Content warning: This article contains screenshots and topics that aren’t at all nice to read. Particularly, reactionary opinions on the subject of reproductive rights. Proceed with discretion, or go back to the main article.
Continue reading Onda Verde: Annexes (Negative Response and Memes)
Update: We did it! We released the game. Thank you so much to everyone who participated. You can play it on the following link: Onda verde at Itch.io.
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Today in Matajuegos we’re announcing the free, safe, and legal web game, Onda verde (Green wave), to be released this August 8th in support of the march for the right to free, safe, and legal abortion in Argentina.
Our game is going to depict a march towards the Argnetinean Congress, and we need virtual protesters. Go to the link up there and send us a 100×100 px image with a transparent background. It can be a drawing of yourself protesting or a made up character.
We hope you can come!
Last year I wrote a couple of paragraphs on the goals I would have in mind if I were to travel to San Francisco to attend GDC 2018, this year’s edition of maybe the most important and certainly the biggest conference on videogame development.
Inspired by the Matajuegos mission statement, I wrote that Continue reading Workers of the Videogames, Unite!
A lot of people detest spoilers. When you’re in no hurry to watch a certain movie, but you know you have to go see it because if anybody tells you how it ends you’re not gonna to be able to enjoy it. Or when a new season of a show you like just came out on Netflix, and you have to tread carefully on social media. Bear in mind that you can save this video, buy the game, try it out for as long as you want and then come back if you feel like it. My accent’s not gonna get any better, but I’ll still be here. Continue reading Getting Over It with David Marchand
For some minutes he had been watching the Tower of Art […] As is the case with many things that are totally familiar, he hadn’t really looked at it for years.
Guards! Guards! (Terry Pratchett, 1989)
The first game by Daniel “Managore” Linssen I played was his metroidvania birdsong (2014). The game’s main appeal, in at least two ways, is its camera. The first way is the clearest: the viewport encompasses Continue reading Windows, borders and defamiliarization in Daniel Linssen’s games
…we can imagine ways to fix Monopoly – either rewarding players who are behind to keep them within a reasonable distance of the leaders, or making progress more difficult for rich players. Or course – this might impact the game’s ability to recreate the reality of monopoly practices – but reality isn’t always “fun”.
MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research
Hunicke, LeBlanc y Zubek, 2004
Game criticism always goes back to the question of what’s the purpose of games. The answer has to be complex because not every game has the same goal, and different players look for different things (sometimes in the same games).
For common sense, there is no complexity to it: the purpose of all games is to produce fun, and the player is always looking for new ways to escape from their mundane reality. Sooner or later one encounters different forms of this escapist idea as a justification for criticism being unnecessary, since criticism often explores the juncture where games and reality are more closely related. Criticism is then left in the awkward position of arguing that many games couldn’t care less if their players are having fun, which is true yet counterintuitive.
Continue reading The Real Escapist Was Houdini: Molleindustria and Games for Facing Reality
It can be annoying when people who don’t know the first thing about videogames claim that games can’t say anything relevant on a human level. Still, those are people we can ignore. In my experience writing about games, the true pebble in the shoe are those who know them very well, yet decide we can only take a game’s message seriously if we’re going to praise it. If, instead, we intend to criticize a game for its message being toxic, then the game’s only purpose is to entertain, and all criticism is an overreaction.
The logic behind this defensive attitude is full of false assumptions: that only some or a few games convey any message at all, that a piece of entertainment must by definition have nothing to say, that if criticisms were correct players would replicate in-game actions in real life, that you can make art without your pesky subjectivity getting in the way, that freedom of artistic expression means toxic ideas are above scrutiny.
We’ve all played a game that is simply too much fun to touch. A thing whooshes when you move it, two things wiggle as they push into each other, it all feels alive and reacts to the controls with glee. There might be many things that make the game good (or bad), but just interacting with it on a superficial level you already feel like a baby who can’t look away from the flashing lights of a toy, or the song it plays.
Some game designers call this “juice”. You can define it as “tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input”. A game can be juicy, and most games should be juicy, or so the saying goes. Another saying goes, “Game design is quite hard and it’s impossible to give broad statements that are true for everything, but adding juiciness to your game makes your game better 100% of the time”. Continue reading Minimal input games and the exploration of juice
Genre is a slippery concept. Audiences tend to think of genres as separate shelves where every book, every movie, every song has a definitive place. In videogames, this is reinforced every time a company capitalizes on our shelving compulsion to sell us stuff, or every time an indie hit spawns a thousand derivative games, giving birth to a genre that is more an awkward formula for success than an organic system of expressive devices.
I’m about to tell you how refreshing it feels when I come across what feels like a True Genre, however absurd or insignificant it might be, but don’t let anybody define “genre” for you. Games are experiences. You’re not supposed to buy into marketing-born, feature-based experience classifications. I mean, you are, in fact, but what I’m trying to say is: don’t. Continue reading Asdfasd
Photographs can’t lie, can they? I mean of course they could, but they look like they wouldn’t. We do associate them with proof, after all. Why is that? I bet it’s the mechanical aspect of it. We see a machine, eating light through a lens then excreting an image. Where could a lie hide there? Light wouldn’t lie and neither would a machine, much less excrement of any kind. Only people lie, and they weren’t a part of the process.
Except they were, of course. People built the machine. They chose what light to feed it. They… did things to the excrement. Continue reading Vernacular