It’s time for my monthly linkspam, just a collection of articles I found interesting from the past month.
In the Shadow of the Holodeck – A couple of months ago, my linkspam featured an article by Ian Bogost called “Video games are better without stories“. This article here reinterprets Bogost as saying “most of even the successful cases of storytelling in video games are, formally speaking, extremely unambitious.” That is, successful video game stories are still very traditional in structure, rather than offering infinite branching possibilities. It turns out that people like traditional story structures. IMHO the problem with branching story structures is that it’s difficult to traverse them in a Hamiltonian path, so you either miss some content or you replay some content. This reminds me of Scott McCloud’s predictions about infinite canvas webcomics. Such webcomics exist but it turns out that they’re kind of clunky to actually navigate.
I did end up playing What Remains of Edith Finch, the game that inspired Bogost’s article. Contrary to what people were saying, this game was extremely literary. It was a story about stories about death. But yeah, the structure was almost entirely linear, and it could very well have been told in book form.
Games telling stories? – Here’s another article about whether games tell stories. It seems to be targeted at people taking games studies 101. I recommend it to anyone who wants to think about the question more systematically.
An intersex perspective on the trans, intersex, and TERF communities – This is an excellent article that gets into some of the differences in how trans and intersex communities talk about things, and how that can create friction. Found via Shiv.
