Weekly Update: Slow Lives and Nagging Wives

August 30, 2011 - Readings

What’s up, travelers from Gamasutra! This week at Robot Geek, I talk about an emerging cliché in art games, where it comes from, and what it’s good for. I call them Leaning Games, and they’re multiplying like rabbits. (If that phrasing just grossed out a few people who follow me on Twitter, bonus!) I don’t really have a problem with clichés, mind you. I just think they usually reveal something interesting about the creative culture that produces them.

As an aside, I think there’s a lot of room for a gender-based critique of these types of games, which keep circling back to the story of a guy who either neglects his wife or his job. That’s not my area of specialty, but it’s a weird trend worth noting.

So here’s what I’ve been reading this week.

Rampant Coyote asks whether subtlety is possible or desirable in games. This is a question I initially scoffed at, until I realized how hard it is to come up with examples where subtlety does work, even in the wild world of experimentals. Can anyone else think of something?

Via Mattie Brice, Altug Isigan applies classical narrative theory to games in Game Narrativity and Interaction.

Indiana Jones and the Video Game Imagination. Over at Robot Geek, Fraser Elliott writes about how children approach games and what it says about how we approach them as adults.