Where to begin with Gears of War? Yes, its a big-budget, AAA console action type game, which are meant to be just the kind of thing I’m mostly focused on, but I have only just played through it. Having played it now, I feel only slightly more inspired to write about it than I did before playing it. Tom Bissell explores videogames in a deeply personal way in his book Extra Lives, and comes to the conclusion that Resident Evil made it possible for videogames to be stupid. If Resident Evil paved the Roman road, this makes Gears of War a German autobahn. Yet in the same book, Bissell makes a long claim for Gears of War as something slightly more than what it appears to be on a superficial, surface level. Can this game serve as a case for critics to put their ludological money where their mouth is? What do we find if we look past the aesthetics of the game, to the purportedly more important mechanics? Read more »
Hell, its about time.
To jump on a hyped-up bandwagon: StarCraft. That long-awaited sequel to a game I did actually play, rather religiously, back when it was current. I can’t say that I was among those eagerly awaiting its return, but it is a bit like an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time, and he’s aged rather well. That said, SC2 is a wonderful example for any of those theorists still in the games-aren’t-stories camp, because SC2, despite its substantial overhaul of narrative delivery technique, still doesn’t do it very well. The “game” bit of StarCraft really, really does not want to tell a story, while the story bits aren’t game-like at all.
I will keep the recap very very brief as I’m sure most of us are familiar with the narratology vs. ludology ‘debate’ that took place–and if you aren’t, look up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game, and you’ll get the gist. Essentially the argument is that because narratives are constructed by an author to be accessed by a reader in a particular order and at a particular pace, they deliver story in a very precise, author-controlled way. Games on the other hand are rule-bound systems which are by their nature very unpredictable and largely place control in the hands of the player. While neither of these statements are unequivocally true, StarCraft would be a great example of how stories-in-videogames simply doesn’t work. (I have maintained for a while now that videogames are not just games, so we can’t judge them purely on their game-like qualities. Keep that in mind.) Read more »
Yes, I’ve been waiting weeks to use that title.
I actually had a very brief review of this game published at Kotaku so check it out there. What we have here will be a longer version with more elaborations than the 500 words allowed me there.
Read Dead Redemption is the spiritual successor to Red Dead Revolver by Rockstar (San Diego). Using the same basic open-world framework and gameplay mechanics as Grand Theft Auto 4, the player is John Marston: an outlaw trying to turn over a new leaf, but being played like a hand of cards by higher powers. Read more »
As part of my PhD research I am undertaking case studies of various AAA videogame titles. These end up taking the form of long critical reviews with essay-like analysis in the latter half of the piece. Many of these will be appearing in the Journal of Gaming and Virtual Worlds as reviews, with supplementary information that just doesn’t fit in a stand-alone article on my Videogames Reference Wiki. So far they all contain a longish discussion of the narrative and game mechanics, with some critical judgment of each in turn. I will analyse the narrative in terms of story-telling, and make some recommendations, or refer to those of others. Similarly with the mechanics, I have done some work to understand their ‘gameness’ and their relationship to the narrative framework. The Assassin’s Creed article below is an example of the results of one such study. (Or two since AC1 and AC2 consisted of two separate sections in my thesis and in the journal.)
One game I have yet to tackle is Grand Theft Auto IV. Though it is quite old now (wow, 2 years is old?) I will be revisiting Liberty City and writing out my adventures there for the first time in the coming weeks. I left this one late intentionally because I felt I needed some practice at this craft of criticism before tackling such a monumental example as GTA4. And yes, I do begin this task with the bias that GTA4 is a monument. There is simply so much in it. I wanted to have some kind of framework that would help me hang onto the wildly differing array of topics that is sure to come up when I play through this thing again, and I think the time is just about right.
So what I have here are a list of topics, themes, points and questions that I hope to address in some way as I play through this game. They are not in any particular order, but the groupings are how I am at this point understanding certain clusters and relationships. Please feel free to comment with additions or omissions. Please feel free to reference your own work as I am happy to synthesize and cite any other analysis that will make this work deeper and better rounded. So here we go: Read more »
Tags: case study, criticism, game theory, Grand Theft Auto 4, GTA4, mechanics, narrative, sex, sexism, thesis
Grand Theft Auto 4 Project | Adam Ruch | 
May 3, 2010 5:34 pm | 
Comments (0)
![[del.icio.us]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/delicious.png)
![[Digg]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/digg.png)
![[Facebook]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/facebook.png)
![[MySpace]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/myspace.png)
![[Reddit]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/reddit.png)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/stumbleupon.png)
![[Twitter]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/twitter.png)
![[Email]](http://flickeringcolours.net/v2/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/email.png)
Subscribe
