Beyond Angry Birds

Here is an interesting thought: Of the two most literarily compelling video games I played this year, one (Sword & Sworcery) incorporates maybe four pages of text total and the other (Surviving High School) is intended for the driver’s-ed crowd. Exactly how damning is it that both games feature characters that play more fascinatingly against type than virtually all of the committee-written games that emerge from the other side of big-budget game development? Utterly and completely damning, I would argue. I would also argue that it suggests that the problems of so many narrative games are not, at the end of the day, terribly complicated. Maybe they are not problems at all but rather ordinary failures of human imagination.

Source: Grantland
Published: Aug 4, 2011
Length: 17 minutes (4,430 words)

Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia: Part Two

I threw myself into my training. It was nice to have a diversion from how I usually spent my days, which was basically me attempting to quantify, to the highest degree of accuracy, the true magnitude of my failures — their mass, volume, and specific gravity. It passed the time in the absence of hobbies. Sure, I worked on my nagging sense of incompleteness a lot, when I had a spare moment, but that was more of a calling than a hobby. The World Series of Poker was my intro to the world of mano-a-mano competition. I’d never been much of an athlete. Perhaps if there had been a sport centered around lying on your couch in a neurotic stupor all day, I’d have taken an interest. I attacked my training on three fronts:

Source: Grantland
Published: Jul 21, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,444 words)

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Couldn’t Lose

Oral history of NBC’s “Friday Night Lights.” “I was really worried. Connie and Kyle developed a very flirtatious, precocious relationship right off the bat. And Kyle, of course, is married. They announced they were going to drive to Austin together from L.A. to move out, and I threw myself in front of that bus. I said it was a horrible idea for multiple reasons. They ignored me. Connie dismissively told me she knew what she was doing and she didn’t need my advice. I was convinced they would be having some torrid affair by the time they reached Santa Fe and Kyle’s marriage would be over by the time they got to Austin. I was wrong about that, thank God.”

Source: Grantland
Published: Jul 14, 2011
Length: 26 minutes (6,580 words)

Renée Richards Wants to be Left Alone

“No, no, no, no,” she says now, at age 76, sitting in her cozy examining room. Her voice is a rasp; her sweater is pink. She is surrounded by autographed photos of Martina Navratilova and Virginia Wade. “That was not my intention. It’s not so much the idea that I wanted to be a pioneer and a standard-bearer. It was a much more selfish reason. I’d gone through such an upheaval in my life, and they’re telling me I can’t play tennis? Suddenly I said to myself, ‘I can do anything any other woman is entitled to do. How dare they?'”

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 26, 2011
Length: 19 minutes (4,809 words)

Immigrant Misappropriations: The Importance of Ichiro

The seat was in Area 51, the section of bleachers directly behind the right-field fence that still serves as the unofficial Japanese cheering section. An older Japanese couple sat to my right. Both wore blindingly white Ichiro jerseys and flat-billed Mariners caps. They nodded, using the jerky, polite motion that many older Japanese use when greeting young Americans, and the husband offered me a bite of his plate of garlic fries. When I said, “No, thank you,” his wife smiled, revealing a gold canine tooth that reminded me, strangely enough, of a photo of my great-grandmother taken when she lived on an orchard in what is now North Korea, a few years before the Japanese occupation during World War II that forced her to flee to the South.

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 14, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,125 words)

Press X for Beer Bottle: On L.A. Noire

Interactivity sabotages storytelling. There is no longer any use arguing to the contrary. Thus, the story of L.A. Noire can never be good — at least, not in the way it is trying to be. As a story, then, L.A. Noire is not successful. As a game, too, L.A. Noire fails. In a lot of ways, it is a terrible game: frustratingly arbitrary, puzzlingly noncommunicative, and not very fun. But I love L.A. Noire. I think it’s fantastic. What this suggests is that we need a new name for whatever it is that L.A. Noire does.

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 9, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,052 words)

Three-Man Weave

In this particular game, a team won with only three players on the floor. And this was not a “metaphorical” victory or a “moral” victory: They literally won the game, 84-81, finishing the final 66 seconds by playing three-on-five. To refer to this as a David and Goliath battle devalues the impact of that cliché; it was more like a blind, one-armed David fighting Goliath without a rock. Yet there was no trick to this win and there was no deception — the team won by playing precisely how you’d expect. The crazy part is that it worked.

Source: Grantland
Published: Jun 8, 2011
Length: 8 minutes (2,048 words)