Occasionally, we discuss genre, and largely this is limited to film and literature, but there’s a particular problem with looking at the use of genre in a ludic context. In short: video games handle genre in a decidedly weird fashion, and it’s worth commenting upon.
Read MoreNow, I could get all political here, and talk about how people secretly long for what they hate, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. While hating this media is part of the experience, I don’t think that we enjoy this experience because it’s what we hate — at least, not usually, — I think we do so in spite of the fact that it’s what we hate.
Read MoreI’m taking a short break from talking about politics to discuss a video game I completed recently, Paradise Killer by Kaizen Game Works. To an extent, this dovetails with my recent writing on mutant epistemologies. I say this because detective fiction, after its heyday in the earliest twentieth century, does one of two things: it either simply recapitulates the tropes of hard-boiled fiction as an imitation, or it delves deeper into questions of knowledge and how we know what we know.
Read MoreSet in a time-screwed 1930s – it’s mostly the dust bowl, but you can meet people who live in your future, as far forward as the 1950s and 1960s – Where the Water Tastes Like Wine casts you in the roll of a minion: you lost a card game with a supernatural entity called the Dire Wolf. He has transformed you into a spirit, and sent you to walk across America, starting in Maine, to collect stories.
Read MoreYIIK very much wanted to be a new version of Earthbound, the seminal 16-bit RPG that was essentially John Carpenter’s Peanuts, mixed with Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim series. It has the same quality of self-consciously blasé psychedelia, but can’t seem to match the thematic weight of its source material.
Read More
