Endless Campaign

“What appeals to me about this is the same thing that I enjoy in games like Kentucky Route Zero and Glitchhikers: it’s the decontextualising of urban motifs in order to illicit the tranquil. In our everyday lives, things like telephone wires have function, and are only considered in terms of their functional relationship to the urban context around them. By putting telephone wires at a remove from an immediate and obvious city setting, Corbeaux has the player consider them as an object with appreciable form, a structure with aesthetic qualities. These qualities are expressed through song.”

‘Half-Life is structured like an anabasis from Hell, whereas Half-Life 2 is more like the Odyssey, and it is during this driving section that I feel this sense of voyage reaches the height of its power as the bombast of the section’s action set-pieces is punctuated by the quietude and solace of driving alone on the open road, waves crashing on the cliffsides below you.’

‘These are quests that overlap, establish relationships between individuals, factions and locations, and also involve only travelling, observation and conversation in terms of gameplay. Rather than emphasising the movement of the player through the space of the Mojave itself, these quests ground the player in the geopolitics of the Mojave that they then become a part of.’

‘The problem with morality in Fallout 3 isn’t so much that it’s built around this dichotomy of good and bad, but the way that this dichotomy is expressed through violence. In Fallout 3, an evil act is the killing of a good person, and a good act is the killing of a bad person. As a result, killing itself has no inherent moral property. What makes an act of good or evil is to whom the otherwise inert act of killing is directed. To put it another way, the game treats good and evil like opposing teams. One dead Evil Person is a point for Team Good, and vice versa.’

‘But now that Metroid is a relic, it has been somewhat defanged. Its design relies on it being new and startling, and on any information you don’t discover first-hand being infrequent, incomplete, even unverified. It needs to be cloaked in mystery so that it can be a revelation, but the awesome communal power of the internet can show you everything. This is not to say that the game has been entirely arrested of its worth or entertainment value. I still enjoy it – a lot, actually. I still felt like I had achieved something when I beat Kraid. It has its triumphant moments and frustrations like it would have if I’d played it at release, they’re just different. Metroid is a changed game, not a lesser one.’

I moved my tumblr essays over to the new Endless Campaign on Wordpress, which you can find here! It’s an easier platform for you, and makes prettier reading for you. I’m still using this site for promotion/personal reasons, so keep following and you’ll see me post new stuff here when it comes up.

The Meta-Ethical Problem can be played for free on philome.la here

Messing around with Twine 2 for a couple of hours, I came up with this. The first passage is lifted from a great Kyle York article on McSweeney’s Internet Tendency called “Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations”. It takes about a minute to read through and contains a couple decent jokes.

FEATURES:

Kill a philosopher through action or negligence!

Get yelled at!

You can play Exquisite Corpses for free here.

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Kent Sheely’s Exquisite Corpses reminds me of driving through Death Valley with my family a few years ago: for miles, the endless desert stretching far away, dotted only occasionally with a lone caravan, or shack, or signpost. It was a ruined place, and I felt like we were trespassing there.

A new game from Alex D. Jones and Alan O’Brien!

It's the bi-monthly meeting of the Gun Fight Club again - but disaster! You only brought a knife! To a gun fight! What are you like? The only way to save face is to survive this deadly meetup. Thankfully, you have unexplained powers that allow you to slow down time! Use them to great effect as you mow down your opponents. It only recharges when blood is drawn, however, so prepare to be brave, charge headlong into the fray and get those combos!

The Falling Sun is free and available on itch.io

“There are times in life where you simply cannot win... where you have no choice but to accept your unpreventable, impending fate.”

- Game description

Kingdaro's The Falling Sun begins at the end of the world.* The player is given some Typing of the Dead-like word prompts to fulfil, but as soon as they do so the game collapses as the timer starts and a raging, dying sun comes closer and closer to the earth. You are implored to type the words at the bottom of the screen, but this does nothing to halt the world’s demise; the entire ludic element of the game serves no obvious “function”, inasmuch as it never intersects with the one other mechanic present and seems to have no relationship whatsoever with anything else in the game. It is a game built specifically around arresting as much agency from the player as possible.

This is something I talked about briefly in my last essay about Glitchhikers, in which I quoted Brendan Vance noting that the driving mechanics of Glitchhikers do not affect the way the outcome of the game. Instead, they exist to reflect the game’s themes of solitude versus solidarity with the wider universe. In The Falling Sun, the gameplay does not affect the outcome of the game either, but this in itself is what makes the game so interesting.

At a certain point, the game begins to try and trip you up. Certain prompts are confusingly laid out, with the spaces in certain words placed oddly so as to trip up your sight reading. Worse than that are the times where words are deliberately misspelled, with the internal letters of a word scrambled - this particular challenge taps into the psycholinguistic phenomenon affectionately known as “typoglycemia”, whereby a word with scrambled letters is read as if nothing were amiss by the human mind as long as the first and last letters of the word are in the right place.**

Of course I have resolutions for 2015, the year in which I will, God willing, perfect my budding aesthetic - I got skinny jeans for Christmas, let the lustful stares begin.

