Making a Case for Vice

I always come back to Vice City.

You know how there's that one experience that points you in the direction of your studies and interests? I'm a literature professor, for example, and the book that did it for me was A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man. James Joyce blew my mind. I just didn't know you could present a story in that layered and structured a way and that a book could require so much of a reader.

In the last decade, though, I am drawn more and more to media studies. In terms of video games, my Portrait is Vice City. I didn't know that you could build a world that seemed so real, so inhabitable, so soulful, which is why I am making a case for the significance of Vice City to this decade of game design.

More here:

Making a Case for Vice

No More Sequels

Ironically, on the heels of my article suggesting a parallel between Suda 51's auteur persona and Hitchcock's celebrity comes my review of No More Heroes 2, which is much less flattering.

The game suffers from eschewing the strengths of the first game, its engagement with themes about violence and solipsism and how they relate to gameplay.

I really love Suda, and I want him to make more games. However, I think that his innovative approach is badly constrained by making a "better" sequel. So, I hope that there will be no more sequels in Suda's future, and instead, new wacky, weird, and thoughtful games. I know that the commercial market is not conducive to this model, but for the sake of the art, I think it would be better to let a mind like Suda's to be free to do what he does best rather than try to make a commercially viable product. I just want there to room for folks that have niche audiences.

My review can be found here:

No More Heroes 2

How Games Might Challenge the Tyranny of Authorship

Blogging is just thinking out loud. But in public.

That's what my brief piece is this week -- just a think piece. A brief comment about the film camera representing a director's authority in a podcast that I was listening to last night over at the Experience Points blog got me thinking about a poem by Wallace Stevens that is kind of about the way that artists command or influence our vision. With only about three hours before deadline on my blog post for this week, a few more mental hops lead me to posit that games might be one of the more democratic and least authoritarian mediums in the arts.

However, since it is only a half formed thought and just me thinking out loud, I have added a lot of qualifiers ("might," "often," "at the very least.")

To read a little bit more about something that "might be" about authority, authorship, democracy, and games:

How Games Might Challenge the Tyranny of Authorship

Is Suda 51 the Alfred Hitchcock of Video Games?

My latest Moving Pixels column is now up at PopMatters. While I am not a particular fan of Suda 51's newest iteration of No More Heroes (I'll have a review up by the end of the week), the game's marketing got me thinking about auteur theory and how it applies to game designers. Suda 51 is a dev that has branded his own image in interesting ways that align with Hitchcock's own self branding as an auteur.

To read more:

Is Suda 51 the Alfred Hitchcock of Video Games?

Of Philosophy in Bioshock 2: Some Words from the Devs

Something simple this week, espcially because it didn't really require much writing on my part. I did transcribe a lot, though, which may be harder for me than producing something new.

In any case, I managed to get involved in a conference call last Friday with the dev team for Bioshock 2. Since it is the philosophical themes about freedom and determinism that got me all hot and bothered about the first Bioshock, I focused on gleaning the more philosopical and ethics related responses from the interview, which you can read over at PopMatters:

Of Philosophy in Bioshock 2: Some Words from the Devs

Love Is a Backwards Kick: The Romance of Karateka

I am not sure what made me start thinking so retro this week (maybe it's the mini-games from No More Heroes 2 that makes me wax so nostalgic), but I thought that I might talk of my great love for the romantic sensibilities of Jordan Mechner's classic Karateka. I am always fond of games that seem to balance the interests of gameplay with mechanics, and in this case, I think the strength of Karateka is how it makes the effort to complete the game equitable to the effort of pursuing a romantic interest.

To read more:

Love Is a Backwards Kick: The Romance of Karateka