Well, PopMatters put up their list of top 20 games of 2011. I was a proud participant in their first ever end of year list for games. Back in December G. Christopher Williams put out an email that we were doing this and despite it only coming out recently all the decisions and blurb writing was completed obstinately before the new year. It was done by having all of us listing our favorite games of the year in order and our editor did some voodoo math to come out with this list. First thing I said out loud upon seeing it: “This list makes no f-ing sense.” Yep, self censor and everything.

For reference here’s the list:

20. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars
19. Dead Island
18. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
17. Battlefield 3
16. Mortal Kombat
15. Shadows of the Damned
14. Gears of War 3
13. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
12. Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception
11. Batman: Arkham City
10. Fate of the World
09. Assassin’s Creed Revelations
08. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
07. Dragon Age 2
06. Inside a Star-filled Sky
05. Dead Space 2
04. L.A. Noire
03. Catherine
02. Portal 2
01. Bastion

Again, I say, this list makes no f-ing sense. It doesn’t look like any other lists out there, but that’s not what bugs me. Nor is it that a number of these games wouldn’t be anywhere near my top games of 2011 list. Or the order of certain games. I can totally understand Dragon Age 2 over Skyrim, especially knowing who works at the Moving Pixels blog. I can also get past the fact that Driver: San Francisco was completely overlooked. After all I hadn’t gone on my promoting spree across 4 different sites yet. No, I don’t really have an issue with the list, it’s just really really weird. Logic doesn’t seem to enter into the equation and I end up thinking more about how on earth this came together rather than feeling any unique voice to the site and the culture it embodies.

That’s not entirely true of course. Like I mentioned before the Dragon Age 2 above Skyrim speaks volumes on our priorities. That both blurbs were written by Mattie Brice just adds to it. Catherine coming in third also says something, what I’m not sure. Portal 2 and Bastion are both rather conventional picks for top honors, because they totally deserve them, so it’s what comes after that speaks to our collective tastes. Honestly, a big shocker to me was Fate of the World coming in at #10. It deserves to be there, but I don’t know anyone other than Jorge Albor and myself who have actually played it. Either a small group put it extra high or a lot of people just haven’t mentioned it.

I think what throws this off, is not the unconventional picks for top honor, nor certain absentees that have been noted in the comments. They explained why they weren’t there in the podcast about this list (no one on staff had played them yet.) It’s the rhetorical order of them. Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars coming in at #20 makes sense in looking it over, doubly so for the average reader. It’s an indie game they’ve never heard of at the very bottom of the list. No one is going to complain. It’s conventional to squeeze something in at the bottom. Dead Island speaks to what we as a staff thought of it, not that great, but solid enough. Then you smack the reader with Skyward Sword at #18. Ok, even fanboys have to admit there has been backlash against the game recently. Any fanboy complaints will take that into account in their screeds. But the reader is reeling at the surprise of seeing it so low on the list. Then Battlefield 3 comes in, followed by Mortal Kombat and Shadows of the Damned. Were these three games on anyone’s talking list for GotY. Then we go back to conventions, strong AAA end of year releases not quite as good as their predecessors. The logic behind them where they are makes sense. It’s understandable. Then a minor quibble with Batman. You can see how maybe this group didn’t think it was the bees knees like other sites did. But it’s ahead of other action games, it’s still in relation to other games that are comparable and it makes sense. Then you throw Fate of the World in their face, a game I can guarantee they’ve never heard of. It’s in the top 10 what the hell. Above all these other critically acclaimed games that I have heard of. This threw me through a loop because I didn’t know any of my fellow writers even knew of it. The Critical-Distance editors sure didn’t. The Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, generally considered the worst in the series. It could be accepted an understood in relation to other titles if they weren’t still reeling from Fate of the World. Oh Skyrim, thank you Skyrim familiar territory…Dragon Age 2 what the hell!!! Again an argument I think could have been made and understood if not agreed with were it not for the reeling still going on.

Inside the Star-filled Sky…ok I think you’ve broken our dear reader. He wont make much fuss, but it’s getting a little awkward with him just sitting there. What makes it doubly weird, it’s only the third indie game on the list. Were it more populated with smaller, flash, downloadables etc one could understand the mindset of the people behind it. They like indies over the AAA cheeseburgers. The reader puts himself in a different mindset expecting something else. They expect artsy fartsy stuff they’ve never heard of, but now might try. Instead they’re in a AAA mindset with levels of story being their driving factor as evidenced by Dragon Age 2 over Skyrim, but wait Mortal Kombat is in there and Battlefield three. Ok he’s drooling now. Dead Space 2.

Once said reader has stopped hopping up and down to a chorus of “that came out last year?” It’s another head-scratcher as it was forgotten and to be this high doesn’t meld with the lists narrative from previous Action titles that came before. Then L.A. Noire, which works on a list where story is king, but such a list this is not. Catherine, while it says a lot coming from the top on down, is dumbfounding coming in the other direction. It’s not just that the list doesn’t conform to other people’s opinion, it’s that it doesn’t seem to conform to an internal logic of priorities of the people making said list. (I stop here because Portal 2 and Bastion make all kinds of sense, though it’s a little late for the reader’s faculties.) Artistic statements mixed with story priority games, next to message games, next to riproaring B movie action games, world building and character building all in the top 10.

