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[This week, our partnership with game criticism site CriticalDistance brings us picks from Ben Abraham on topics including thestate of music games, and the night Castlevania and Wu-Tang Clanowned NYC.] Oh dear look who left the keys to TWIVGC on the kitchen table forme to find. Yes, in her distracted exam-cramming state, Kris leftme in charge of TWIVGC once again. I'm sorry. Look, here's a little secret I'm going to share with you: sometimeswriting about video games is… how do I put this… not weird enough. I'm going to try and pick out some of the weirder stuffthis week. For instance: At the architectural/landscape/urbanism blogM.ammoth, Rob Holmes regales us with a short anecdote about a student designing a game as part of an investigation intothe ramifications of the Mississippi river diverting it's course: "One of the student projects proposed a kind of abstracted boardgame which attempted to codify the interactions between theinsurance industry, various economic activities in the AtachafalayaBasin (such as gambling), floods, disaster management systems,public space, and citizens of the flood-prone Basin. This project intrigued me greatly — but it did so lessbecause of its resonance with the recent vogue for "gamification"(where I am inclined to agree, for the most part, with Ian Bogost),and more because it helped me articulate a set of problems relatedto aggregation, complexity, perversity, and misalignment in thedesign of landscapes." It's only a brief little mention amongst a sea of tranquilinformation-overload, but it's interesting. It's weird . Sufficiently weird enough for me is also Darshana Jayemanne's ' Do It Differently ' essay for Killscreen which argues we should stop playing up the'uniqueness' of video games interactivity. It's a powerful andunpopular argument, but I think he's right. "Look around you. Architecture is an art form—you'd be braveindeed to claim the Sistine Chapel or the Patio de los Leones arenot art, and only slightly less brave to call them "linear." RobertVenturi and Fredric Jameson didn't have to wait for ludology to beinvented so they could wrap their heads around the nonlinear spacesof Las Vegas and the Bonaventure Hotel, respectively. Similarobservations could be made for sculpture or improvisational music.In these art forms the distinction between linear and nonlinear isjust a nonsense. It does not even arise as a problem in the firstplace." Go read his whole argument and then tell me you don't get a sensethat Things Could Be Wholly Other about video game writing andcriticism. Weird indeed. Not entirely sure if this really hits the high point on my 'weird'metric, but it's an interesting piece and it goes well withJayemanne's piece above – at Medium Difficulty Kyle Stegerwald discusses whether writers and critics can actuallybe bad at games and still be good critics . I don't think he's wholly right, but neither is he wholly wrong,primarily because games writing could be so, so many things andStegerwald seems to have just one particular thing in mind. Still– definitely worth reading and thinking about. ForStegerwald: "…skill in games resembles critical understanding inliterature, and nobody sneers at someone who advances awell-reasoned opinion of a piece of literature by calling them a"minmaxer."" Also at Medium Difficulty this week is neat little discussion byAdil Sherwani on ' The State of Music Games ' (by which it is meant the Rock Band/Guitar Hero style musicgame). It's sort of history, really, and History, as anyone whoknows anything about it will tell you, is Really Weird. Oh yes! And this is a sufficiently strange offering from thealways-intriguing David Carlton who paid a visit to France's Musée d'Orsay and took inspiration from the rangeof nudes and other paintings, sculptures, etc in the museums collection: "A couple of years ago, I took inspiration from musicals andproposed that narrative video games should present themselves as asequence of set pieces that are as well-crafted as possible, withjust enough connective tissue to let you go from set piece to setpiece without being jarring. And my experiences in the Muséed'Orsay gave me a new perspective on that argument: each of thoseset pieces should have the unity and impact of a painting. Thereshould be a vision, a scene, an interaction at the core of each setpiece with the rest unfolding from it." Brilliant stuff. Go read it, if only for all the brilliant imagesof paintings the Museum holds. Also brilliant this week was Cara Ellison's discussion of ChristineLove's Don't Take It Personally, Babe and ' Being Single in Public ' for the Unwinnable blog: "Playing Don't Take It Personally, Babe when you're