videogames. Paul is the director of Melbourne’s Freeplay Independent Games Festival, a writer and a game designer. The first part of the dialogue can be found here. The final part may be found here.

To: Dan Golding
From: Paul Callaghan

Hi Dan,

I totally agree that we’re not all in this together. Lumping in a group of people, whether players, developers, academics, or critics, who enjoy a particular activity as sharing similar traits is problematic. Every individual evolves their own particular taste—or as William Gibson recently put it, a microculture—you only have to have a conversation with someone to uncover vast gulfs in that same taste.

This mindset is very much exacerbated by what you’ve observed as The Common Enemy. You don’t need to go far to find commentary from The Other about those who play video games as misfits or maladjusted or as living in their parents basement or any other number of inaccurate stereotypes. You also don’t need to go far to find comments about the games themselves as juvenile pastimes, incapable of art, or the product of ordinary minds.

Read More »

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