About
Adam Ruch is a PhD candidate and researcher in videogames at the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney Australia. This is a collection of thoughts that such study encourages.
Recent Posts
- Game Maker Day 4: Interface Woes
- Becoming a Game Maker: Day 3
- Game Maker RPG – Day 2
- Becoming a Game Maker
- Something about Draw Something
Tag Cloud
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Categories
- Creative Ramblings
- Cyberspace and the Interwebz
- Game Maker RPG Project
- GameSpy
- Grand Theft Auto 4 Project
- Kotaku AU
- Uncategorized
- Videogame Commentary
Blogroll
- Clint Hocking – Click Nothing
- Critical Distance
- Experience Points
- Jonathan Blow – Braid
- Kill Screen Magazine
- Kotaku Australia
- Sexy Videogameland
- The Brainy Gamer
- The Ludologist: Jesper Juul
Attempting to Appreciate Gears of War
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?