report

Also, Kieron- you crazy bugger, I watched that Strawberry Switchblade vid you posted link to and it drove me nuts, it was like Siouxsie and the Banshees doing Playschool… :)

report

Cool, I’m big on Mr Spector I shall look forward to it.

report

(If I may unnecessarily throw in my 2 cents, perhaps a game may just appeal to critics more than to us commoners? Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me for a variety of reasons, certainly happens with movies all the time.)

report

I don’t presume anything personal – I think he’s just annoyed by the Bioshock piece and wanted to take it apart, as is his right. I do sense that he’s angrier than he’d admit to being though. Which is also fine, as it was the article was a bit of an irritant.

KG

report

I’m also not too sure where he gets this idea that ‘game design isn’t taught in our colleges and universities’ because there are plenty of game design courses out there, or why he believes that there needs to be ‘a centralized school of thought on game design’. Once you have conformity you have nowhere to go creatively. Within any design field there are always some basic tried and tested rules, but beyond that ,how you go is up to your imagination and budget.

report

Fyfe’s other writing on Bioshock is cool too (my opinion having nothing to do with the fact he says the sort of things I think about it, of course)
I’d like to see the end of the “backlash” description, particularly where people characterise it as some sort of subconcious ecounterbalancing, be it over a film or game. Having been arguably involved with it it’s a pathetically inadequate term what what was going on. People were bitching about bioshock from the get go, and as more people played it more people found the same problems.
To do a reverse characterisation; it is as though the journalists views are self evidently correct and any criticism is just the commoners hooting to feel better about their position, the illusion of free will continued through the excercise of dissent while the reality does not change ( a sad failing of the less self aware human mind), not because there’ is anything actually wrong with the official record of the game’s greatness.
That’s just a bit of invective which seems appropriate to being on the end of, effectively, a groupthink tag. I do think ‘backlashes’ of public opinion are a phenomeneon of social life, but it’s dismissive to call “Bioshock v Internet” one.
(I should add, this is also nothing to do with KGs article, which I found to be just trying to point out the good and interesting things about it so that people don’t forget. It went a bit far here and there with its textual analysis, if you ask me, but that’s life)

report

Maybe they’ll just have to edit Soul Calibur so you’re fighting with increasingly deadly sticks of celery or some such.

The Clucking Fist is such a buffoon, he still hasn’t realised that every time he goes on a publicity blitz, his natural dislikability causes Labour to slump in the polls.

report

(I think he has better points – at least to think about and argue against – in his other articles, admittedly.)

KG

report

The PM went on: “I am very worried about video and computer games.

“No one wants censorship or an interfering State.

“But the industry has some responsibility to society and needs to exercise that.”

So no Soul Calibur IV release in the UK then? I expect he’ll be levying similar concerns at all movies featuring anyone wielding a blade, and certainly all books.

report

He does have other articles on the site, a feminist essay and some others, and I believe he is working on a colection of essays for Bioshock. I’m not sure I was that impressed by the feminism one, it didn’t quite ask the right questions so much as state obvious facts from the game and his definition of the gaze was missing a crucial element. But I admire the time and effort he is putting in to it and he is at least attempting to create a meaningful discourse with the medium and is not afraid to put his thoughts out there, which is a good thing as is engaging with other peoples articles and trying to examine them.

I enjoyed reading the fallout diary too. It was interesting to see how they will rationalise certain aspects of the game. I personally think it is a positive article, whatever peoples personal views on how the faction should be represented what it does show is that they are putting a lot of thought into the game and into the environment within it.

report

report