Hello world!
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Okay, now on to real content.
I have to admit – I’ve become partial to a number of video game blogs, many of which will be featured here in the coming days and weeks. Honestly, I have been surprised at the level of intelligence and thought being put into video game culture lately, and how writing about games has moved past the games itself to interrogate and explore gamer culture. I feel like (at least in some corners of the blogosphere) video game writing is moving beyond “oh what a gorgeous game” and “ooh look BOOBS!” into something more sophisticated and (I think) culturally significant. As a recovering academic (should finish my thesis on copyright soon) it’s really encouraging to see intelligent discussion about a topic I have loved since childhood.
One such blog is Shamus Young’s Twentysided Tale. In an entry on Guild Wars, he discusses an epiphany he had about the nature of the game. The whole article can be found here here, but the essence of his comments is that , once he reimagined GW as a strategy game, it changed his interpretation of gameplay elements and thus reshaped his opinion of the game mechanics (and the fun of his experience) substantially. I wanted to offer another example of that kind of shift from my own experience, and it came in my first playthrough of Resident Evil on the Gamecube (the 2002 remake).
I know one of the longstanding criticisms of RE (and survival horror games more generally – see the new Alone in the Dark especially) deals with the awkward control scheme that makes it clunky to navigate the environment using typical analog controls. Aware of this problem (one of my major reasons I had not finished the game before now), I was looking at different control schemes when I experimented with the two other options, one of which moved “move forward” from the analog stick to the right trigger. Playing the game this way was a revelation akin to Shamus’ Guild Wars epiphany – I realized the title wasn’t a third person shooter, and was never meant to be. I can’t believe I never saw it before now – Resident Evil is a complex strategy/adventure game. When I thought about the game like this, everything made sense – ammo is scarce because guns are a tool, a means to an end, and not the focus of gameplay. Zombies became puzzles in and of themselves, puzzles which required guns to solve. I know it sounds rudimentary, but it completely changed the experience with me, and I was able to understand that shift thanks to his post.
Honestly (and I’m not exactly proud to say this) this is one of the first gameplay-shifting epiphanies I’ve experienced. Maybe it’s just about perception, or maybe it comes from being open-minded, but it seems like for the first time I interacted with an unfamiliar genre on its own terms, with transformative results.
So, that leads to the inevitable question: how about you? Has anyone else ever experienced this sort of brain-shift in relation to a particular game or a game genre? Am I just blowing smoke? I’m not sure if this sort of openness is a fluke or a joyous accident, but I’ll take it.
Please share your thoughts below – there’s no sadder two words put together than “no comments”.
Sean w/o an H
The Second Quest 