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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade, 2007-2017: The Complete ListAlright, here they are. These are my fifty most highly-recommended games of the decade. It is, admittedly, an unusually demarcated decade, stretching from October 10, 2007 to October 10, 2017, as a way of celebrating the 10th anniversary of the release of Portal. Happy birthday, Portal. Enjoy the cake. Again, I make no claims that these fifty games are…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: EndingsA week ago, I laid out that videogames typically have bad pacing. Did I also mention that videogames far too frequently to have bad endings, too? No? Well, they do. So often, in fact, that I can lay out five distinct schools of bad videogame endings. Below, I list out those five traps of videogame endings,…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: Mood
I’ve already compiled a list of games that make me deliriously happy and agape with wonder. But not all art aims to create positive emotions such as these. Much to the continued consternation of aesthetic philosophers, human beings have been proven, time and time again, to also like art that makes them sad, that makes…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: DelightA couple years back, I wrote a dissertation on Heidegger and videogames. This was, from the outset, a contradictory endeavor. Heidegger would not have liked videogames. Already in his lifetime, Heidegger did not like the cultural changes brought about by newly emerging digital technologies. “Cybernetics transforms language into an exchange of news,” he wrote in 1972,…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: IntimacyThe games in my “ambition” category all “aimed big.” They tried to simulate the daily lives of an entire community, or put the entire history of videogame storytelling in their satirical sights. This category can be seen as the reverse of that. If my “ambition” games were large in scope, these games are small. They are cozier,…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: Sense of PlaceI will shock no one by saying that videogames, like architecture, sculpture, or gardening, have the potential to be a richly spatial art form. It has been twenty years now since Janet Murray, after playing DOOM (id Software, 1993), reported that “the fluid navigation through the enormous three-dimensional spaces was rapturous in itself.”[i] It has been nearly as…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: StakesIt has become a set of dual clichés: in videogames, you either save the princess, or you save the world. Those are the only sets of storytelling stakes offered. The only things that can imbue our actions with importance is to tie our success or failure to the fate of humankind, or the fate of a…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: CharactersFalstaff. Miss Havisham. Anton Chigurh. Much like yesterday’s category, today’s sub-list is partially a lament that baseline competency in storytelling seemed so long unachievable in games. Defending games as a potential storytelling medium seemed like a silly project, as the games stories had opted to tell just simply weren’t very good. Good stories need good characters. Creating…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: AmbitionIt was important for me to immediately follow up my elegance sub-list with one on ambition. There’s a simple reason for this: these two are often incompatible. The games on here are among the most rough-hewn of all the games I’m listing. In terms of visuals and audio, I would have to admit that two of them…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade: EleganceEven those who would reject the idea that videogames are an “art form” could agree that games can exhibit certain traditional aesthetic values. One prominent one is elegance. If we look toward traditional, analogue games, it seems inarguable to me that Go is elegant, and that Chess is elegant. Over the course of centuries, the tumbler…
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Continue reading →: Games of the Decade, 2007–2017Wait … what? Who does that? Who makes a decade-long retrospective in a year ending in anything but a 9? And who publishes a retrospective in any month but December? Well, I do. And I have my reasons for it. Chief among these is that the true purpose of any “best of” list is to be wrong…
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Continue reading →: Worlds Viewed: Spring BreakersOne of my long-standing dreams is to teach a class on cinema and the concept of world. It’s a topic that runs through the writings of numerous film theorists. (Possible readings would include Stanley Cavell, André Bazin, Annette Michelson, V. F. Perkins, Parker Tyler, Daniel Yacavone, and Jennifer Barker.) It is also, frankly, one that I have…
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Continue reading →: 1-Year Anniversary of the BlogI first established Intermittent Mechanism in 2015. At the time, I conceived of it purely as a blog for hosting my classes’ student projects. I have gradually added to it since then, beefing it up a bit every academic job market cycle. It wasn’t until September 17, 2016, though, that I posted my first lesson plan.…
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Continue reading →: Wow, I’m Old: Syndromes and a CenturyI no longer remember the exact date at which I first saw Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006). I do know that it was at a screening at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which screened all of the films made for the New Crowned Hope Festival sometime in the first week of September 2007.…
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Continue reading →: On Ones (and Zeroes): A Tribute to Hannah Frank
Today, the friends, family, and colleagues of Hannah Frank held a special Chicago memorial for her, hosted at the University of Chicago. I already wrote quite a bit about Hannah in the past two weeks, so for my presentation at this memorial I decided to do something different: a short found-footage celebration of Hannah’s audiovisual…