Said reader was me when I first read this list. Some choices were baffling all on their own, but it’s the lack of any internal logic to what the staff prioritized as personal preferences in picking particularly pleasant play proceedings to present to the petulant people. Hence what I meant when I said it made no f-ing sense. Of course the blurbs don’t really help in this regard as they only explain what we liked about the game and not in how it relates to the rest of the list. I don’t think we could have done that anyway, because this isn’t anyone’s list really. Maybe that makes for a better site to see such diversity.

Of course, what I’m really saying is I would love to see the math that lead to this. There has got to be an interesting story or two in there. I meant to ask back in December, but then the Critical-Distance projects took over so that idea got pushed aside. Take a gander at what we had to say about each game. I had the privilege of making my case for Fate of the World and Portal 2. Oh yeah, and Mike Schiller wrote one hell of an intro to the whole thing.

This was a piece that spawned from the end of last year’s debate on Limbo. I figured I might try to be more positive and provide an example that actual does the atmospheric storytelling well instead of ragging on Limbo all the time. I really did want to like that game. If only it wasn’t avant-garde just to catch attention and could follow through.  After a little time thinking of a few titles, I figured Flower was the best one to make my point. That and I’ve been wanting to write about it like a proper critic ever since I played it almost three years ago now.

In a way I can see that as my growth as a critic. I may be a little off, but at least I think I’m ready to tackle it. Of course it still took more than two weeks to actually get it from first draft to published. I was ready to publish it when I realized I should expand upon the individual levels and the base thematic meaning they are trying to convey. I only did the first two originally as examples. Of course I couldn’t quite remember details of the later levels as well so I had to go back to the text. Still a great game.

Of course most of it worked and I inserted the thematic details in, but oh wow does that last level tear my argument apart. My main argument that Flower is a good example of a game whose story is told via atmosphere and ambiance still holds strong, but major parts of my reading start to crumble in the face of the sixth flower. In fact I started to go on too long about it and had to cut it for the original piece. But now, after the image I will get to it, because the last two levels deserves a close reading all on its own.

In looking over the last level I was astonished to find how much surrealistic imagery manifests throughout the dream city. While all the other levels had a magical quality to them and each had their own rules they played by, the small white flower seems to go the extra mile.

It begins by not looking out at the city and we are thrust into the level directly. A petal floats to a space surrounded by the menacing rusted electrical towers. The petal grows a flower and upon the player pressing a button, the flower purifies the constructions out of existence. The field is brought back to life and the sky lightens. Following the level we destroy barriers of web shaped iron bars and purify more bent constructions returning life and color to the city. It’s not just nature either. Once within the city walls in the first field upon clearing certain areas it is a three story building and some streetlights that grow out of the ground instead. They don’t rise out either, but twist out like an enormous vine. Later we travel along a highway road flinging roadblocks and collecting flower petals and the road has color return to it as the same speed was travel on it. The player restores an industrial fan and uses to fly high from building top to building top, collecting flower petals and returning color to the skyscrapers.

Each of these purifications have the constructions burst apart, slow in mid air and turn pure white before vanishing. There is no violence to the moment. It happens when the petal train merely touches one of the constructions or brushes past and it is accompanies by the sound of a call of a heavenly choir singing a single note. We are removing an abberation, but not because it is man made. Some of these things are hindering the growth and life of the city itself. They dull the city, constrain the buildings and create a dark atmosphere. The constructions themselves look like parasites in the environment. They attach themselves to buildings and grow from the nooks and crannies to strangle the life out of them. In the entering the final corridor of buildings, additional ones grow from the slates in the buildings to try and halt your way. Once they are all purified, color and light return to the areas they once occupied.

The flower petal comes and clears it away. It purifies it and brings life to both nature and the world of man. In the final part of the level a ominous tower seemingly built from the these things looms overhead and on your approach spires grow in batches to try and halt your progress. You blast your way through them and begin you assent through in the inner workings of the tower. Three times the flower petal blasts its way through a spiderweb barrier. More and more spires try to block your way and you sail through their efforts, purifying them out of existence until you soar out of the top. The camera pulls out and you see a single point of light hanging in the sky; the trails of flower petals heading up and up towards it. Then the camera zooms in and we see that point of light is a window with a empty flower pot hovering over the sill and the chair from the menu at and askew angle. The window is hanging in the night sky showing a bright sunny day in the city it looks out on to. The flower petals, like they did in all the previous levels, streaming into a single point, in this case the flower pot, and grow a single flower as if all the collected life energy from all the other flowers collected into a single point gives life to a new flower.

It doesn’t end there as the tower is bathed in light. All the spires and constructions turn white and the screen whites out. In the tower’s place we see a large sakura tree in full bloom, an eastern symbol of spring and new life and beginnings. The tree is so massive that it towers over the rest of the city, taller than any of the skyscrapers. It does’t blooms so much as collect the massive amounts of petal that float towards it and collects them on its branches. It is a cloud of pink to hang over the city.

Here we see the full thematic argument of the entire game made plain. All the other dreams were mere pieces building up to the whole. Wish fulfillment of the flowers whose lives are missing something. In the youngest flower we see an idealism and hope for co-existence between the two worlds. It manifests the conflict between them as the iron constructs and the spires that stand in the way of growth and life for both nature and the city. In a way there is a Jesus motif for the light pink flower. Through it all things may be redeemed and it is the bringer of light. Peace reigns once he reaches towards the heavens and bathes the world in light, ending on an eastern symbol of peace and tranquility. In fact we get both an Eastern and Western mythology of peace and spirituality in the final level. The harmony between nature and man and then focus of the light through all things are brought to peace.

