Line Hollis | Videogame criticism

Mouthwash: Emotions and Stats

July 22, 2011 / 6 comments

The time has come to check in again on the Mouthwash conversation engine. Earlier I mentioned that speech acts in Mouthwash have effects in four domains: goals, emotions, viewpoints, and relationships. Basically, this is meant to be similar to saying that an action in turn-based RPG combat can affect the domains of character health/MP, stats,…

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Belated Weekly Roundup

July 20, 2011 / 2 comments

This week at Robot Geek, I hash out some of my thoughts on how to analyze storytelling style in games: Pieces of Story. It’s my little contribution towards a world where we never have to hear to terms “linear” and “nonlinear” in reference to games again. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading this week:…

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A screenshot from Storyteller, showing two panels of a fairy-tale-like comics story in 8-bit style.

Pieces of Story

July 19, 2011 / 0 comments

Telling good stories in games is hard. Interactivity screws up a lot of the things we associate with good storytelling, such as pacing, control of the audience’s knowledge, and and suspense. This fact, though generally agreed upon, provokes a variety of reactions. Some argue we’d be better off not telling stories with games altogether; others,…

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Persona 3: Your relationship seems to be in a rut.

July 17, 2011 / 0 comments

Here’s a new thing I want to start doing. Most of my posts are either reviews of short games, or feature pieces that discuss several games at a high level. As a result, I rarely get a chance to write about the long games I play in any depth. In order to improve on this…

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A virtual reality scene with dated 3D graphics. A blocky helicopter lands in a vaguely jungle-like environment.

Sense of Presence

July 12, 2011 / 0 comments

The recent United States Supreme Court decision that affirmed the free speech rights of violent videogame producers was generally viewed as a great victory for the medium. It is a strong statement against future legislation that treats videogames as uniquely toxic to the tender minds of children. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in the majority opinion: As…

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Weekly Roundup

July 12, 2011 / 0 comments

This week at Robot Geek, I came up with an odd mashup of the SCOTUS videogame decision and virtual reality in Sense of Presence. Since I didn’t have a post up last week (in defiance of my British overlords at Robot Geek, or just my Independence Day hangover) my link dump covers two weeks’ worth…

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Depression (2011)

July 6, 2011 / 1 comment

Aaron Oldenburg’s Depression is a short entry in this past February’s Experimental Gameplay Project. If you’re not following the EGP, you should. The organizers come up with a short theme every month, and participants come up with a game prototype in seven days to fit it. You end up with lots of short, simple experiments…

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Screenshot from Osada in a photo-collage style. Three Native American men in an inflatable canoe, wearing aviator sunglasses and track suits, singing.

Surrealism from the Inside

June 27, 2011 / 0 comments

Amanita Design is a developer known for its charming little point-and-click adventures. The games are distinctive for their low-key surrealism and collage-like art style, but as games they tend to be very simple. You manipulate the environment by clicking on hotspots. Click them in the right order, and you can progress to the next screen. By…

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Weekly Roundup

June 27, 2011 / 0 comments

Man, do I love that screenshot. I’ve got a new post up at Robot Geek: Surrealism from the Inside. In which I talk about why un-gamelike games like Amanita Design’s point-and-click trifles can have artistic merit. It’s in part a response to Fraser Elliot’s A Case for Medium Specificity, which is very much worth a…

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Conversation Games in the Wild: Deadwood

June 24, 2011 / 7 comments

One of the things I’ve been doing in the course of developing the Mouthwash conversation gameplay is to analyze transcripts of TV shows with good dialogue. The idea is to have some good examples to work with while I figure out conversational skills and how all the dynamics work together. So the first thing I…

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