Monday, December 16, 2013

Gaming Round-Up: December 16, 2013


Source: Pixiv


Interview: On PC Gamer, Philippa Warr interviews Charles Cecil on Broken Sword 5, the Gnostic Gospels, conspiracies, and religion.

Erik Fredner muses on Typing of the Dead: Overkill as Dada-inspired surrealist art.

On Higher Level Gamer, doctoral student Erik Bigras shares the interesting tale of the collective worlds built among his colleagues in Minecraft, all of which explore interesting takes on geometry, architecture, and efficiency.

On Medium, Liza Daly provides a great analysis of games as fulfilling jobs the same as (or different from) many other diversions.


Simon Parkin kicked off an energetic discussion this week with this piece written for the New Statesman. In it, Parkin contends simply and emphatically, that the term ‘gamer’ has become too charged to reclaim, and the idea of a ‘gamer community’ is a non-starter. “If you love games,” Parkin says, “you should refuse to be called a gamer.”

Writing in her own blog, Mary Hamilton maintains that the term ‘gamer’ is not beyond reclamation, and indeed there is a lot of value in doing just that. Meanwhile, Stephen Beirne — while agreeing with Parkin’s larger point — takes issue with the class assumptions behind some of Parkin’s remarks, in particular the idea that games are “the great contemporary leveler.”  In summing up some of these discussions, Australian games scholar Brendan Keogh maintains that the term ‘gamer’ is fraught with problems largely for how gendered it is, and avoiding its use is an important symbolic gesture: "My issue with ‘gamer’ is not that people identify as gamers. My issue with ‘gamer’ is it is a word that when used in discourses around games is not actually representative of everyone who plays games and its uses as such often excludes and obscures a much broader and diverse spectrum."

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