Articles You Should Read

A few articles to stir your thoughts.

Patricia Hernandez, Endless War: How Shooting Games Perpetuate War As the New Normal

These mechanics tap into compulsion, sure, but also relay the message that perpetual war is necessary for your development as a subject, and the means through which someone becomes empowered. Here, too, there’s an empty promise: despite how long a player might develop a character, “prestige-ing” means that the process is never-ending. You reach your level cap just to start it over again and again and again.

Declan Skews, Communicating Games: Vilolence, Consequences and Barriers

Communicating the passion, the beauty; the romance of games to non-gamers is a task that can oftentimes seem impossible. How do you explain the draw of sneaking down a corridor, slowly losing your sanity, in Amnesia? What’s so appealing about repeatedly dying and becoming frustrated with Dark Souls? Why bother to learn new and confusing button configurations to play Uncharted, when you could just pop Indiana Jones into the DVD player? How do you explain to someone why it’s fun to massacre wave upon wave of seemingly helpless bad guys?

Real and Virtual Firearms Nurture Marketing Link over at the New York Times online takes a look at the relationship between video game publishers and firearms manufacturers, with a focus on EA's Medal of Honor: Warfighter. Click the link for The McMillan Group in the second paragraph. You'll either be surprised or disgusted by what you see.


Over at Killscreen Joseph Bernstein has a brief article on the massive growth in the gaming industry in China.


Harris O'Malley writes about Male Privilege in video games and so-called nerd culture in Nerds and Male Privilege over at Kotaku.

Y'see, one of the issues of male privilege as it applies to fandom is the instinctive defensive reaction to any criticism that maybe, just maybe, shit's a little fucked up, yo. Nobody wants to acknowledge that a one-sided (and one-dimensional) portrayal of women is the dominant paradigm in gaming; the vast majority of female characters are sexual objects.