Monday, August 4, 2014

Gaming Round-Up: August 4, 2014



Interview:  Kelly Kelley, one of the top female FPS pro gamers, explains why it's hard for female gamers to join eSports "Boys Club." "I want to play against the best, which are with the boys.' But unfortunately it’s just so hard to even play against them when you just want to even scrim. They won’t even scrim you because they look at you as a joke because you're a girl. All in all, it's just uneven. If you even have the resemblance of a woman, they won’t give you a chance at all."

News: Guardians of the Galaxy skins to appear in Minecraft. Squee!

Are these really the 25 Top RPGs of the Last Five Years?  The Escapist thinks so.

Cosmo Wright narrates an 18 minute 10 second speedrun of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. It includes descriptions and histories of many of the glitches and hacks required to complete the game. Behold.

The HBO Documentary Love Child about the 2010 death of a 3-month-old baby, Sarang, who died of malnourishment in 2010 while her parents were out playing video games at a PC bang, or Internet cafe, will examine the ethics of video game design and addiction.  But Can a Baby's Death Tell Us Anything About Video Game Addiction?  In an interview with Yahoo Tech, director Valerie Veatch even says that she and her crew met with and interviewed the couple, but didn’t include the footage, which seems like it would be kind of important, in the documentary.  "Still, the film raises important questions about how people react when presented with virtually unlimited high-speed Internet and immersive gaming worlds where they feel that they can shed their regular identity and become something else."  According to Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post,  "“Love Child” will not provide reassurance for anyone who hopes that regulating or even outright banning video games would provide a balm to a host of social ills. But policymakers should take a lesson from the film anyway, and remember that when something terrible involving an obsessive gamer happens, video games are more likely a symptom of larger issues than a cause."

How a transgender "foreign hope" is challenging the pro Starcraft world is an A.V. Club writeup about Starcraft II pro Sasha "Scarlett" Hostyn.  Meet Scarlett, North America's Top ranked Starcraft player. A complex, real-time strategy game with exquisitely balanced opposing forces, Starcraft is so popular that men can and do make a career out of playing the game. All but one of the top 20 ranked players in the world live and play in Korea. And all of them are men. So maybe it is not surprising that Scarlett, a 20 year-old transgender woman from Canada , is making huge waves in the gaming community.

On Infinite Lives, Jenn Frank uses the lack of a pause button in Destiny as a jumping-off point to discuss her feelings of guilt, frustration and resentment of being made into a “Game Widow,” and talks about how design choices in games can put real strain on personal relationships.

Joe Donnelly of IGN asks Is Online Co-Op the Future of Video Games?

At Paste, Maddy Myers admonishes game designers to take another look at Metroid and Alien if they intend to make Metroidvanias. It’s not enough, she argues, to borrow mechanical tropes and conventions, or even to feature a playable woman protagonist in your winding space platformers without also acknowledging the “aesthetic and tonal success” of Metroid’s and Alien‘s universes respectively.

At Polygon, Brianna Wu discusses The daily harassment of women in the game industry.  "It’s telling that men in the gaming industry, or simply commentators, refuse to listen to the reality of these situations and try to help. They’d rather talk over women and convince themselves of a fictional reality that’s more comforting."  Sadly, the article's comments were disables, but there's some great conversation on the piece over at Metafilter and across Twitter.  This is all coming on the back end of a terrible few weeks as great journalists have been basically driven out of gaming, including Maddy Myers and Samantha Allen, because they dared to question the video game boys club.


The music in Supergiant Games’ Transistor is incredibly beautiful – and now you can listen to (or buy!) the extended version of the soundtrack. Yes please. (via Joystiq)

In "There and Back Again: A Wizard's Tale," Feminist gamer/producer Tifa Robles writes candidly about her journey in, out, and around the world of competitive gaming. "As a single woman, I received a lot of attention. ... It felt that I was either pissing people off with my bubbly attitude or breaking hearts. All that said, the most difficult part of all was having everyone think I was bad at Magic simply by looking at me—and them being right. This was by far what drove me the most."

At Wired, Chris Kohler attempts to choose The 8 Best Sprites in Videogame History.


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