The Great Undiscovered of Minecraft

Minecraft within Minecraft

I have to admit, I am not much of an indie gamer. I spend most of my time with the big-budget mainstream titles in my research. There is a reason for that, but it isn’t the point of this article. What is important is that Minecraft managed to get my attention, partially due to its intensely addictive fun, and to the buzz its created within the gaming/blogging community. I’d like to address the game and its context a little here.

Firstly, why is this thing so fun that around 500,000 people have parted with their 10€ to play an alpha release that would have been known as a demo five or ten years ago? The reasons aren’t that hard to grasp, and have been documented in a few places already. There is the intense feeling of agency: the player is able to affect this world in deep, meaningful ways relative to the complexity of the world itself. This world doesn’t have a narrative or social structure, it only has a physical presence. So, the physical interactions the player can have with every block of space, whether filled with material or not, is akin to being a small God in a simple universe. Every square block is offering its existence to the player to be tampered with, shaped and molded into something greater, offering no resistance and bending to the will of the creator.

This is a powerful feeling, and demonstrates the rule of agency quite nicely. Many AAA games are far richer in content, but that content is out of the player’s reach. Whether it is the physical landscape or architecture, whether a vehicle, a door, or an NPC, these rich pieces of the gameworld are impervious to interaction. The player can’t do anything to them. These parts of the gameworld simply do not care about the player. Every part of the Minecraft world does care. Read more »

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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? Read more »

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Something about StarCraft

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 »

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Grand Theft Auto: First Steps

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 »

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