bigtallwords

A Sky for Every Man

A colleague of mine recently introduced me and a group of others to the NEXT update of No Man’s Sky. Having smoothly floated from teasing his early failures, advising the best next path, tracking needed materials and off-screen dangers to ultimately naming and providing a suitably operatic origin story for the little iguana-parrot shaped humanoid we lovingly came to know as Lee Zard Birdman (we…

It's been 1 year plus a day since I blogged a blog. But now I have blogged a new blog. Blog!

In the past I’ve raged against some cable exclusives distinguished (even if on occasion rightly) for being “good” TV like The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones because they endorse a really anti-social understanding of human relationships.1 These texts discuss an “inevitable” and desperate microsociety in the context of the world’s end (in the case of the former), or the encroaching possibility of…

A Very Thin Blue Line: This is the Police, Noire, Repression and Administration

“Don’t you know what the police are for, Stevie? They are there so that them as have nothing shouldn’t take anything away from them who have.” (Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent) This is the Police is a game of frustration. Playing it isn’t frustrating; the rules are actually pretty straightforward and only slightly grow over the course of the 15-ish hours it takes to complete the game. What I mean…

As interesting or as varied as many characters are in Exit Fate, the raw numbers tell a pretty compelling story. The fact that there are so few non-white non-men suggests that white men belong in the Elysium army more than anyone else. Again, the player is managing an institution that quickly and obviously becomes far more than an army. The Elysium “army” becomes an entire state-building…

Representation and the Power of Media as Discussed through Exit Fate: Part 2: Representation and Language

The thing to take into account is that the fictional world of a videogame (or a whatever) is not the only language of a piece. There is also the language around the piece, what the audience brings to and understands from a game. Exit Fate is not isolated from the rest of the world: in fact it’s deeply enmeshed in its generic history. So when you have a character, the player’s interpretation of…

Thoughts on Dragonball Xenoverse and Cultural Capital

So I played Dragonball Xenoverse and it has given me some emotions I want to talk about. Around the time that Xenoverse was released, Austin Walker wrote an excellent piece of reflective criticism about Dragonball1 that I feel like I relate to. If you’re pressed for time or attention I recommend you skip this article and just go read him because you’ll likely get more out of his work anyway. But…

A Family That Plays Together

[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s June 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] Videogame fiction, like a lot of adventure fiction for young people, places the central character in the position of rescuing a loved one. Often the loved one our hero must rescue is a damsel in distress with an implicit romantic/sexual relationship between them as the reward. The consequence of…

Been a while but here, have a blog:

At the end of the first act in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the titular king, in true villainous fashion, monologues his sinister plan to capture the hearts of his unsuspecting friends and associates so’s he can see the end of his dastardly plot. The play invites the audience to sympathise, even admire, Richard while they freely admonish his actions; it offers a space for the audience to willingly…

Bloodborne and Back Pain

[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s March 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] In the last week or so my background viewing over meals and housework has been a Let’s Play of FromSoftware’s Bloodborne, a gothic horror fantasy spiritually succeeding the same developer’s infamously difficult Souls series. I’m not likely to ever play it myself, although I’d be interested to see…

How Murderers are Made

Although this take has been off the stove for a long time I found this in my drafts folder and figured it might be a worthwhile blog post. If not: whatever. Content warning for a general discussion of sexual assault, murder and violence against women for what follows. It feels a little absurd to offer a spoiler-warning about lived events from a decade ago but in discussing Making a Murderer I’m…

Hit Him Again: For the Sadists in the Audience

[Warning for discussions of violence and genocide] What the hell kind of political dynamics are at work in Star Wars: The Force Awkens? This kind of question normally annoys me but sometimes there is such a failure to suspend disbelief that it just can’t be ignored. Spoilers or whatever. In The Force Awakens, the First Order, the villainous organization that replaces the Empire, the villainous…

Nuking the Family in Fallout 4

I don’t play Bethesda RPGs. Not because they aren’t good; in fact my second-hand opinion is that they’re very good. I’ve developed this opinion after a lot of critics and writers I respect have engaged with Bethesda RPGs in very intelligent ways. To see what I mean take a look at Michael Clarkson’s critical compilation of Fallout 3 over at Critical Distance (Jul 17 2009). I’d even go so far as to…

Right away, the cinematography of The Gift implies something is not right with the film’s central couple, Simon and Robyn (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall). As Jim Hemphill writes in his review of the film for Paste: [Director Joel] Edgerton’s eerily still and angular compositions, in which Simon and Robyn are repeatedly framed through glass, like bugs under a microscope, create a sense of unease…

[Originally posted on PopMatters] As useful as it is to not judge a book by its cover, some covers simply reveal everything there is to know. Take a look at the cover of a Dungeons & Dragons manual and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what to expect out of its contents. Similarly, looking at any of the promotional screenshots or material for Tangrin’s Kyn and you’ll already know what the game’s…

[Originally posted on Haywire Magazine] Come 1996 I had to choose between the Sony Playstation and the Nintendo 64. I was happy with my SNES and Nintendo’s branding department had captured my nine-year old heart. Nintendo was all bright colors, magic spells and mobility. There were cloud islands in Super Mario World that would take decades to discover and tools in A Link to the Past that I…