As Charlie Brooker put it in his latest Guardian column, “Goodbye, cruel 2014: we promise not to miss you once you’ve gone.” Although there have been some exceptional releases, the games industry has had a challenging time of it this year. Developers are still getting to grips with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4; there have been server meltdowns and hacked gaming services; there has been Gamergate.
Perhaps it’s because of these trials that the year has also provided a wealth of very good writing on games – and not just from the dedicated gaming press. 2014 has seen an increasing number of mainstream newspapers, magazines and websites exploring the medium. The New Statesman, for example, has had the Labour MP Tom Watson summing up the merits of Destiny while the New Yorker regularly employs the Guardian contributor Simon Parkin to consider such sublime subject matter as “the kiss that changed video games”.
For all the noise it generated, the Gamergate controversy has produced little writing of lasting brilliance that can be taken out of its exact chronological placing and enjoyed as a work in its own right. Jenn Frank’s article for the Guardian, “How to harass a women who works in video games” is an uncompromising look at the culture of suspicion that surrounds high profile women in the industry; Zoe Quinn explored similar territory in her post for Cracked, “Five things I learned as the internet’s most hated person”.
Jon Stone’s “You and your damned games” is a beautifully written and damning assessment, and for its inventive use of language few polemical works got close to Chris Klewe and “Why Gamergaters piss me the fuck off”. Meanwhile, on the periphery of it all, Claire Hosking’s feature “Bound Women: why games are better without a damsel to save” is a perceptive study of Anita Sarkeesian’s YouTube video series, Tropes vs Women in Video Games.
On the other side of things, Milo Yiannopoulos has been cunning in his ability to exploit the fury of Gamergate followers with a slew of rabble-rousing editorials. He is now planning a book on the controversy. Lord help us all.
Culture and community in games
Elsewhere, there has been some excellent writing on the minutiae of game cultures and communities. Keza MacDonald has covered the arcane worlds of Monster Hunter and Pokemon with insight and humour, while Philippa Warr has done great work on eSports for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, although my favourite article of hers was “The impossible architecture of The Stanley Parable” – a chaotic and engrossing interview with the game’s writer William Pugh. Nathan Ditum used his experiences as a father to highlight the uneven gender aspirations presented by games.
Andy Kelly steadfastly deconstructed Alien: Isolation and then wrote the definitive piece on Oculus Rift sex games. Laura Hudson’s article for the New York Times on the interactive fiction tool Twine and its most creative exponent, Porpentine, captures that creative scene in all its emotional depth and resonance.
There have been great articles too on design and mechanics. Austin Walker’s piece “Real Human Beings: Shadow of Mordor, Watch Dogs and the New NPC” is an illuminating study of how intelligent non-player characters can deepen the narrative experience. In “Form and its usurpers”, game developer Brendon Vance uses titles like Spelunky and Problem Attic to explore questions of content and freedom; “Stop crying about choice” is similarly weighty on the idea of choice and consequence in games. There was also Time Magazine’s interesting experiment where it sent a war photographer into the post-apocalyptic adventure The Last of Us to capture images as though it were a real battle zone.
On the subject of embedding, you should also read all of Cara Ellison’s wonderful “Embed With...” series. The Guardian contributor has spent the year traveling the world, living with a series of interesting independent game developers. The intimacy of this approach has allowed her to convey the lives and motivations of designers like Nina Freeman and Tim Rogers with incredible clarity. It is a unique project.
Elsewhere, Christian Donlan has had another astounding year at Eurogamer. His feature on Monopoly and World War Two is a fascinating tale that could and probably should be a books and a movie, while “Hooray for games that are hard to talk about”, is a superb thinkpiece on the joy of idiosyncratic design. But it was his feature on how games have helped him cope with multiple sclerosis that set a new bar for games writing as a method of exploring the human condition.
There were some great offbeat pieces too, like Andrei Filote’s “Open letter to guards everwhere”, an affectionate ribbing of non-player characters, and Jamin Warren on what you can learn about game design by visiting Ikea. These are a fitting reminder that although more mainstream sources than ever are writing on games and game culture, dedicated sites like Unwinnable, Killscreen and Critical Distance are still knocking it out of the proverbial ball park, whatever terrors a year in video gaming may bring.
