Remowned

As some of you may know, I currently serve as Editor-at-Large at industry trade publication Gamasutra.  Today, we ran a piece of mine looking at the idea of subtext in games, with an examination of titles such as Half-Life, Grand Theft Auto, Ico, No More Heroes, Full Throttle, and BioShock.  Here’s an excerpt:

On the surface, Full Throttle is a badass neo-noir biker murder thriller with hard rock music (on that level alone it is already more novel than most game premises), but underneath it is a melancholy reflection on the American frontier and the inevitability of invasive industrialization.

If you have any interest in a dialogue- and puzzle-driven game, Full Throttle isn’t overbearing or preachy in the least, but there’s a lot to chew on. Its subtext is essentially literary, hinging on classic themes of American fiction.

If you like, go check out the whole thing.

A little while back, some Shackers entered a contest whose entrance requirements were to write lyrics for a song about video games–the criteria were pretty open, the entries just had to have verses and maybe some choruses. Song stuff.

Anyway, quadeh’s entry won, and I wrote and recorded a song based on his lyrics, as well as the lyrics of several other entries. For reasons I no longer recall, the content never really officially wrapped up, but I did release a few tracks to the Shack community. Today, out of the blue, I cleaned up my recording of quadeh’s song a bit, and now you can listen to the new and improved version here.

It can be streamed above, or downloaded directly. Entitled “Gordon’s Crowbar Blues,” it chronicles the early exploits of everyone’s favorite theoretical physicist button pusher/homicidal maniac.

PapaBoo, a non-gamer playing through the seminal first-person shooter Half-Life, soldiers on. Now his exploits are being documented at the dedicated web domain howdoiplaygame.com, which anyone who is familiar with hardcore games should be sure to read right away. He is now supplementing his descriptions of in-game progress with screenshots.

If you are unfamiliar with PapaBoo’s Black Mesa journey, start from the beginning. What is most fascinating is how he is beginning to think in the context of what the game demands, having started his play session with absolutely no existent framework for FPS games. Coincidentally, just today I was thinking about when I first played Half-Life way back in 1998. It was a borderline revelatory experience, unlike any shooter I had played. Many of its demands were uncommon for the genre. Still, though, I had a familiarity with shooters in general, and my experience with adventure games and other types of video games gave me a baseline for video game logic, which is somewhat tangential to real world logic.

PapaBoo, of course, does not have that foundation. His experiences are priceless, because they are so uncommon–I doubt many non-gamers take their first voyage into the world of full 3D interactive worlds by way of something like Half-Life. (more…)