Both the level’s beginning and ending sort of throw my initial reading of the game out the window in my Nightmare Mode post. It is the climax of the game, but it isn’t independent of the other levels. It picks up right were the previous dreams leaves off and ends in a far more grandiose and surreal fashion that any of the previous levels. It isn’t about the internal peace of the individual, but about the peace that can be achieved for all through societal harmony. It also emphasizes the dream of the flower being beyond what it can personally attain by wanting it to bring this dream into the real world. It dreams of its place on the windowsill and from there seeing the sakura tree, based in the dream world stretching high to the window in the sky.

The final level of the game is another anomaly, but for a very different reason. It isn’t the dream of a flower, but a world within a painting of a flower. Here we have a playable denouement. Each flower releases a name of the credits hovering over the flower before the letters float up into the sky. We traverse new terrain that uses elements of the previous levels: the moving canyon walls, the lighting up of haystacks, the industrial power cable tower, the windmills etc. They are mixed and matched into a world where nature and man made constructions are existing in harmony. But more than that, the level is an artistic signature in the painting. Instead of having the credits roll at the end like movie, it integrates them into the form of the medium. It makes them apart of the game. To see the credits you must pursue the flowers and have them bloom. Then at the end, the flower train flies into the night sky as the names are collected in more traditional scrolling fashion and fly into the night sky. We have sent them to the heavens above and so concludes the game.

I don’t know what this ending level means, but I feel it appropriate with the rest of the game. Few games integrate their credits into the game dynamics and make them playable. Instead most use them as a reward for completing the game. This method is much more satisfying. I’m glad they did it in a way that feels thematically relevant. I don’t know how, but at least it is aesthetically consistent with the tone and design of the rest of the work.

My second post on Driver: San Francisco is up on PopMatters. I’m surprised the title made it through at all. Hell I’m surprised I wasn’t told to write something else. I mentioned on twitter I was playing fast and loose with terminology and was told that is how you know you made it.

This piece spawned from the simple thought of how the game got around the problem of breaking my immersion by taking innocent civilians in their cars and smashing them into on coming traffic. As Yahtzee put it “Protect and Serve ladies and gentlemen.” The rest came out of how to fame this thought and how to stretch it out into an 1000 – 1200 word post. Out of that came the bizarre post of conceptualizing the process of the game’s dynamics in the player’s mental state during play. I had no idea where it was going until I had arrived which I think is how most good theory work is written. That and written right before the deadline.

In all seriousness, go check out the piece and then find a copy of the game and play it. I am really pushing this as an overlooked gem of 2011.

Yeah so another podcast episode came out this week. I know, there must be something in the water. Well it’s the missing episode 9 that was recorded back in August in an attempt to release it for the third anniversary of Braid’s release on the XBLA. Rather foolish as I spent three weeks trying to get a panel together and ended up doing an open call for people on twitter 10 minutes before recording. I may just do all future Critical Compilation Companions like that. Anyone who would respond would have strong feelings about the game. I asked for two who loved it and two who hated the game. I think it turned out all right. Despite this method being rather slap dash the weak link of the whole thing was yours truly. During editing any time I was speaking I just wanted me to shut the hell up. I could tell where I was going and in my head formulate the proper argument, but that seems to go out the window once I open my mouth. Good thing I’m the moderator and don’t have to speak much.

So, Episode 9 – A Braid Companion is up on Critical Distance. The next episode is in post production and the one after that is in the planning stages. Who knows? Maybe I’ll be more regular with these things.

Note: It’s on iTunes and iTunes still can’t put these things in any order. They are numbered Apple or Apple automated program.

And because I submitted my PopMatters post a bit late for a Tuesday release it got pushed back to Thursday, so I ended up giving everyone a double dose of Driver: San Francisco love. My Nightmare Mode post though focuses more on the ongoing narrative I seem to be building about racing/driving games across my posts.

I realize how damn lucky I got that the first driving game I tried was Burnout: Paradise with all junk I’ve been going through since. Thankfully after about a half dozen games (only some of which I’ve written about) I finally found another great racing game. The reason I love this game so much is because of the depth I find to it, not only in its narrative and story, but also its formalism and in this post as I discuss, its aesthetics. It’s fun without only being about the enjoyment of what you are doing while you are doing it. It is a game with a personality. Personality goes a long way.

If nothing else, this piece made me do some research on 1970s and 1980s cop show. Some of the shows I thought of as with a 70s style are actually from the 1980s. Maybe its because broadcast TV is slightly behind trends or something. Though when I found some clips of Starsky and Hutch I found what Driver was aping.

Fun fact. I came up with the title this time and everyone liked it. I’ve been off lately in titles, but I can come up with a good one now and then. Oh and I’m just going to quote one editor suggestion because it deserves it. It was a potential example on how to expand one section of the piece.

EXAMPLE* I’m going to go with the one that lets me skid through a corner and fruit stand, jamming back on the accelerator to awkwardly line up previously mentioned car transporter, hitting it at a bad angle, and 50 feet, 3 barrel rolls and a crowd of frantic pedestrians later, landing on my opponent, whipping off my shades and saying “You should be careful to not let things…..get on top of you…

So, yeah, after that cringe worthy moment, head on over to Nightmare Mode and read more on Driver: San Francisco.

