Colonization Has Very Little Slavery
Play the Past‘s latest entry in a series of posts exploring Sid Meier’s Civilization IV: Colonization talks about the game’s use (and non-use) of slavery, and how modders responded by adding slave-trade mechanics.
Slavery and racial inequality are still sensitive issues for people living in the United States, and as comedian Louis C.K. has pointed out, we like to mentally distance ourselves from that past. But if games are meant to be a series of interesting decisions (as Sid Meier once said ), and if we are supposed to be serious about the potential of historical games, shouldn’t we let people explore offensive and controversial identities and roles? Yes! But cultural norms, commercial interests, and personal discomfort have all been barriers (and will continue to be barriers) in facilitating that exploration through video games.
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/MKvViP
Nintendo Power
Download old issues of Nintendo Power dating back to 1988.
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/JUFNUX
Jonathan Blow
A fantastic profile on Braid creator Jonathan Blow and his new game, The Witness.
As a developer whose independent success has emancipated him from the grip of the monolithic game corporations, Blow makes a habit of lobbing rhetorical hand grenades at the industry. He has famously branded so-called social games like FarmVille “evil” because their whole raison d’être is to maximize corporate profits by getting players to check in obsessively and buy useless in-game items. (In one talk, Blow managed to compare FarmVille’s developers to muggers, alcoholic-enablers, Bernie Madoff, and brain-colonizing ant parasites.) Once, during an online discussion about the virtues of short game-playing experiences, Blow wrote, “Gamers seem to praise games for being addicting, but doesn’t that feel a bit like Stockholm syndrome?” His entire public demeanor forms a challenge to the genre’s intellectual laziness. Blow is the only developer on the planet who gives lectures with titles like “Video Games and the Human Condition,” the only one who speaks of Italo Calvino’s influence on his work, and the only one to so rile up the gamer community with his perceived pretentiousness that the popular gamer blog Kotaku used him as the centerpiece of a post titled “When You Love the Game But Not Its Creator.”
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/IEPdo0
One More Game
The New York Times Magazine on the rise of casual gaming.
Game-studies scholars (there are such things) like to point out that games tend to reflect the societies in which they are created and played. Monopoly, for instance, makes perfect sense as a product of the 1930s — it allowed anyone, in the middle of the Depression, to play at being a tycoon. Risk, released in the 1950s, is a stunningly literal expression of cold-war realpolitik. Twister is the translation, onto a game board, of the mid-1960s sexual revolution. One critic called it “sex in a box.”
Cross posted from http://bit.ly/Ht5sFV
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger for iPhone.
Flick Home Run
Flick Home Run is my new obsession.
Humans As Videogames
Andy Baio on humans pretending to be videogames:
It’s a clever solution to complex problems that have plagued game designers for decades. How do we understand the player’s intent? Can we make AI characters act human, instead of like idiot robots? Is it possible to handle every edge case the player thinks of without working on this game for the next 10 years? Making computers think and react like us is hard. So instead of making software more human, some game developers are trying to make humans more like software.
Also coming to the Kindle, classic text adventure games.
Super Mario Bros. with Portal guns. Whoa. More info here. [via]
(Source: youtube.com)
In 1970, Dock Ellis pitched a no hitter while high on LSD. Or so the story goes. Anyway, Deadspin editor AJ Daulerio tried to accomplish the same feat in MLB 2k11.
I pitched with a purpose throughout the next batch of games, plunking players both intentionally and not, missing the strike zone with pride because, according the box score from June 12, 1970, and Dock’s recollections of the game, he had had some control problems that day. Besides, if these computer-generated Padres continued to ruin my trip with their weak singles, they would have to pay. I had eight walks to give to match Ellis, so I was going to make them count. Venable took one in the ribs. I aimed for Orlando Hudson’s knees. I tried to bean Nick Hundley in the right temple in the hopes that his brains would splatter all over the batter’s box.
“What are you doing?” Craggs asked. I told him why this was allowed and necessary, even if it didn’t help the cause.
(Source: vimeo.com)
Pitchfork on the fall of the Guitar Hero franchise.
Never mind that Dragonforce nonsense; as someone vaguely skilled at messing with a plastic guitar, the run of bullshit that kicks off GH3’s version of “Holiday In Cambodia” was the sort of miracle mile that I never wanted to run. Activision needlessly turned a challenging yet enjoyable gaming/music emulation experience into the fake-music equivalent of Ninja Gaiden II.
Atari’s Greatest Hits brings 100 classic Atari games to your iPhone or iPad. There goes my weekend. [via]
The real story behind that Gatsby NES game.
But here’s what really happened: Charles Hoey, a developer at the San Francisco-based Barabarian Group and Great Gatsby fan, was messing around with Photoshop one day when he hatched the idea for the game. Hoey partnered with Pete Smith, an editor at Nerve.com, and released the game about a year later. According to The Washington Post, Hoey and Smith considered creating “a full literary classics arcade” with Jane Eyre as their next submission but instead decided to put the source code online for other developers to make their own classic NES games.
