Recommended Reading #1

When I created Acclaimed Video Games, I had no intention of turning it into a link blog. However, seeing as this site explicitly deals with video game criticism, it makes sense to occasionally highlight some interesting examples of video game journalism. Additionally, as 'the List' section of this blog will be updated much less frequently in the months to come (the next major update will be in December / January at the earliest), this semi-regular feature will offer some new content in the meantime. This is not going to be an exhaustive project. I do not read thousands of pages of game related content a day and am therefore in no position to offer my take on the 'best criticism' published within an arbitrary time frame. The pieces I single out are just things that I have stumbled across that I happen to like. They are divided into 'contemporary' and 'classic' sections. Note that I use 'classic' as a synonym for 'old' and not as a reflector of quality.

For the inaugural edition, I offer an installment in Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Dark Futures series, which is about the future of the 'immersive sim' video game ten years after Deus Ex. This is the fifth part in the series and it takes the form of an essay by game director Clint Hocking. Hocking is an interesting and valuable commentator because, unlike the vast majority of game critics and designers, he appears to have an understanding of art and cultural history beyond Hollywood action movies and science fiction films. Mr. Hocking is a believer in authorial irrelevance and, hence, he appears to advocate a future where game developers cede control of their creations to the player, in much the same way John Cage championed indeterminate musical compositions in the 1940s and 1950s. Personally, I would love to see what the video game equivalent of 4'33" would be.

Elsewhere, Chris Lepine's article about the assumptions we make about control schemes, at a time when the the control mechanisms of video games have seen, perhaps, their most radical changes in history, is a fascinating, but brief, exploration of a topic that I had never really thought about. I also present two articles about the importance of gaming history: Evan Stubbs' piece is about history's relevance to designers, while Michael Abbott's (from a year ago and linked in the Stubbs article) is about the appeal of older games to a new generation of gamers.

Finally, I have an older article about the convergence of two interests of mine: video games and dandyism. Denis Farr writes about the roles that the dandy character most commonly plays in video games (mostly JRPGs) from a gender theory perspective. I quite like the article, but it qualifies the term 'dandy' in a rather broad way, meaning that Farr's characterization of the dandy appears simplistic and could leave a person who is unfamiliar with dandyism with the wrong idea about what a dandy is (see Dandyism.net, where I first learned of Farr's piece). Still, since the piece is about video games first and dandyism second, this is an excusable shortcoming and one that only about 1% of the potential readers would care about anyway.

Contemporary
Clint Hocking on Deus Ex, the immersive sim and the Cagean future of video games
The Changing Nature of Gaming Interfaces by Chris Lepine
Learning from History by Evan Stubbs

Classics
Evergreen Games by Michael Abbott
Who you callin' macaroni? by Denis Farr