Why 'Videogames'?

The other day I had a conversation on Twitter with Adam Williamson about why I use the term ‘videogames’. You, the reader, have probably noticed that every so often someone suggests that we should use another word. The idea is that the word fails to adequately reflect a changing medium and needs to be replaced by one that can handle the job. Academics frequently use ‘digital games’’; Williamson has half-jokingly coined the term ‘digic’; I once preferred ‘computer game’ because it sounded more mature. Others have adopted ‘ractive’ from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, to the clear detriment of humanity (or at least the English-speaking parts). But I use 'videogames', and here's why.

The Political Uses of Fear

Edited screenshot from Lim, by Merritt Kopas

This post is in response to Blogs of the Round Table. Trigger warning for street harassment, passing anxiety, rape culture. 

Here in videogameland we relish fear like children relish Halloween. Actually, we relish Halloween like children relish Halloween. But our uses of fear are essentially escapist, even hedonistic: we lust after the adrenaline rush of shocks and frights and cathartic thrills like the psychologist in Psycho who has a little too much fun delivering the denouement. Games are very good at fear, too, though when we mention this it's usually just before we note how bad they are at ~*love*~. But that primal, animal emotion, that evolutionary hangover that cross-wires nuclear bombs with teeth and claws, is good for more than rollercoasters. It has political uses. By harnessing fear we can trap even the most privileged players in the frightening subjectivity of another. The scariest things are not the ghosts and goblins of seasonal kitsch, but the hidden, suppressed suffering our society produces as if it were a machine specifically constructed for that purpose.

Quizzical Play #1: How to Not Play Dishonored

This month, everyone except me has been playing Dishonored. I read the blog posts, watch the Let’s Plays, and fantasize about the choices I might make – but right now, £39.99 for a new release is the difference between making rent and borrowing money. At the same time, I can't bear to be left out of the blogging frenzy that's struck up around the game. So how can I write about Dishonored without having played it? Simple: maybe nobody else is playing it either.

Good Question: The Games of Pippin Barr

Art: Pippin Barr (with permission)

What do you call an unwinnable game that players can compete to lose the most often? Or a game about our experience of art that simultaneously denies us the chance to experience it and simulates it perfectly? Or a physics platformer in which having complete control of all physics variables – and seemingly utmost power over the game – still leaves you with quite conventional puzzles to solve? You might call them a bit of a joke. You might call them experiments in paradox. You might call them horse shit (which is your prerogative, I suppose). But you might just call them the games of Pippin Barr.

From Cyberspace to Composite: Two Fantasies of Hacking

Once upon a time, in the early years of the internet, nobody knew you were a dog.

In those days, nobody knew that I wasn’t really a 21-year-old graphic designer from Britain either. Every night, in the witching hour, I would sneak down to my father’s study, furtively unlock the door, and spend all night flirting on IRC with well-built Australian women. Tom Brindle had left the key in the lock once after losing a particularly savage drinking contest to our mother, and I cycled the three miles into town to get a copy cut. From then on, it didn’t matter who ‘sat’ on my ‘lap’ or what weird shit I wanked to, because it happened in a place as placeless and secret as Narnia.

Watching the trailer for Ubisoft’s forthcoming Watch Dogs reminded me of those nights because I feel sure they couldn’t have come from the same planet. Ubi’s game belongs to the world of Foursquare, Girls Around Me, and geotagged Twitter posts, where I can sit on a train and watch my best friend’s kid nephew’s tween Twitter spats. But I didn’t get social networking until I was 18 and didn’t ‘get’ it for another year after that. My adventures took place in the world of another hacking game: Introversion’s 2001 classic Uplink. Existing more than a decade apart, these games represent two very different fantasies of what role technology plays in our lives.

Conference Report: GameCamp

At a lecture given to the RSA, Everything Bad Is Good For You author Steven Johnson asked: “Where do good ideas come from?” In five minutes he outlined a theory that the most fertile environment for ideas is one where they can meet, bounce off each other and joyfully breed – where half-formed hunches can combine through conversation to emerge as beautiful butterflies. That’s why the coffee houses were the intellectual centre of 18^th century London - and it's also why GameCamp is a good idea.

Reality is Beastly: when videogames meet thirteenth century heresy

In a parallel universe, I start this article by declaring how sodding tired I am of games about the 13^th-century Catharite heresy and its persecution by the Catholic Church. Sadly, in this world, there is only L’Abbaye Des Morts. Dealing with a dark and obscure annex of European history, creator Locomalito opts for the dark and obscure conventions of classic insta-death platformers like Manic Miner. But because of how it uses these conventions, it is – delightfully – not just a game about the Cathars, but a Catharite game.

We have a Tumblr, apparently

Not content with stinking up this blog, my malodorous brother Jimmy Brindle has established a Brindle Family tumblr on which she is reposting our articles alongside pwetty pictures, along with a bunch of original content and her general 'thoughts' (ha!) on videogames. You can 'follow' her there, and 'reblog' her, and 'ask' her, and do all kinds of social media things, if that's to your taste. Hopefully this will keep her busy at a safe distance, and if you are coming here from Tumblr...welcome! Please ignore everything I just said about your social network, I'm sure it's lovely.

I Will Eat You And Everything You Love: Metal Gear Solid 3

In 2007, the Brindle family fortune was divided equally between each brother, there being no will to determine otherwise. Last month, however, one of us – I’m not saying who – claimed to have uncovered just such a document in one of Tom Brindle’s old filing cabinets. After the initial brouhaha, expert analysis and cryptographic elbow grease eventually confirmed that the document was merely an invoice to a long-dead developer for selling them the concept of ‘escort missions’. Anyway, that’s why there haven’t been any posts for a while. We’re back now, I guess. What else are we going to do?

I wanted to respond specifically to Bunbury’s post about Metal Gear Solid. There,  he argues that the game benefits the more it resembles Pac-Man, and claims that stealth games – and games generally – are better when their rules and mechanics are explicit, clear,  known. That may be so, but to me, it’s Metal Gear Solid 3 that most resembles Pac-Man – because it’s all about eating.