My second post is up at PopMatters, this time looking at an actual game. Thanks to the scheduling of the hiatus on the Moving Pixels Blog at the end of last year meant that my second post would be pushed back to the new year. Driver: San Francisco is a game that is so much better than its advertising gives it any right to be. This is another case of the developers and PR not knowing how to sell their own game. Driver: San Francisco is a slow burn of a game. It sounds like a stupid premise with maybe the best it can reach for stupid fun. But it isn’t. It is a very thoughtful and reasoned game. For crying out loud this is a game where the police actually perform police work. The premise is ludicrous, but it’s how the game uses it.

This was a post I struggled to write mainly because I started writing a completely different post on the game and ended up write one draft that had three posts within it. Of course they weren’t one after another, they were woven into each other. Every other paragraph belonged to a different post and then it became every other sentence and then I topped it off with parts of what ended up in the PopMatters piece. I’ll be fitting the rest of the content into different posts at some point.

I was worried that it wouldn’t come out to well with me hammering on certain points too much or maybe repeating myself in the text. But seeing it live I can say that I don’t think all my worrying was warranted. It flows well and I have to thank G. Christopher Williams for the new title. That has been a real thing for me lately hasn’t it?

So, take a look at what I think magical realism does to the undercurrent meanings of Driver: San Francisco.

See, he argues that racism requires intentionality. [These sentences have been removed until they can be corrected properly.] Then he goes too far.

Several times he gives examples that show words have no meaning without intention, but he removes all context so that there could be no intention. He says he calls a woman he loved “Chief” being that she is not an American Indian she it is just a cute little nickname. He is perfectly right in this respect. The word has no meaning outside of that connotation, BECAUSE she is not a Native American. Likewise earlier in the piece he says that the character’s use of “Capt’n” is only affix the racist term to it because it is spoken by a black woman, but has no connotation when on a cereal box with an old white man. Again since context is removed and therefore meaning is removed, that somehow means that the word has no meaning. I hate to burst your bubble, but should you put it back into context the uninsulting word becomes insulting.

I will use a less charged example to show my point. In Mass Effect 2 the main character’s name is Shepard. He partakes in missions titled A House Divided (Mark 3:25, Matthew 12:25), The Prodigal (Luke 11), Eye for an Eye (Matthew 5:38), Sins of the Father (Deuteronomy 24:16 or Leviticus 26:39). In case you haven’t noticed there is a very strong biblical theme running throughout the whole game with the player cast in the role of a Sci-Fi military Jesus. Through him all your squad mates shall be healed. The thing is the parentheticals are my additions. The mission names are just phrases or noun phrases that mean nothing by themselves. They are words plastered on the screen. They are imbued with meaning because I know something about Christianity and the Bible. You don’t even have to know that much because these are well known phrases, known to be biblical though the first one is probably more famous coming from Abraham Lincoln now. Is it everywhere in the game? No, but in most places. (Suddenly it makes more sense that Shepard mother is mentioned throughout the game but not his father.) Does the game have any of that? No, but it is there because it was placed there with the understanding Bioware’s audience could connect some mental dots.

Nothing exists without context in our world. Some comedians make their living off of simply repeating verbatim famous quotes or well-known scenes in new contexts. In fact all comedy is reliant on having some foreknowledge or understanding for something to be funny. Which brings me to the most misleading arguments of the entire piece.

He bookends the piece with a story of him as a baby that would howl should he ever be held by a black person’s hands. It ends with a story of him helping in a Madagascar clinic where the baby’s would have the same reaction when he held them. This is not proof that baby’s are racist or that the baby’s actions are racist or even that the actions have no meaning because they have no intention. Yes the baby has no intention of being offensive if it even knows what offensive is or hurt is beyond physical discomfort. In fact that uneasiness of the parents in both sets of circumstances is an example of us ascribing more to the moment with our own world knowledge than is inherent in the moment itself. But this is not because the action is without meaning, it’s because it is without meaning because it is without context. A baby has limited to no context of the world. I am no pediatrician of infant psychologist, but I feel pretty confidant is saying it’s not the skin color itself that is scaring the infant or any cultural connotations therein, but the fact that the skin is just different. Mommy and Daddy’s skin looks like this and this is not that color, this is a stranger, I want Mommy is along the lines you as an infant and the baby you held in the clinic was thinking. They have no context of the world. They don’t know what apartheid, the North Atlantic triangle, Rwanda, Imperialism, Jim Crow or who Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X are. That comes with time.

The baby has limited context of the world and no context beyond anything relating to itself. The synthesis you create in the piece by introducing and concluding with these circumstances is to compare video games or any artistic work with a baby. Newly dropped into the world with no context for anything and just a thing that exists. And were the game designed by a baby that would be true, but it was not. It was designed by a large group of adults spending a lot of time going over every detail not just to see if it looks good but to make sure it works as intended and doesn’t break. These are intelligent people who are aware of the world. Deus Ex and Mass Effect and all other video games are a byproduct of the massive amount of blood, sweat and tears of the designers specifically to produce something.

Now does that mean a racist image or character or line in a work is bad. Not inherently. It’s all about context. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was recently censored in a certain reprint to remove the N word from the character of the escaped slave Jim’s name. Why? Because it’s racist. Yes it’s racist, but it isn’t racism. Mark Twain used it as part of the culture of the time and used it to humanize the character by highlighting the degradation and humiliation black of the south went through by attaching it to his name. Finn himself at the end of the book recognizes the inherent wrongness of it and Jim’s treatment. The book is very anti-racism and does it by using a racist slur. Context matters.

