videogaming (this is why we)

Highway of Death revisited

Imperialism, videogaming (this is why we), War on Iraq
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The latest Call of Duty has taken the infamous massacre of fleeing Iraqi soldiers and civilians from Kuwait back in 1991 and made it into a war crime perpetrated by the Russians.

Call of Duty screenshot:

Only a few weeks ago I watched Rambo for the first time. I’d watched First Blood years ago and that turned out to be a decent if rightwing revenge fantasy that made sure to show how hollow revenge was and had Rambo lose at the end. I’d never watched Rambo because, well, it looked like it was a dumb power fantasy about going back to ‘Nam and finally get to kick commie butt without any of the complexities that made the first movie so interesting. And indeed Rambo turned out to be just what I expected, except much dumber. The enemy is cartoonishly evil, a beautiful Vietnamese ally dies to underscore Rambo’s greatness and lines like “Do we get to win this time” are uttered with a hilarious sincerity by Stallone. the only thing funnier in all of this was knowing Rambo III was dedicated to the people who’d blow up the WTC two decades later.

Obviously silly as Rambo was, it’s Nobel Prize material compared to what Call of Duty did. To just boldly take one of the most notorious war crimes of the first Gulf War, fictionalise it and flip it so that it was the old Cold War enemy did it is dumber than anything the Rambo series ever got up to. Even for a brogamer first person shooter like Call of Duty it’s beyond the pale. Bad enough to have the developers recycle other people’s suffering as background material for your game. But blatantly rewriting your own war crimes so you can still be the good guys? That’s disgusting on a whole other level.

Graham, Graham, Graham Glinner — there really is no one dimmer

Feminism, Gender, LGBT, video, videogaming (this is why we)
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Graham Linehan has been mentioned here before, but now we’ve got a new person more mature than our Glinner and his very normal obsession with trans women. Twitch streamer Hbomberguy got pissed off so much at Glinner’s attempt to defund the trans youth charity Mermaids he decided to start a stream to raise money for it:



So far he’s managed to raise over £250,000 for Mermaids and made tens of thousands of people aware of how much of a transphobic knob Glinner is. Who said gamers were all trash?

“Our protagonists, our characters, can be anyone.”

videogaming (this is why we)
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Elsinore with black Ophelia

Katie Chironis is the team lead and writer for Elsinore and for Gamasutra she wrote about how her team approached diversity in the game:

Elsinore is an adventure game set in the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet – which places it, historically, in 16th century Denmark. Since we began work on the project a year or so ago, I’ve shown the playtest build to family, friends, and strangers alike. After they’re done playing, intermingled with their feedback on gameplay, they often point to Ophelia and ask: Why is she black?

My answer is always the same: Why shouldn’t she be?

Which to me at least is sufficient answer. If anything has shown its adaptability it’s Shakespeare after all, but there are always morons who want to argue the toss about the plausibility of a black woman in 16th century Europe. Hence Chironis’ focus on historical research, even though the game itself isn’t very historical. It’s easy to nitpick her argument in the context of her own game, (as seen in the MeFi thread here), but that misses the point she’s making. Games need to be more brave at embracing diversity and not whitewash history, not cling to a faux-historical perspective that can’t see anybody but white men be assassins or knights.

Long Live the Queen — HA!

videogaming (this is why we)
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Loading screen from Long Live the Queen

Kim Nguyen plays Long Live the Queen

Hanako Games’ Long Live the Queen is a princess story all about facets and demanding respect. You play as Princess Elodie, who must replace her late mother as queen by the end of the year. It’s a princess power fantasy where you learn all about Elodie’s world so that she may navigate politics both at home and abroad and survive attempts on her life. It’s a brutal game, as you learn how to progress by failing and/or dying repeatedly. It’s maddening for perfectionists.

skills menu from Long Live the Queen

Long Live the Queen is one of those deceptively simple spreadsheet simulator games where the appeal is that it is really, horribly, unfairly difficult. Basically the only decisions you can take is what classes to send Elodie to, how she spends her weekend to help change her mood to get bonuses in her classes and hope you can take the right decisions during the cut scenes, which is when all the action happens. Some of the crisis events are triggered, some are random, some unavoidable but all you can only prepare for either by accident or because you’ve played it before and died. (Unless you cheated and had the wiki open next to it.)

Elodie looking depressed from Long Live the Queen

Not a game with much of a visual glamour going on, so if that’s your bag, this is not for you. At best you get scenes like this, with princess Elodie looking at you depressed, angry or happy depending on her exact mood. All the real interest is in beating the story, which has set you up for failure. Having played it for a couple of hours, I can say it’s really frustrating to be blindsided by something you have recovery of; it needs an entirely different mindset to play than the sort of game I normally play, where there’s always room to correct a mistake you make. Here, you die and have to restart.

An all too familiar ending from Long Live the Queen

So instead you have to find out the perfect combination of skill training and luck to make it through the crisises that hound you and hope the game has mercy on you. But it probably won’t.