single, and have been for a while, is an alienatingexperience. It's a wonderful shorthand of the messages that aregoing on around us every day. Couple culture is everywhere –it's in every televisual soap or drama, it's in every advertisingcampaign." As a young man who has spent the vast, vast majority of his lifewithin the kingdom of singledom I know exactly what Ellison istalking about, and it can be a very, very weird place. Also from Unwinnable this week is Kate Williams piece on Dear Esther , describing it as "a sudden heartbeat in a flatliningrelationship". G. Christopher Williams writing for PopMatters' Moving Pixels blogthis week thinks Ms Pacman is the Platonic form of games . That's kind of a strange argument, but that's kind of the point.More strange please! Mattie Brice writing for Paste Magazine this week asks ' Who's the bad guy? ' and discusses being a demographic actively excluded from videogame marketing and taste-appeal (which would be a very weirdfeeling). Jeffrey Wilson at 2D-X has a cool little anecdote about ' The Night Castlevania and Wu-Tang Clan owned NYC ' and the hunt for a Castlevania sample heard (imagined? Auditoryhallucination?!) in a 90s hip-hop track. And here's another weird little thing from BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaughwho has a little think about some game-applications for MIT's distributed robotics' 'Smart Sand': "…perhaps in some future game brought to you by BLDGBLOG andBig Robot—you have to battle your way forward throughinfinite sandstone buildings that rise up, one after the other,like endless violent waves rolling as far as the eye can see, adesert of shapes lurching and unbuilding themselves toward you,forever. You jump through doors, up stairways, over walls, neveradvancing forward more than a few feet at a time, blinded by cloudsof sand crashing on all sides, always another building ready torise up out of the moving dunes and block you." At Sneaky Bastards (possibly the best named video game blog on theinternet) James Patton has words about the Maltese Falcon and Games and Society and stuff . The piece describes itself (blogs these days! They do all yourwork for you!) as " Examining the stealth genre's depictions of society and culture, asseen through the stark, shadowy lens of The Maltese Falcon. " Vying for the 'best video game blog name' competition is FullGlass, Empty Clip (I'm surprised that I've not stumbled upon thissite before), where blogger 'Stavros the Wonder Chicken' akaChristopher Kovacs talks about ' Living in First Person ': "Part of growing up isolated and insulated, for me at least, wasburning curiosity about Other Places. Ever since I could remember,every new thing I learned about the world out there filled me withever greater desire to see it for myself." And here's a funny new tumblblog ' Postplay ': " POSTPLAY is a project founded on the fundamental principle that a videogame is only as relevant as the contemplations or debates itprovokes may be equally worthy of note; that the most significantgames are, by definition, those which are capable of stimulating anedifying discussion and different degrees of contemplation. This,however, does not insinuate that a widely discussed title is, bydefinition, pertinent; quite the contrary, for this same criterionpresupposes that the character and corollaries of the dialogue itincites provide an authentic intimation of its veritable merit." Oh and I very nearly forgot – Michael Abbott at the BrainyGamer blog, inspired by Taylor Clarke's essay/profile of Jon Blowin The Atlantic, has started a crowd sourced catalogue of "Smart Games" to counteract the notion that games are only Hollywood dumb. Gocheck it out, it's a weird lest (yes!) and it can get weirder ifyou choose to add stuff to it. Go forth and submit strange andeclectic games! Hmm, so that's the week in weird video game writing, but it couldalways be weirder, more eclectic, more ambitious. Take that underconsideration. Here, one final parting curio: a mind-blowingly beautiful Vietnamese Café . Think about that and level design. Lets see that in a game. I hope you enjoyed some of the weirdness. As always, we rely onyour submissions to make it through the week. Send them via Twitter or email , if you please! Related news: This week in Video Game Criticism: From auteurs to shoot'em uphistory This week in Video Game Criticism: From Cooking Mama to inhabiting Skyrim This week in Video Game Criticism: From the Krogan to revengeeating. I am an expert from digitalquranpen.com, while we provides the quality product, such as Qibla Locator Compass Manufacturer , Modern Islamic Clothing, Arabic Alphabet Chart,and more.
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