THE PEOPLE IN TACOMA

My main criticism of Gone Home and all the games derived from it is its lack, kind of covert lack, of human characters. It’s about love, sex, loss and family but although you read some diaries and look at a lot of curios, in an admittedly really well-captured mid-nineties American home, you don’t actually talk […]

LITTLE RED LIE’S WILL O’NEILL

I spoke with Will O’Neill, writer and director of Little Red Lie and Actual Sunlight, about his work and the condition of modern videogames. Little Red Lie is one of the most compelling games of 2017 so far. For reasons outlined in this review, it comes recommended, and is available here.

HIDEO KOJIMA AND WOMEN

The first Metal Gear Solid I think is a terrific horror game and political thriller. I think you care about who everyone is, you’re scared, you’re uncertain and it even picks at videogames themselves in ways much defter than he does in his later work. The second one predates BioShock and has a deliberately spiteful […]

PROCEDURAL GENERATION WITH OSWALD HURLEM

I put a call out on Twitter for anyone who had a burning desire to talk about games to contact me. Oswald Hurlem, game designer, had read my article, published on this site, about why I don’t like procedural generation and got in touch; our conversation is below.

PROCEDURAL DEHUMANISATION

Procedural generation, of the sort which automatically creates videogame levels using an algorithm, is not to me an exciting new technology. I understand independent game-makers use it to cheaply build products (I refuse to call a game created by this method anything other than a product) that might compete, size-wise, with published and larger-budgeted works. […]

SPEAK UP, DiRT 4

At the centre of sports games is a contradiction. They have top athletes on their covers and reverence for the sport they’re recreating, and generally insist that whatever we’re doing in-game isn’t something we could ever do in real-life. But they also, like almost every videogame, want us to win and to feel good, so […]

SHUT UP, OLD MAN’S JOURNEY

Since he is able to literally move mountains and, in one sequence, traverse effortlessly the bottom of the ocean, the eponymous central character in Old Man’s Journey – despite the game’s mawkishness – appears not forlorn or sympathetic, but powerful and able. If one were willing to co-operate with this game, they might argue that dragging […]

Twenty-Seven

Even when you’re older than the dead, musical idols they seem the more experienced adults. Why? They did things in their lives you haven’t and are increasingly unlikely ever to do – two years my junior, forever, Tupac Shakur could nevertheless boast a quantity of living three times my own. Or not, because like Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and the […]

HITMAN, YAKUZA ZERO AND ASPIRATION

Rarely do videogames give us characters to whom we can aspire. Coolness, of the fictional kind, should, of course, be impossible for us to attain – James Bond endures because, although he is tied to our world, he is also its inexplicable, unscrupulous controller, whose suaveness overwhelms even the most immovable rules of reality. But […]

A CONTINUING LIST OF GOOD OR INTERESTING VIDEOGAMES

– Alien Isolation – Wolfenstein: The New Order – Year Walk – Mount Your Friends – Broforce – Gone Home – Papers, Please – Bernband – Depression Quest – Actual Sunlight – This War of Mine – Dys4ia – One Chance – Immortall – Sword and Sworcery – Receiver – Metro 2033 – DmC: Devil […]

shutupvideogames

—just shut your mouths