Also, I want to read more games criticism on a more reliable basis. Given that both Critical Distance and Normally Rascal do "Best Writing of the Week"-style lists, there's little excuse not to. Oh, and I'm giving money to all those Patreons.

Here, I want to drop a couple of hints as to what I have in the pipeline for 2015.

First, I have a bunch of games in different stages of development. One, which is as of yet unnamed, was an entry for RuinJam from me and my partner in crime on Connecting, Sandy Gardner. It's about a failed military op and the only reason we didn't release it at the time was, err, time. I'm also writing at the moment a game about your dad's last poem. This will hopefully be released by the end of the year but you can never tell with these things. Neither of these are referred to by the strange, inexplicable incantations that appear on this page.

On the writing front, I want to write about games that let you write within the game, looking specifically at Eidolon and Elegy For A Dead World. I also have a half-complete short piece on a little game called The Falling Sun. In general, I want to continue the trend I've established of looking primarily at small alt games, because they yield interesting insights into what games can do as a whole.

Finally, next year I'm going to be appearing in an anthology of writing on shooter games called Shooter! It's being edited by Patrick Lindsey and Reid McCarter and it's getting contributions from a constellation of great writers. I'm writing on S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, depictions of landscape, complicating player empowerment and post-Soviet trauma. It's going to be wild.

I started this blog in June. Since then, I have posted six essays and made two games with one "post-mortem" post for my first game, Connecting.

There is, therefore, not a whole lot to try and parse, and certainly not enough, I believe, to substantiate a personal "best of" for 2014. What I want to do here instead is to highlight two of the things I'm most proud of from this year (half-year?) that I made, before turning your attention to a couple of things that I think represent the best writing from other critics. I stress a couple of because a) I don't want this to be too long and b) I haven't read as widely as I wanted to this year, something I want to fix next year.

From Endless Campaign:

Sonder on the Highway to Kiel: The best essay I've written about games so far. It could do with some clarification and expansion with regards to the way Euro Truck Simulator 2 establishes and interpellates the player into a series of systems, but it's the best example I currently have of the kind of writing I like to do.

Shipping by Moonlight: This was never intended as anything other than a nice, calming experience; the sound of waves, pretty sentences, a simple and reflective story. What I learned throughout the process of writing this was the way that sometimes themes and connections emerge organically from the writing process. My other, aborted attempts at fiction have been lethargic, shallow messes in comparison.

From the internet:

Real Human Beings: Shadow of Mordor, Watch_Dogs and the New NPC by Austin Walker: When I read "Real Human Beings", what I see is a roadmap for games writing to follow. I talks about games as reflections of their systems, their source material, their cultural contexts, and their players. It's everything that writing critically about games ought to be.

The Customer is Often Wrong (FUCK THE PLAYER) by Lana Polansky: This treads the polemic-rant-manifesto borders quite nicely, and showcases Lana's ability to combine philosophy, critical theory and art history to provide a sound framework through which we can talk about - or rather listen to - games.

Call of Duty: Ghosts - A Hill by Cameron Kunzelman: This doesn't appear on Cameron's own personal 'Best of 2014' post, which is worth a look through in itself, but what I like about 'A Hill' is how it works as a piece of criticism that doesn't necessarily work towards a grand thesis of what the game says, but guides you through an exacting and engaging thought process about what the game does on a mechanical and design level. It's something I've variously tried to replicate here, especially with my short post on perspective in Shot Aground.

Folklorists by Stephen Beirne: Stephen's been doing a lot of interesting work over the year, from satirical polemics to close readings of particular scenes from Final Fantasy VII, but I liked "Folklorists" for the way it navigates the reader through the vast concept of "how do we interpret games" in a way that's straightforward but substantial.

This is Phil Fish by Ian Danskin: It's a long video, but it's also an engrossing piece of cultural studies that examines the construction of the narrative around Phil Fish, and how this construction trades in an examination of games culture for gossip and sensationalism.

From the internet, but in different ways:

I recommend getting a subscription to Unwinnable Weekly if you haven't already, because it's consistently great, and frankly that's all I think needs said on the matter.

Five Out Of Ten has released a collection of its second year of running, and the fact that's it's lasted this long so far with no signs of slowing down is fantastically promising.

If you aren't listening to Dan McKenney's A Brief Escape then you are depriving yourself. My favourite video games podcast. Just...just bloody listen to it, God.

Oh, and finally:

Since the beginning of the summer I have been working on a twine project that I've released today called Shipping by Moonlight. I worked on it through until August, at which point I dropped it completely until tonight when, coming down from a night of free wine and challenging poetry, I decided to fill in a couple of the gaps I had yet to fill. By 4am, I'd accidentally completed it.