Language Games: Clones

"I'm a clone, I know it and I'm fine."

After dabbling for a few years in writing my thoughts on games down in words and forms that other people could understand instead of keeping my feelings restrained exasperated abandoning of pads and grunts of joy/despair from in front of a screen in the safety of my own home, I've progressed onto tackling the idea of consistently trying to review games, and I'm starting to think about how hard it is to actually write about games well. Part of the issue resides in the idea that a game is inexplicably tied to its mechanics and presentation in a way that other mediums aren't (bear with me) and this poses a unique challenge to a reviewer, with three of the choice issues being: how do I explain these mechanics which at there most basic are “Push A to do B” without boring people, how do I separate the my inability to control a game well from the actual quality of the control scheme, and how do I talk about something that is mechanically similar to dozens of other titles without falling back on those titles?

I think these are all fairly interesting ideas so I decided to postulate a bit on them and write about them, and tackle them in three separate bits. Obviously I don't write for any big sites or anything, but these issues have cropped in my very basic communications about games with others, and are issues with the vocabulary around gaming that exists so far. So maybe there are examples of reviewers out there doing it right, or maybe I've missed communities where these issues are resolved through deft prose and delicate syntax, but as far as I'm aware that isn't the case. Anyway, onwards.

This album is forgotten

According to a recent BBC article, Nottingham is the second worst city in the UK for illegal downloads. the most shared artist in my fair city is Ed Sheeran. In fact, the entirety of the UK seem to think that they can't last without Sheeran in their lives, so they've decided to illegally download his album instead. I could go on about how I dislike Ed and his novelty micro-acoustic guitar, his beige demeanor, his MOR, milquetoast, pointless, translucent music, and his fan-base, who mistook his rendition of Wish You Were Here for a 'new track' of his at the Olympic Closing Ceremony (there is a special kind of stupid happening there, and it probably needs an entire post to get to the bottom of) but really I just wanted to use the article as a jumping off point for a bit of spiel.

A step away from misogyny

Games are for men, or more specifically they are for teenage boys. Despite surveys that tell us that the average gamer is around 30 years old and that 47 per cent of them are female the demographic that the majority of releases, be they triple A or bargain bucket, are aiming for a predominantly male teenage audience. With this week's furore over John Hemingway casually calling Borderlands 2's easy to co-op skilltree 'girlfriend mode', to the immature and frequently frightening responses in June to Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs Women Kickstarter project, it is clear that attitudes in the gaming world, including reluctance to address a female audience combined with the casual misogyny slowly bubbling away in male-dominated studios and awareness of these issues are causing focus to be more frequently placed on these subjects.

Whilst reactions remain varied from the audience, these community wide missteps have been covered extensively by other more prolific writers and I shall leave their deconstructions of the holistic issues aside to instead concentrate on a few of the games out there, those that can be viewed as partly progressive, and potentially even gender neutral, and how even a developer who gets it right can subsequently mess it up.

It's all to easy to simply lay blame equally across all titles and genres and point the finger indiscriminately, but there are titles that appear to have grasped the concept of gender neutrality, if only where it matters most: the player's avatar.