Julen nærmer seg, og hva som skjer med denne spalten i julen er ikke godt å si. Vi har imidlertid et par uker igjen, så her får du ukens lesestoff:
Ukens lange og varmt anbefalte artikkel er skrevet av Craig Bamford hos Nightmare Mode. Her legger han ut om at dagens spill – hvor «dagens» impliserer smarttelefon-samfunnet der Hvermansen mellom mobilspill og Twitter har oppmerksomhet og konsentrasjon som et hyperaktivt ekorn – ikke tør å ha «nedetid». Spill er alt for direkte, og intrikate systemer, ikke-linearitet og belønninger som ikke er umiddelbare finner vi mindre og mindre av. Han er slett ikke sikker på at dette er en god ting:
So what exactly do I mean by “downtime”? … It’s simple enough to understand when you’re thinking about, say, RPGs or strategy games. You’ll often spend time poring over maps, charts, graphs, and inventory lists, in order to sort out how and whether you can move forward; in RPGs, you’ll also spend time “grinding” in order to make your character powerful enough to take on the opposition. It’s often necessary to master the game, but it can be tedious and painstaking work. It leaves players wishing they could get back to the “real” game, and back to that clear sense of real progress.
…
FTL is different. It’s constantly moving forward. … A lot of genres show this shift. It’s obvious in social games, noticeable in FPSes, and even changing RPGs. Games are becoming tremendously streamlined thanks to some serious economic and cultural changes. It seems good‒but this might say something really scary about us as an audience:
Games might have lost their indirect progression because we can’t just handle it anymore.
Etter en så lang tekst tar vi en liten pust i bakken med tre meget informative figurer i ekte statporn-ånd, laget av ludologisten Jesper Juul.
Klar for et par tekster til? Flott, da går vi videre til en fin duo. Hos den østerikske nettsiden Video Game Tourism kan man finne en undring om hvorvidt eventyrlyst og trangen til utforskning i spill stammer fra vår nomadiske fortid:
Games' virtual spaces allow us to roam farther than reality does - especially now, that the tools made to free us from fixed office spaces and the need to be physically present also, paradoxically, take away the necessity to leave our screens. There is, after all, a reduction in our daily lives' radius; we're living in the age of the "Great Indoors".
It shouldn't surprise us that, in exchange, the virtual spaces around us are growing. Games let us decamp and set forth. And they take us to places that are as outlandish as our wildest fantasies: Great underwater cities, showcasing madness and art deco; twisted death zones exhibiting the ruins of once proud civilizations; megalomaniac architectures between Heaven and Hell.
I en tekst som er så komplementær til denne at det nesten ikke kan være tilfeldig, skriver Steven Poole hos Edge Magazine om spillmediets fiksering på korridorer.
The corridor is inherently authoritarian, seeking to corral unbounded biological movement into unnaturally linear paths. Early man did not grow up in corridors but on wide savannah plains, which is posited by some evolutionary anthropologists as the reason why our field of vision is wider than it is tall. To put a human being in a corridor, then, is to create a tension between our sensory equipment, tuned to one environment, and the artificial new surroundings. It is to say to us, with a sneering challenge: ‘Adapt to this!’
Helt til sist i dag skriver Aaron Gotzon hos Ontological Geek om de mange ulike tutorials vi finner i spill.
God lesning!
Noe du vil si?