When text games go to war: full interviews

pic: mark muehlhaeusler

Last week, I got an article up in the New Statesman about text games which challenge mainstream representations of war. This week, I've been posting my full interviews with all the people I talked to - and here's a nice single post which links to them all.

The discussion mostly concerns the capabilities of text versus 3D graphics, representations of war, and indie production values, but also includes some specific stuff about the individual games. Enjoy(?)!(!?!)

War-based IF games as recommended by Emily Short

This is one of a series of interviews I conducted for my article about what text can say about war that AAA games can't. You can read the other interviews by clicking here.

Actually, it isn't so much an interview as a series of recommendations. I contacted Emily Short for this article because I don't know much about interactive fiction, and she, being about the most prominent name in contemporary IF, assuredly does. After booting up the text parser and explaining my idea, Emily gave me a long list of violent or war-related games, mercifully refraining from rising to a terrible joke about getting myself Informed.

When text games go to war, elsewhere

Somehow, against all odds, I have tricked left-leaning UK magazine The New Statesman to publish an article by me, John Brindle. In it, I examine several text-based war games which challenge the representation of war in mainstream games, and which manage to speak about that subject in ways that AAA can't. You can find it here.

Take 2007’s Rendition, whose title would not exist without the war on terror. Both the first two Modern Warfare games include "interrogation" sequences, once with a beating and once with electrodes. But where they coyly conceal the violence involved, Rendition makes you participate in awful detail. Try to leave the room and you’re told you haven’t done enough to Abdul. “Break Abdul’s toe,” you type, and the game replies: “Which do you mean? his left little toe, his left second toe, his left middle toe, his left fourth toe, his left big toe, his right little toe…” At this point, many players simply quit.

Below are some notes on what I think of the article and what others think of it.