Video Game Controls as Standard Language

Anyone watching me play through the first few hours of BioShock Infinite would have had a painful experience. When I tried to swing the Sky-Hook, I would inevitably find myself staring up an enemy’s nostrils, having forgotten that zoom, not melee, is mapped to R3 in the game. I’m sure you’ve had similar experiences when a game didn’t control how you expected it to. I think my failure to grasp Infinite’s perfectly simple controls results in part from me expecting the game to adhere to the established ‘standard’ shooter control scheme.

EA Responds To Bad PR With More Bad PR

Once again, EA has received the Golden Poo, the prize given to the ‘winner’ of the Consumerist’s ‘Worst Company in America’ poll. Voted for by the site’s users, it marks the second time EA has topped the poll in as many years.

PS3 Review: BioShock Infinite

Many big budget games rely on the player overcoming violent opposition to progress. Taking place in the floating city of Columbia during its yearly fair, BioShock Infinite’s first hour makes a compelling argument that this needn’t be the case. Columbia is mysterious. Posters bear cryptic references to prophecies you don’t yet understand; ambient dialogue and seemingly innocuous fairground games hint at a culture where racism is rife; stalls show off curiously advanced technology for a game set in 1912. Everywhere you look in BioShock Infinite, scraps of Columbia’s backstory are incorporated organically into the landscape, and each one you discover pulls the curtain back a little further. This process of discovery is so tantalising that you’ll never find your trigger finger itching. When the curtain comes all the way back and the extent of Columbia’s prejudice is laid bare, it’s one of the most incredible scenes in gaming to date.

Performative Utterances (Or Not) in Chris Hecker's 'Fair Use'

Fair Use, Chris Hecker’s hilarious Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) 2013 rant, is essential viewing for anyone sick of video game developers making unsubstantiated claims. Hecker’s rant skewered the worst tendencies of spokespeople in the gaming business, just by giving a few of them enough rope to hang themselves with.  If you haven’t seen it already, you can check it out at Chris Hecker's personal website.

Let’s have a closer look at the clips in Fair Use.

From PR Fail to PR Win: BioShock Infinite’s Cover Art

BioShock Infinite is a great game. So great, in fact, that I’m unwilling to rush through it for review. Instead, I want to talk about the controversy that erupted last year when its cover art was revealed. My review will be posted this time next week.

BioShock Infinite’s cover art went down badly with gamers. Infinite is a game of considerable thematic depth, and it’s difficult to explain succinctly what it’s about. You certainly can’t accurately capture the essence of the game with any single image. Bless 2K, though, because that’s what they tried to do. This is what my copy of BioShock Infinite looked like when it arrived in the post:

Metaphors We Game By - Part II

If you haven't already, be sure to read part one of this article first. It sets up the concepts I refer to here in part two.

Lets go back to ‘systematicity’, and the entailments of the GAMES ARE COMPETITION metaphor. These are, I’ve claimed:

GAMES CAN BE WON OR LOST

GAMES ARE ENTERTAINMENT

GAMES HAVE RULES

I would argue that how closely a game adheres to these entailments influences its reception within the video game community. For example, Mortal Kombat (2011) was criticised because its final boss, Shao Khan, suffers from ‘SNK Boss Syndrome’. This is when an enemy character is difficult to beat because they are able to do things (such as unblockable attacks) that other characters are not. Shao Khan is therefore difficult because he breaks the rules of the game, and players reacted poorly because this deviated from the entailments of GAMES ARE COMPETITION, which is key to their concept of what a game is. Compare this with a game such as Ninja Gaiden. Universally seen as extremely difficult, Ninja Gaiden is nevertheless warmly received because its challenge is fair. Gamers don’t mind the game’s difficulty because it sticks to its own rules, and is therefore in line with the metaphor.

PS3 Review: Tomb Raider

I’m not proud of this, but I’ll be honest and say that I wanted to dislike Tomb Raider. I’ve never been a fan of the franchise in the past, and the knuckle-headed pre-release PR, coupled with my general dislike for reboots meant that I was positively looking forward to this game being mauled by the press. Imagine my annoyance, then, when I found myself enjoying Lara’s origin story more than any other game so far this year.