Before anything, we must admit that to simply depict something is not to endorse it.

BULLSHIT. Yes it does or they wouldn’t have made it or changed their names in the credits to Alan Smithy thereby disavowing the work. A creator, by making something and releasing it to the world is standing by their work. All parts of it. Mark Twain stood by Huckleberry Finn, Bioware stands by Mass Effect and Edios Montreal stands by Deus Ex: human Revolution.

Are the developers guilty of racism? No. Are they guilty of having put something racist in their game? Yes. Still not a problem, but the problem comes from as you say:

One talks with Letitia not to discover social insights into sub-species differentiation but to figure out where to go next and what to do there. The game is built like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces require a scavenger hunt. Objectives are unambiguous: break in to building X, go find person Y, bring object Z somewhere else. The puzzle is in discovering the prompts.

It’s because she has no other purpose than to be a means to an objective that it is a problem. There is no context other than the cultural knowledge that we bring to the game. There is no context as to why this character is unique to anyone else in the game other than her speech and mannerism. Not her class or her situation that others share. You said this was “before anything else, an aesthetic choice.” What did that aesthetic choice convey? Without any further context in the game, nothing concerning the game at all.

I am quite willing to chalk this up to Edios Montreal being idiots and leave it at that. Same with Capcom and Resident Evil 5. Massive, massive idiots. But you, you are the dangerous one here. I would not have stepped in were it not for you peddling of your anti-intellectualism garbage. Maybe it was unintentional. I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt that YOU did not know what you were doing. Words have meaning, the meaning we give them. And you cannot change the meaning of a word by yourself. Only a society can do that, because words are creations of a society. They are thoughts made audible or in the case of writing physical. They are the purist distillation of the mind that a human can create. To say or promote otherwise is an insult to any person still willing to use their mind. Some things change meaning when they changed contexts. Look up the word “set” if you don’t believe me. But some words are so powerful, so strong they create the context for everything else. The same goes for images and cultural conceits. If I may use a video clip to show what I mean in the visual realm:

Meanings can change, be co-opted, disappear and so forth. But do not tell me there is no meaning. Art would not, could not exist without prior understanding and meaning. I focus on this example from your article because each of your examples are not equivalent. They all have different context and say different things to different effects. But they all do saying something all by themselves. You cannot say otherwise without perpetuating a lie.

The last month have been a very special sort of self-inflicted hell. For some unearthly reason I think last year was so much easier to get everything done. On a whim last year I decided to revive the CDC podcast with an end of year retrospective and pull off the first ever This Year In Video Game Blogging without telling anybody. Both ended up being stealth projects that took a lot of people by surprised, none more so than my editor in chief at the time Ben Abraham. Was I going to make it an annual thing? Well I don’t remember, but it hardly matters because I did it anyway.

I started getting ready near the beginning of December to make things easier on myself, to spread out the work and so forth. I don’t know what happened, but at the end of the month I ended up with strained eyeballs and a desperate dive for the finish line and actually did worse. Last year’s post didn’t need as much editing as this years all mainly because my brain, fingers and eyes were not on the same page half the time. The podcast editing ended up taking the same amount of time as last year even though I dedicated not to go to the same extreme lengths of editing and cleaning up as I did before. I cringe in certain parts at things I could have fixed has I gone for it. But of course being my sophomoric effort and the end of year projects they somehow got so much bigger. From 4 hours of audio to edit into a 3 and a half hour podcast to 6 hours of audio to edit into a 5 hour podcast. From typing up a round up of 60 links I typed up a round up of 79 links.

Scheduling the podcast recording session for two days before Christmas wasn’t the brightest idea on my part, especially since it was the day before Christmas for those of our friends across the International Dateline. But it was literally the only time I could get everyone to show up. I knew I was lucky last year asking Ben, Kirk and Denis out of the blue if they’d be free in a handful of days to record a podcast. I suppose it was a bit much to ask everyone who worked at Critical-Distance to come on. It was six people, one beyond the limit of what I think is a controllable conversation. Though it was fun finally getting to talk to Kris and Katie, come back soon ladies. Also, I like to have fun with the podcast titles and I channeled my inner brony for this one.

Though who knows, with these relaxed standards I might be able to do a podcast more frequently. What a concept!

As much as a slog as it was to get through the podcast, the real challenge is TYIVGB. It’s like TWIVGB except on an order of magnitude the likes of which you haven’t seen before. With TWIVGB you generally have between 20 and 35 links to curate and nearly all of them get in. Depending on that week’s editor your mileage may vary. With TYIVGB I have 937 links pre reader suggestions to cull (much more apt a word) through. Thank Inspector Space-Time that I wasn’t doing this stealth like and had an editorial staff willing to help me. I first went through all the TWIVGBs myself and culled the list down to around 300 potential links. Then I split them up and shipped off a piece each to a different editor. After Christmas Ian, Kris, Ben and myself got on Skype and we worked through all the yes’s to cut them down as well. Ben cut out all the No’s at the very beginning of the process so we could get through them faster. After we finished culling all the yes’s he had to go and I pulled up the deleted no’s and pulled out links I thought deserved a second look. I saved quite a few links that did end up in the final copy. Just goes to show how subjective the whole process is, especially when you only have a partial list. Also, thank you to those of you who submitted suggestions. I only asked for a line or two explaining why you thought a particular pieces was the best from the year, some of you did that, but some of you wrote essays. Good lord.

