Category: Critical Responses

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Game Frame – A Book Review

Game Frame by Aaron Dignan is a book about gamification. It’s about how you as a person can insert gamification into your ordinary activities to help you get through them. The author is a co-founder in a digital strategy firm for big companies and this is his foray into the next big bandwagon. Gamification in it’s most basic form is a stupid idea where in most cases people will add points or badges to something and think that is all that is needed to up the engagement with people. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

In Which I Respond to A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism

(Quick history: About a year and half ago I took issue with another of Danc’s posts, the Three False Constraints. It was the longest post I ever wrote. Then his latest post came out and I wrote a 13-page response in one night a week later after it had been edited. A combination of poor sleep schedule, life and laziness kept me from editing it. It was also 13 pages long. In that intervening time it has been edited again, apparently. I couldn’t care less about what was added and this is long enough. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Reality is Broken – A Book Review

I knew I was going to review this book so in preparation I kept away from all of McGonigal’s talks, interviews, and presentations as much as possible before reading it. I caught her appearance on the Colbert Report, but it was hard to make any prejudgments from that short interview. So I am coming into this review as clean as I possibly could and allowing McGonigal’s book to speak for itself. Having read it, I asked on twitter, rhetorically, how do you review this book. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

A Comment on Video Games as a Medium

(Because Open ID blog comment systems are crap and for some reason never want me to comment regardless of what blog it is, this time I think because the comment was too long, and because I felt the need to say this, I’m posting it here and hoping to post the link in the comments instead. And for those of you absolutely sick of the ‘are games art’ debate, not everyone has had this debate and if we who have gone through this question and hammered out the answer do not take our time to educate or at least inform the debate then we really are Ivory Tower wankers. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Resonance or Dissonance in Gears of War

My last post generated the most comments of anything I've written (so far). At the end of the comments Dagda had this to say on the Gears of War franchise: "It's why the "rah-rah kill them" mentality of the Cogs is somewhat undermined by the fact they cower behind chest high walls at every opportunity despite wearing refrigerators." That strikes me as ludonarrative resonance; undermining the tough-guy images the characters present is Gears of War's central narrative theme. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

In Defense of Ludonarrative Dissonance

First off, no this is not a retraction of my opinion (which I was apparently the sole defender of) that Ludonarrative Dissonance is a bad thing for a game to have. Instead, this is a response to the growing antagonism towards the term itself. There is plenty of it about, most recently from a post of Corvus Elrod's over at Semionaut’s Notebook. I wanted to write this right away after reading it, but other commitments kept me from doing so at the time. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter – A Book Review

I haven't done video game reviews on this site. I also don't intend to. I have only done video game critiques or criticism. The name in the top banner should be enough of a clue. So it is interesting that the first review I do for a blog about video games is really about a book. faster full movie high quality part I finished Tom Bissell's Extra Lives over a week ago, before E3 started. I wanted to finish those posts on inFamous before I got around to writing on the book. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

The Ebert Response

For those of you are utterly sick of this issue, bear with me. I am with you. I am tired of people questioning whether video games are art or not. Yes they are, now move on. But when someone like Roger Ebert brings it up and declares that opinion loudly to the rest of the world, a world ready and eager to accept that proclamation, then we have to stand up and say you are wrong. You are mixing your facts up. You are missing the point. You are looking in all the wrong places at all the wrong things. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

The Nature of Reading: Interpretation and Auteurism using Final Fantasy VIII and Mulholland Drive

Recently on twitter I was pointed to an essay on Final Fantasy VIII that differs from the more generally accepted reading of the game's story. If you have not read it yet, before you proceed with this post, please do. First let me speak on the essay itself. I think it's a beautifully argued and supports its position admirably. The Squall's dead theory hadn't ever occurred to me. Never once did it enter my mind that discs 2-4 were a death dream. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

In Which I Respond to the Three False Contraints

When I first read Danc's post over at Lost Garden, Three False Constraints, I called it the stupidest thing I read from the critical community. I decided rather than write an immediate response I would wait a few days to calm down and think it over non-emotionally. I'm glad I did, not because I came to any agreement with him, but because I read this piece by Charles J Pratt over at Game Design Advance. It got me thinking more about the meat of the form of the medium. So I spent some more time thinking and went back to reread his post. Here's my response. | more