Tag: Critical Responses

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

PopMatters Top 20 Games of 2011

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. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Words Have Meaning Dammit

I just read this post, a pretty well written one, talking about the trash lady from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. He contends that the character in question is not racism. His is only correct on a technicality, but his reasoning has me boiling. 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. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

Better the World Think You a Fool than to Open Your Mouth and Prove It Right

Tadhg Kelly is a very good marketer and a pretty good essayist when it comes to that field, but every time he ventures forth out of marketing or the cold world of numbers I cringe. A recent opinion piece on Edge is one of the bigger offenders in cringe worthiness and laughably contradicts itself so spectacularly that it almost doesn’t need a response. But I am going to respond anyway, because 1 I don’t like people constructing untruths from my former field of study and 2 as a jumping off point to clear up some misconceptions I see perpetuated mostly by accident. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

In Response to the Responses I Got For What I Said About Limbo

I like getting thoughtful and intelligent criticism of my work. I like reading what people had to say. It means I had enough of an effect on them to make them think and ad drive them enough to respond. And while I like the criticism, whether it agrees, disagrees, clarifies or whatever else, I also like responding back. I want to head off at the pass that I’m writing to the following in an effort to silence my critics. No, I’m responding to them the same way they responded to me. | more

Eric Swain Critical Responses, Recent Posts

The Supergenres of Action, RPGs and Adventure Games

I wrote a piece for Gameranx asking the question, ‘What is action/adventure?‘ This is part of the larger question about game genres, one that’s been discussed at length over twitter and several posts have come up as well with regards of what certain genres are. As much as the genre debate is generally one of semantics, or in the case of Action/Adventure pigeonholing, I feel there is a necessary undercurrent of philosophy and focus behind the question of what they are that is generally lacking in the current discussion. | more

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