Unwinnable

It’s the time of year when the conversation turns to annual Best Of tallies. I put my hashmarks into Unwinnable’s roundup. Technically, my favorite game of 2012 didn’t even come out in 2012, but my admiration for it spans such Gregorian constraints. I loved this game more than any other, because of its unrelenting instruction in the virtues of patience, humility and grit and most importantly, the joy to be found in suffering. My game of the year for 2012 was Dark Souls. (more…)

I went back to Dishonored some time after finishing it and skulked around on exposed industrial piping and lampposts, turning myself, as the vengeful assassin Corvo Attano, into a brooding, silent observer over the rotten cobblestone streets of Dunwall. Unlike my last visit, this time I was not here for bloodletting. Instead, my mission was an unnoticed vigil spying on what remained of the city’s citizenry – mostly gang members and petty thugs – and the totalitarian foot soldiers of the Orwellian-cum-Victorian city night watch. I was there to test and tinker with Dishonored’s AI systems, to see what they did when they thought I wasn’t around, to provoke and harass (and yes, sometimes puncture their necks with my blade – a little unexpected violence is sometimes necessary to trigger a response) and look at their reactions as test subjects in my own loosely controlled study. (more…)

In everyday life we are surrounded by horrifying sights…We all know perfectly well that such things are ugly, not only in the moral but in the physical sense, and we know this because they arouse our disgust, fear and repulsion. Marginal as the voice of art may be, it attempted to remind us that…there is something implacably and sadly malign about this world.

-       Umberto Eco, On Ugliness

The first thing that struck me about Far Cry 3 is how much I dislike Jason Brody, the character whose skin I am forced to wear during my time on the Rook Islands. He is a professional tourist whose life revolves around thrill seeking and excessive drinking, the perfect archetype of the rich, white, directionless mook. He is empty of ambition, a waste of potential with an asinine haircut. (more…)

The first thing I did in XCOM: Enemy Unknown was customize my soldiers. Vincent Domingo, a beefy soldier from Ecuador, metamorphosed into an impossibly muscular approximation of myself – bald, goateed, grumpy. My other troops soon took on the appearance of friends and colleagues.

This was a mistake. (more…)

Today in 1979 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was first released. Have a great weekend!
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Fictional characters, by their very nature, are parasites. They cannot live without us – the attention we pay to them as readers, viewers and players quickens and sustains them. Our cognition is the coal that fuels their furnaces. In this way, all narrative is interactive. (more…)

Part Two: Cold Comfort, Colder Heart

Calming words are cold comfort in DayZ. When I left a fellow survivor to die alone, only to loot his body afterwards and tell those who would listen of what I’d done, I knew I had slipped. At first, I shirked it and tried to shake it off. I told myself I still had the option to back down, to back away, to back out – to shut the game off and never finish the experiment I’d set out on. (more…)