By the 4th culling process we still had near 100 links, so we went down the list again chipping away at things that we didn’t need. We cut off the fat where ever we could. We were looking for posts that could fill requirements of showcases authors, subjects, games, theories, discussions, but mostly for pieces that could pull double and triple duty. For every link we got to keep there were at least 1 it pained somebody to cut. I don’t know what it was about this year but last year’s TYIVGB was 60 links out of 995 and this year it was 79 out of 937. Kris and I came up with a few theories for this. Don’t know how right any of them might be. The next day I was ordering up all the links into a working outline so it would all flow nicely. After I got everything sorted into the big categories I had to bring in Kris because I need an editor to challenge me if I’m being an idiot. It took us 40 minutes to get everything nicely order. I have no idea how long it would have taken by myself. Probably all evening. We chopped out a few more links during this process.

I could go into detail over some of the stories we had during this process. Or how our views were vastly different. Or gush over the reception (which I think I’ll do anyway, thank you all for your kind words and excitement.) Haven’t seen anyone take issue with it this year, I’d like to think that’s because I was more open about the process and those of you following me on twitter saw the anguish I was putting myself through. Even yesterday’s tweets alone could stand as an example at that was only about the writing process. Anyway, back to what I was saying. I could go on into detail, but instead I want to use this post to highlight some personal favorites that got cut for one reason or another. Mostly because I was aiming for last year’s 60 and couldn’t even do that. So here we go:

This three-part creative writing piece in the style of Hunter S. Thompson tracking down Ash in the world of Pokemon is an absolute scream for me. I haven’t read a whole lot of Thompson, but there is just something about the Gonzo style journalism I find spellbinding. The fact it also reveals what an ugly world this would be if it did exist is a bonus. Of course we don’t have the space for such a piece on a game that wasn’t talked about much and while a lot of fun didn’t say much critically that we haven’t heard a dozen times before.

This is another Bitmob piece that shouldn’t surprise anyone that I like it. It had me at gothic horror. No one else seemed as tickled with it as I was and ultimately it didn’t cover any representation ground, but it is still a good piece that brings up some neat ideas. Neat ideas are great for a weekly inclusion, but not a yearly one. That became a thing, we started calling things week (with an E) pieces as in they are good for the week, but not for the year. Nothing we had was a weak (with an A) piece.

This Character Done Right  at the Border House struck a cord with me. Though it’s about a game I haven’t played that is several years old now, just seeing such and in depth analysis of a character that doesn’t fit the normal Star Wars mold is enough to make one stop and take notice. It was also written by Quinnae, which we unfortunately couldn’t find a worthy year end piece by here. She does good work.

Eric Swartz was a writer we wanted to highlight very much. Not only was he very prolific this year, but he is an excellent long form theorist. He wrote some of the best essays on UI design and structural design of the year. So this piece was in there for quite a while, but had almost nothing to do with the rest of his body of work. It was in there as a place holder because we couldn’t find the bloody link for the essay of his that to me was a shoe in. It took a few hours, but the right essay of his finally got put in. Also, this piece focused on the Smithsonian exhibit that while that got some attention it wasn’t a whole lot.

This next one was a user suggested piece that I hadn’t read before. It is a powerful piece about real Afghanistan and Iraq vets using video games to help combat PTSD. To me it didn’t say much about something in video games from this year like the author’s Call of Juarez piece which got included, but it needs attention so I’m showing it off here.

Last year we had a section dedicated to Print Criticism and Video Essays. While there were books, there wasn’t a Extra Lives nor was it Kill Screen’s inaugural year. You should be picking up the issues to the magazine however. And there weren’t enough video essays to justify having a section all to themselves. So I went through the big essayists to see which of their works was worth highlighting. Extra Credits got three great videos in, but here are two I wished I had space to go in. Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Art is not the Opposite of Fun. I feel that latter one, especially, needs to be linked again.

Ok, this one caused some real contention among editors, by which I mean Kris and myself. I really liked it as a think piece of who we become in video games even those where you can play as anyone you want. Kris saw a lot of problems with it that I didn’t get. In rereading it I find some of her issues with it valid and others unsubstantiated. I will admit I really liked it when it came out, but the shine had worn off over the year. It’s still a great piece just not yearly material.

This is another Kirk Hamilton piece that actually was the excuse for other pieces getting cut because they were too similar and this one did it best. In the end the satire of treating a work in another medium like it was a video game while entertaining doesn’t merit inclusion all by itself. We love satire and we included satire, but we didn’t need it. Plus we were going to sound like Kirk Hamilton fanboys after a while.

The Brindle Brothers are excellent writers new to the scene of video game criticism and we wanted to highlight their efforts. We had this and their Red Dead Redemption piece in the list until we started our final cuttings. I eventually determined that their RDR was just better and we had other pieces looking at first person shooters covering not exactly the same territory, but close enough. You can’t always get what you want.

This Frictional Games blog post really hurt us all to cut. We were making excuses and shuffling things around trying to find a way to keep it in after every culling round. Every single editor liked this piece. It quote Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher and Battleship Potemkin within a paragraph, how could you not like it? Eventually I had bring the ax down myself. It’s a great piece of writing in looking at video game formalism by developers who know how to tell a story in games, but it was indulgent of us. We knew the writing was on the wall for this piece (no pun intended). It wasn’t part of the conversation and it tragically wasn’t remembered on its own merit either. But I’m showing it off now, because dammit this is my blog.

