Tag Archives: Joseph Hilgard

Horror Done Right: Horror as a Pejorative

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Karl Parakenings

“…there are all these games in which your health regenerates after a while but they aren’t about finding shelter or moving from one point of cover to another. they’re just there because they’re cruft that’s been accumulated. a lot of what contemporary video games are is the accumulation of that cruft. it’s all borrowed material that’s been completely divorced from its original context. we’re not looking carefully at our history, we’re just taking the shiny thing and running with it.” -Anna Anthropy, interviewed at ctrl-alt-defeat May 1st, 2012 A great deal has been made lately of ‘evoking emotions in players’ by game developers and the writers who love the games. The recent Lone Survivor by Jasper Byrne spends a fair bit of time trying to get under your skin in familiar ways. Players commonly remember Silent Hill 2 and 3 as the last great horror games, with pretenders such as F.E.A.R. and Continue reading →

Posted in Features , Horror Done Right | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Simple Machines: Legend of Grimrock and the Joys of Coherent Design

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Joseph Hilgard

By Joseph Hilgard “Video games are one of the few remaining artforms where there is an empirical positive correlation between budget and quality.” – The single dumbest thing anybody said to me about video games, ever. Legend of Grimrock is … Continue reading →

Posted in Criticism , Reviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Mind’s Eye: In Defence of Subjectivity

Posted on May 1, 2012 by Alan Williamson

I learned the joy of owning a ZX Spectrum this week, but I’ve never played one. I felt the connection between Dear Esther and the end of a relationship I never had. I understood the fear of being an inadequate mother, although I am not a parent. It’s easy to see how a piece entitled “What’s wrong with game reviews?” would provoke games writers, especially those who subscribe to New Games Journalism, but Joseph Hilgard’s essay contradicts what I believe about the value of subjectivity in games writing.

Hilgard and I are both psychologists, and we both focus on video games. My undergraduate dissertation studied non-verbal behaviour differences in violent and non-violent games. Even with a science background, it is a mistake to treat game reviewing as an exact science, something that can be dissected and analysed, assigned scores and scales. There is no ‘Five Factor Model’ of gaming. That approach reminds me of when game review magazines had entire columns dedicated to scores: giving games separate marks for their gameplay and graphic fidelity which didn’t count towards an overall score. Continue reading →

Posted in Critical Conversation , Criticism | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , psychology , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

What’s Wrong With Game Reviews?

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Joseph Hilgard

What’s wrong with game reviews? I could complain what a useless measure game scores have become, since the current range of 8-10 scores is too restricted to have any meaning. Imagine how difficult it would be to talk about height if everybody’s height was described as a number between eight and ten. Worse, I find that the most interesting games tend to score in about the 85s, so imagine that sometimes people who were 10 feet tall were actually shorter than people who were eight feet tall. Even if the range of scores were better distributed, though, it still seems like the least interesting titles would still rise to the top. Why is that? Continue reading →

Posted in Criticism , Features , Round Table | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Not Just Solid Food, But Real Food

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Joseph Hilgard

by Joseph Hilgard I was excited to see that John Walker wrote a piece calling for more mature games. My excitement faded, however, when I saw that he approached this admirable goal in completely the wrong way – talking about … Continue reading →

Posted in Criticism , Features | Tagged , , , , | 26 Comments