Archive for the ‘Game Genres’ Category

A storied MMORPG finally gets the finger.

In the month or so since L.A. Noire has come out, I have read review after review proclaiming it to be a revolutionary game.  I have heard this before.  Reviewers call games genre-changers or “like nothing I’ve ever seen before” or innovative or even, if you’ll excuse the terrible pun, “game-changers”.  I hear this yet [...]

One of the most striking things about our virtual worlds, even many years on from the first MMORPGs, is how resistant these worlds are to player transformation; for years the marketing pitch of all these games has, in essence, been “you make a difference.” The reality is that you don’t. That boss will re-spawn for the next player, that field littered with the corpses of 30 Savage Fluffy Froofroos will, in five minutes be teeming with life, that town will need to be defended all over again by the next raid.

Have you functioned in a dynamic online community under an avatar identity for multiple years?  Do/did you operate, or recognize the possibility that you could have operated differently in that community than you do in the physical world?  Have you ever consciously withheld information about your activity in that online community from the inhabitants of [...]

One of the most damaging aspects of the dominance of the military industrial edutainment complex is that it has sold so many of us on the lie that entertainment in particular and pleasure in general are purely recreational.

My friend Justin recently drew my attention to an article by game designer Brice Morrison, “How Megaman 9 Resembles. . .Real Life?” published a little over a year ago at Gamasutra.  (It also appears on Morrison’s own blog, which seems to have been superceded by his current project, The Game Prodigy). Megaman 9 takes the [...]