I feel like I have to apologize to Matthew Burns for not including this piece, because its just so good. But ultimately it felt like something from last year and was following up on a conversation from 2010. It’s one of those January pieces that got lost in the transition. A few of us were wary since it seems to go into games as art territory. It was also a reader suggestion, so consider this my penance for that and allow me to show it off here.

Finally, this was another pieces that was painful to cut. In fact it has the distinction of being the very last piece of writing we cut. It made it all the way up to setting up the outline. It is a superb piece. One of the best written of the year about the second men of Final Fantasy. So, why did we cut it in the end? Because criticism doesn’t exist in a vacuum. By itself it’s a wonderful and would have gone in no question, but it was surrounded by Kirk and Leigh’s letter series, and by Tom Bissell’s essays and the writing people did on more relevant games and subjects. Against all that it just didn’t stack up and stood out as a bump in the flow. It sounds like I’m down on it, but really it is so good. It made the weekly roundup and would have made a month round up without a problem or a quarterly one without breaking a sweat, but you have to have higher standards when curating for a year round-up.

I hope people take this in the way it was intended as an extras list for pieces that didn’t quite make it. They deserve your attention, but they were the last tiny pieces of fat that got chopped off on the cutting board. The same thing happened last year, where for many different reason I had to leave off writing I personally loved. Critical-Distance could not create any sort of objective list of best criticism of the year, but we can damn well try. Pieces I like got left out and some pieces I didn’t particularly care for got in, because I can appreciate things beyond my tastes and understand their importance and/or quality. Our preferences will come into play no doubt, but we also have to be willing to put them aside for the work we are doing.

I hope you enjoyed the podcast and TYIVGB and if you haven’t got around to them yet, what are you waiting for?

First is Avadon: The Black Fortress. This is a massive cRPG based in old school isometric design with deep characters and lore that feels relevant to the story to are taking part in. I only played the demo, but I still put almost a dozen hours into the game and never reached the end of the demo. I can’t imagine how much more there is to this game, but I bought it and will be finding out. Everything about it looks dated and indie, but that’s because the game put the effort into what counted, the story, the interface, the characters and the feel. This is the successor to the Baldur’s Gate style of RPG that the big guys have left behind.

Next, Outland, a metroidvania style game with Ikaruga inspired color-switching mechanics combined with a tribal African aesthetic. It’s a beautiful and original looking game with simple tried and true mechanics, but unlike Castlevania games, it’s sprawl doesn’t get out of hand and back tracking is kept to a minimum when it comes to the story. The bosses are interesting and kept as unique challenges throughout the game. Again, a game I’ve put at least 10 hours into and have barely gotten anywhere.

Thirdly, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective. I got this game for Christmas that I hadn’t heard anything about it until very recently when it started showing up in awards and end of year lists. I’ve only had the time for the opening, but so far it looks like an innovative and well-constructed adventure game. It already has me hooked with an intriguing mystery and bizarre style all its own.

With that said, let’s get into my top 5.

5

The Stanley Parable, a Half-Life 2 mod that I’ve played probably a dozen times by now. It’s simple choose your own adventure style of game taking place in a 3d environment with a narrator very aware of what is going on. Depending on how well you follow instructions is how meta the narrator gets. It is an allegory on the nature of video game storytelling that plays out with you rather than in spite of you.

4

Driver: San Francisco was a game that was overlooked at every turn and had no right to be. Part of the problem has to be with how it was shown to us at E3. In short bursts it seems like an insane idea and cool for a few seconds, but incredibly stupid afterwards. And it is, but the shift mechanic is a slow burn. Showing off what can be done isn’t the same as experiencing it. After a while you begin to process what can be done with the concept and what happens as a consequence. It becomes part strategy, part world building and part psychological drama. This magical realism the world is imbued with doesn’t only explain gaming conventions, but makes them apart of the story.

3

Fate of the World is what I wished more games could be. Explaining a difficult world through deceptively simple mechanics. It makes me think of The Wire in that the game is about systems and what those systems mean to the world. How the different elements interact and the complicated concepts affect everything else. I tried to explain it and made it sounds awful. That’s because I’m not sure it is a came that can be explained, it is a game that must be experienced to be understood. Did it teach me specific things about the world? Some. Did it teach me why things don’t always work? Yes. Did it teach me that when push comes to shove I will make some choices I find despicable by themselves? Absolutely. That alone is what great art does.

2

Bastion is the indie darling of the year, but unlike previous year’s indie darlings this one doesn’t go for obscuring it’s story or what it is about. That is right front and center. The world has ended in the Calamity and the Narrator is explaining the story as you play it out. You find your way to the Bastion and do the only thing you can, rebuild. The music highlights the thematic journey and gives a spiritual resonance as well as old west tang. It is a fantasy western from top to bottom. It’s part of an increasingly large cadre of games that is melding the verbs you perform in game to what the story is trying to convey. Now go build the wall up on the hill.

1

Portal 2 is on paper a game that has no right to exist. Portal the first was as perfect as a video game can be and really left no loose ends that needed tying up. But trust in Valve we did and what we got a spectacular game that push the boundaries of the first in ways we didn’t expect. It increased the size of the world and the length of the game, but more importantly it increased the thematic scope of the game. Where other sequels feel empty with their extra space filled by the same amount of ideas as the first, Portal 2 fills that space with expanded themes derived from the first by go far more in depth and cover a wider range of details.

