Instead of talking about the games you like, Local No. 12’s Metagame asks you to discuss the games you disliked or felt “meh” about. The comparisons Metagame makes aren’t just “which is better,” but specific questions like “which is more tragic?” Nico Dicecco at Medium Difficulty articulates how these specific questions encourages thoughtful videogame critique. Metagame is also notable for what it has to teach us about the dynamic between critical engagement and nostalgia. So often, when I have informal discussions about games, and about the canon of gaming, I find my arguments are rooted in little more than fond memories of…

The level editor for Portal 2, Puzzle Maker, is suprisingly easy to use. It reduces the many variables involved in a Portal level to a few intuitive controls. The game also helps players use their intuitive understanding of physics to solve puzzles. Educators loved it, and there are already lots of lesson plans to teach math and physics with the level editor. Katie Salen at Fast Company describes how the educational version of the level editor came about. Valve worked with Lisa Castaneda, a middle school math teacher at a local school, and brought in students early and often to get…

Halo 4 and Black Ops II are out this month, causing us to reflect on the appeal of first-person shooters. I tend to dismiss them, as I’m not a fan of shooting things without understanding them, but there’s no denying the adrenaline rush from a competitive multiplayer win. Stephen Totilo at The New York Times explains how the feeling of surmounting a difficult challenge makes these games successful. The best experience involves cranking the difficulty to Heroic and engaging a set of enemies, trying new strategies repeatedly and scavenging weapons or equipment from the battlefield until the right solution is found,…

The promotions for Assassin’s Creed III made much of its Native American protagonist, but the game starts with a lengthy (and as our reviewer found, intolerable) prelude playing his British father. While a few applauded this contextual approach as necessary in hindsight, most players found it slow, to say the least. Dr. B at Not Your Mama’s Gamer found the emphasis on Conner’s white lineage harmful. He [Conner] is the personification of the infamous letter of authenticity that precedes every slave narrative. Yes, I recognize that Connor is neither African (American) nor a slave, but the feeling is still the same.…

You’ve played the polished levels that have been iteratively playtested; where you don’t get lost and you know exactly what you’re supposed to do. Some might consider this too obvious for a game, but in the world of architecture, this is precisely what buildings need. In an article about how neuroscience can improve architecture, Emily Badger asks us to imagine an Alzheimer’s facility that could help residents remember who they are. It might be a long shot, but one biologist, Eduardo Macagno wants to bring architecture under the research eye (something game designers have been doing for quite some time).  Macagno…

The release of Call of Duty: Black Ops II is today. As it’s set in 2025, developer Treyarch wanted some help making a believable, yet “cool” futuristic shooter. Yannick LeJacq at the Wall Street Journal talked with the game’s military consultant, Peter Singer, about his role in helping develop the near-future FPS.   I do consulting for the non-fiction world, for the Pentagon and others in the intelligence community as well. The priority when consulting on a videogame is that you have to remember the goal of the game, which is to entertain. So it’s not just a technology that might…

So you’re walking around in Skyrim or Magicka or one of these medieval fantasy games, and there are lots of fires, and plenty of wooden furniture around these fires that seems to be perpetually flame retardant. Jeremy Antley at Play the Past reflected on these little inconsistencies, especially the ones that reflect our modern sensibilities. The ‘high medieval’ background of [Skyrim] contained a surprising amount of rationalistic and enlightenment based underpinnings that helped to support what I would call the ‘Medieval+’ background common to many similarly-themed RPG’s.  Everywhere the player goes there is evidence of a society deeply under the influence of…

Many of us believe the rules of regular life apply to our online interactions; a good measure of whether or not a comment is appropriate is if you’d say it face-to-face. This standard does not hold across all cultures. David Herold in the Journal of Virtual Worlds Research uses Bakhtin’s carnival as a metaphor for how a Chinese person feels about their persona online. The “life of the carnival square” is the antithesis to the boring and ordinary lives people live outside the carnival, thus offering them an escape, albeit temporarily, from their drudgery (Bakhtin, 1984b: 8f). The carnival ‘space’ and ‘time’ are…

Children want to be the heroes of the stories they’re playing. But for a five-year-old girl, there aren’t that many female heroes to emulate. One father, Mike Hoye, got tired of switching genders while reading the game’s text out loud and made a mod to change all the pronouns in Windwaker from masculine to feminine.  It’s annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen. You can pick your character’s name, of course – I always stick with Link, being a traditionalist – but all…