This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including status of Grand Theft Auto V as failed satire and the strange, strange world of Salty Bet.
At Least Three Infinities
Michael Lutz has a few interesting musings
on the nature of performance art and how it correlates with the idea of "replayability" for games. And on Notes & Commentaries, Matthijs Krul has produced
a Marxist reading of Dwarf Fortress.
Meanwhile, on Unwinnable, Nate Andrews takes a peek inside
that curious machine art-turned graffiti wall-turned ersatz gambling community, Salty Bet.
And Edge has
a nice look back at the genesis of expressionistic American gothic point-and-click (and IndieCade award winner) Kentucky Route Zero, whose developers insist they didn't set out to upend anyone's chess board.
Theft No More
On Kotaku, Leigh Alexander
laments aging out of the target demographic of games, while the hype cycle chugs on. Elsewhere, on Higher Level Gamer, Erik and Gaines address that so tricky of topics:
whether Grand Theft Auto 5 is defensible as satire:
Rockstar could have written a satire of the American dream without using misogyny. They didn’t. The game they made is a satire and misogynistic. The game asks you to deride representations of the American dream but not how sexist those representations are. Is the real American dream still wrapped in a patriarchal bow? Yes. But, GTA 5 doesn’t ask you to see that bow for the sexism it is.
On Ballistically Grapelike, here's an interesting reading of
Hitman's Agent 47 as an inverted Christ figure. And Eurogamer's Rich Stanton explains
how he got going as the Pokemon equivalent of a puppy farmer.
Elsewhere, International Hobo's Chris Bateman pops up to underscores the problems of thinking of game narrative as window dressing or, in his words,
wrapping paper for a game.
World War Zinester
Rise of the Videogame Zinesters author anna anthropy reminds us that the "zinester versus formalist" dichotomy is
actually not a real thing. And Mattie Brice calls attention to
the oft-invisible partitions within the loosely-defined spheres of "games criticism."
Thanks for reading! Please keep on sending in your recommendations via
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Lastly, have you picked up your copy of
Five Out of Ten #5? Because it is very much worth your time to do so.