I didn’t know what game was going to be my favorite until I sat down to think about it. In fact it came to me while recording the end of year Critical Distance Confab. I realized while examining the game and thinking what that experience was that it couldn’t be anything else by my Game of the Year. Realizing what Valve had given us made me tear up. This hasn’t been a great year for me or really for most people. And in all that I had the good fortune to play what will be remembered one of the greatest games of all time. It is excellent in every regard and personally hits the mark when it comes to my personal biases with regards to themes and storytelling. I said it before, but I’ll say it again here because I don’t get to say it often. Thank you Valve.

While I started writing for PopMatters’ Moving Pixels blog only in December on a biweekly schedule, and consequently only got a single post published before the winter break, I think it’s a great post highlighting Desert Bus for Hope charity drive, an event I was hooked on for a whole week. In companion to my Moving Pixel’s piece I created a video gallery on this blog to highlight some of the best and most entertaining moments of the whole event.

I started much earlier with Nightmare Mode. Thankfully they let me write whatever I want there and have a great editorials staff willing to talk at great length to make sure your piece is the best it can be. My first post was a repost of my Enslaved piece, the first post of the year, but with editorial oversight, so this is the version you should read. I followed that up with a Ninja Theory companion essay on Heavenly Sword. Then a piece on the Atmosphere of Limbo and Another World that got a big enough response to warrant an in depth reply and further critical discourse in the comments. (Again, the Nightmare Mode repost has editorial oversight and is the better version.) After that began the series of posts on racing games. It has been a bit difficult to get on a weekly Thursday schedule going (a self-imposed schedule), but I am getting better and hopefully I can stick to it in the new year.

At Gameranx, I did a number of top X lists and while not too notable in themselves, I like to think that they are part of an effort to elevate the concept of the top X list itself. Additionally I wrote a feature on what Action/Adventure games are and it lead me to a new area of theoretical thinking. I breach the topic here. I say breach because the response was such that is going to take several more posts in the new year to iron out all the thoughts on game genres.

With all these posts elsewhere, I’ve take a page out of Jorge and Scott of Experience Points’ book by writing up a short companion piece to my posts that appear elsewhere. This has a double benefit of letting the essay be a better more focused work by allowing extra tidbits.

Once again I tried to start up my Indie Game Spotlight series, but could only manage two posts. I was driven to write about The Stanley Parable by its exploration of storytelling, a favorite theme of mine. The other Indie Game Spotlight I wrote was on p0nd, a game I finally got around to writing about. I want to keep up with this series as I had many more minor games I wanted to write a couple hundred words on, but I seem incapable.

Another running theme this year is my focus on books towards gaming as a whole. I reviewed Jane McGonigol’s Reality is Broken and Aaron Dignan’s Game Frame. Neither of which I particularly liked. But I also read A Reader’s Manifesto and how pertinent it was to the modern state of game reviews and cultural ideology toward them.

Massive critical response take downs were other theme. While I could consider my Limbo response a part of that, I’m talking about the link by line take down of arguments I not only disagree with, but also are flat out wrong. These arguments have factual difficulties and problems with the very concepts they were trying to deal with. This is the second time I pulled apart one of DanC’s piece A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism. At 15 pages not many people got all the way through it, but I’m proud of the achievement. I do wish that I didn’t have to so harsh with DanC every single time, because he is an excellent thinker. Incidentally he has invited me out for a drink should we ever meet in person. The other huge take down I have much less qualms about given the original post. I would have ignored had it appeared on writer’s own blog and not Edge. The title of my response says it all: Better the World Think You a Fool than to Open Your Mouth and Prove It Right.

Overall this year was the not the best. In fact were it not for the changes in the last several weeks I would have considered this one of the worst years I’ve ever had the misfortune of living through. Just a constant personal misery and doubt pervaded nearly the whole first half of the year, culminating in August in my Existential Critical Crisis. Writing that was more cathartic that I could have ever suspected as it acting as a way to expel all the horrendous bile that has built up on my soul. And thanks to that post, almost as a karmic response, I was offered a staff position on Moving Pixels and Nightmare Mode both. So in the end things worked out pretty well for me.

This year was one of disappointment for me on the whole. For most of the year I was sidetracked by other mediums and a lot of real life problems got in the way. Then I lost my entire site for a day and while I had a backup of the text I lost all the pictures. This was a massive loss. My posts use images not only as breaks, but rhetorically to make points or enhance the writing. I lost screen captures and pictures of tweets now long lost to the archives of twitter. And then there is the matter of my PAX East photo trip. I have all the pictures, but the hassle of putting them all back in. Not just that post, but also the rest of them. It is a level of aggravation I’m not sure I want to contend with. Though in the end, while I may not have a job at the moment, I feel I have direction and responsibility enough to keep moving forward. I’ve got a theory series in the works and a huge stack of games to play through. I’m not at a loss of things to write bout and not at a loss of platforms to write them on. In fact I’ve been thinking on starting another blog or tumblr for my thoughts on the other media I consume: movies, TV, comic books. I’m leaving things open this time around and see where 2012 will go one day at a time.

Oh and I finally stopped cataloging The Ebert Response this year and as if by magic, they stopped being written.