Monday, May 19, 2014

Gaming Round-Up: May 19, 2014

Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes by Patrick Brown


News: Halo 4’s former senior art director has joined the Oculus development team to help shape VR in the coming years.

Are Video Game Publishers Becoming Irrelevant?

At Gamasutra, editor-at-large Leigh Alexander interrogates the idea of ‘passion’ as a characteristic for game playing and development, and suggests the stigma around the ‘casual’ label is more than a little undeserved.

Can Video Games Teach Your Child to Be a Better Person? Personally, taking turns on a classic Nintendo taught me more about sharing than my entire grade school career.

David Kuelz advances a theory on why games struggle with subtle storytelling.
Den of Geek counts down the 25 Most Disappointing Games of the Xbox 360/PS3 Generation, though I feel like this list could have been much longer.

Edward Snowden Sees Himself As A Video Game Hero: How video games prepared Edward Snowden to leak NSA secrets.

At The Guardian, Keith Stuart pays tribute to the recently departed Alien designer H.R. Giger and the artist’s influence on games.

How Not to Suck at Game Design’s Anjin Anhut has posted a very in-depth guide offering approaches to improving gender representation in games. The comments are a worthy read as well.

I Met A Video Game Troll In Real Life And He Really Pissed Me Off.

I'm A Man Who Plays As A Woman In Games, And I'm Definitely Not Alone: A new study reported on by Slate found that men are much more likely to gender switch in online games than women. Researchers recruited 375 World of Warcraft players and had them cooperate in small groups for about 1.5 hours. The biggest finding? 23 percent of men opt to play as women, but only 7 percent of women try taking a walk on the (generally) hairier side.

In a great piece of entry-level reading for anyone wishing to get started in the more scholarly side of writing about games, Stephen Beirne bridges the concept of ‘intentionality’ as advanced by critic/developer Clint Hocking and the same term as it appears in philosophy, applying it to the player’s actions (and inaction) in games.

Is Portal an exercise in stealth feminism?

Is being good at video games anything to be proud of? A 34-year-old father of five from Scotland has been revealed as the world's best Call of Duty player. But is being a talented gamer something a grown man should boast about? To which I reply, Screw you Old Man Telegraph! One day, my children will marvel at my mad Tetris skills!

Neatorama runs down A Short History Of Game Panics.

On Promoting Diversity and Inclusion in Video Games: What Developers Might Learn from The Last of Us

At PopMatters Moving Pixels, Scott Juster observes that with modern day smartphones serving as real-world ‘minimaps’ for many of our lives, the feeling of being ‘lost without even a landmark is a vanishing phenomenon. Juster describes rediscovering that feeling through Miasmata.

Red Faction, Twisted Metal: 10 Videogames That Should Be Movies.

Why are video game movies usually so bad? Warcraft movie producer Thomas Tull says it's because they are often made for the wrong reasons.

At Wired, Alan Levinovitz has penned a great, meaty feature piece on the challenges programmers face cracking the ‘code’ of Go, a game so deceptively simple in its design and so complex in its permutations that it’s stumped the field of artificial intelligence for over 60 years


No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...