Category: Games
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Old new reboots
I was late coming to Tomb Raider (of course) because I had to wait for it to come out on the Mac. I’m talking about the first game, in which the protagonist (one of few videogame protagonists to be as or more famous than the franchise they come from) was…
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Visual worlds
Among the games that I’ve played while catching up on the last few decades of big-budget productions, Horizon: Zero Dawn stands out for its combination of compelling gameplay, an appealing player character, and beautiful visual world-building. I’ve played other games with better voice-acting, better side-quests, more convincing settlements, better writing,…
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Old school concision
Much of the development of videogames passed me by, despite my early and continuing interest, thanks to my long voluntary exile in the Apple Mac gaming ghetto. Since I finally bought myself a console about three years ago I’ve been catching up, with a particular focus on the last ten…
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I waited thirty years for this holiday
I used to play tabletop role-playing games, teen nerd-punk that I was. This was the 1980s, when RPGs enjoyed a huge explosion in popularity, and in the available variety of games and publishers. My playing years were quite few, but I continued to collect games obsessively afterwards—if I’m honest, they…
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Spending time
The experience of playing a narrative-focussed AAA game is getting progressively closer to the experience of watching a movie or a TV series, in terms of both visual fidelity, and of dramatic sophistication. Actors and writers who also work on film and TV are now routinely employed, and rather than…
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Full marks
I hesitate to say too much about Karl Marx or Marxism in response to a book written by someone who could list their profession as ‘Marxist theorist’, but I do need to point out that I don’t consider myself a Marxist, and that I don’t believe that Marx or Marxism…
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Heavy with meaning
You don’t have to like the protagonist of a story to identify with them, or to buy into their charisma. You don’t have to think they make good choices, and they don’t have to win. Consider Josh Brolin’s character in the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men, stumbling from…
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Words and music by Cory Barlog
Having come late to the garden of gaming delights, I’m dropping in on some series at the end of a very considerable history, quite oblivious to its presence in the creative and design decisions that made the game I’m playing. The Assassin’s Creed series is one I got in on…
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Los Santos: a city of four ecologies?
The title of this essay is obviously a misnomer. Los Santos, the fictional city in which Grand Theft Auto V is set, does not operate ecologically. The Foothills, The Plains of Id, Autopia and Surfurbia are all here in image, but the drivers and pedestrians that populate them so convincingly…
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A new loop
I’ve been lucky with Star Wars games. I played X-Wing and Tie Fighter in the early 90s. both of which are now regarded as classics of their genre, and when it made it onto Mac I played the RPG Knights of the Old Republic, which is sometimes cited as one…
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Narrative serving violence
The experience of being the protagonist of a story, rather than simply the player of a game, became a characteristic form of engagement with videogames with the arrival of the first-person shooter, I guess. I recall reading a prediction by Gary Gygax, the co-author of Dungeons & Dragons, sometime around…
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The cost of survival
Late the year before last, when I bought my first console, and played Red Dead Redemption 2 quite soon after its release, I was completely bowled over. ‘This game changes everything!’ I ranted enthusiastically to you, my journal. Of course if I hadn’t been in the Mac gaming ghetto all…
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Decide for yourself
There are stories and there are libraries. Libraries are not only repositories of completed stories, but the raw material from which stories are constructed, the sets of possibilities, arranged spatially, that are sometimes placed into sequence to form narratives. This dichotomy, between the settled order of a story as told…
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A fractured continuum
Photographs, particularly digital or polaroid photographs (remember those?), are both immediate and mediated, both portals and barriers. They are small physical reifications of memory, which both manifest and falsify the past, insisting that our recollections adopt precisely one physical position, and one instant, out of the infinitely many that we…
Oliver Arditi 