Worth Reading: 11/21/2014

Tick-tock. Tick-tock. When this article publishes, we'll be one week away from gathering in San Francisco for this year's game of the year deliberations. It's hard to imagine 2014 has come and gone so quickly, but the annual recording of yelling, debating, and mental exhaustion is upon us.

The whole Giant Bomb crew will be in the bay area for the festivities, too. That's a lot of people to be talking about the year's best games, but it should be really fun, too. The ensuing horse trading is probably my favorite part. I still feel bad for Super Mario 3D World, but I don't regret getting Papers, Please on that list, either.

This also means I'm in the final sprint. Bayonetta 2, Kentucky Route Zero, Super Smash Bros., and Dragon Age: Inquisition are the final games on my list. I'm hoping to squeeze in The Sailor's Dream and Monument Valley's expansion while traveling. Always so much to play, never enough time to play it all.

Not a terrible problem to have, you know?

You Should Read These

• "Let Them Play Assassin's Creed?" by Kabir Chibber

No one expects the Assassin's Creed games to be historically accurate. Ubisoft developed an amusing, outlandish premise that allows the series to explore and render settings the medium typically runs away from as fast as possible. The French Revolution?! But if you're like me, there's juuuuust enough history in the Assassin's Creed games to get you interested in going down the rabbit hole. Kabit Chibber highlights some of the controversy Unity's created, thanks to the way it portrays certain figures of the era.

"In fact, the debate over who are the heroes and villains of the Revolution goes back to the 1790s. British counter-revolutionary thought often focused on the suffering of the monarchy in their stories, such as the King’s tearful goodbye to his family before his execution on Jan. 21st, 1793 or Marie-Antoinette’s perhaps apocryphal last words to her executioner after stepping on his foot just before her head was cut off: “Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it.”

Like the video game, many scholars also focus on the revolutionaries’ violence. 'Bloodshed was not the unfortunate by-product of revolution, it was the source of its energy,' the historian Simon Schama wrote in his book Citizens (paywall), published in 1989 to mark the bicentennial of the French Revolution, which he said depended “on organized killing to accomplish political ends.'"

• "Twine, the Video-Game Technology for All" by Laura Hudson

It's fascinating to watch the barriers to entry begin to fall down with video games. Not only is learning basic programming skills easier than ever, programs like Twine make designing simple adventure games dead simple. I even made a tiny Twine game last year. Laura Hudson spoke with some of Twine's leading creators, writers and designers making interactive experiences touching on subjects most games wouldn't dare. If you're tired of Gamergate, get past the first few paragraphs, and you're clear.

"Contrary to the stereotypes about gamers, nearly 50 percent of people now playing games are female, according to the Entertainment Software Association. Even more surprising, there are more adult women playing than there are boys under 18. The demographics of game creation, however, lag significantly. Developers are still overwhelmingly male, and most mainstream games cater to the interests and expectations of young middle-class men. Getting a job as a programmer at a traditional game publisher often requires proficiency in multiple programming languages, as well as a degree in game development or computer science — fields in which women are perennially underrepresented. Unlike Twine games, which are usually made by one person without cost, a “AAA” game from a major studio can have a development team of hundreds, cost tens of millions of dollars and take years to complete. Video games are now a roughly $100 billion industry, exceeding (by some estimates) the global take of the U.S. film industry.

“The amount of people who have access to the engineering education required to be in programming is very, very small,” says Anna Anthropy, a game developer whose book “Rise of the Videogame Zinesters” helped put Twine on the map in 2012. “And even within that, there are a lot of ways that people are filtered out by the culture.” Anthropy has taught Twine workshops to everyone from 9-year-olds to 70-something retirees who had never played a video game in their lives, and she says they picked it up with equal ease. “If you’re someone who hasn’t played a lot of video games and you’re handed this tool where all you need to do is write, maybe you’re just going to write something about you,” she says. “Maybe you’re going to write something about your pet. There’s no reason you have to create something that’s about space marines.”

If You Click It, It Will Play

These Crowdfunding Projects Look Pretty Cool

• Crossing Souls channels 80s nostalgia in a way that's making my wallet tingle.
• To Azimuth, a story about an alien abduction, feels like a long-lost episode of the X-Files.
• Scorn wants to scare you in space, but it's not looking good for its funding.
• Scott Nichols would like to focus his criticism on "bad" video games.

Tweets That Make You Go "Hmmmmmm"

Oh, And This Other Stuff

• Tadhg Kelly tried to deconstruct why some were opposed to paying for more Monument Valley.
• Ben McGrath profiled Scarlett, one of the more accomplished StarCraft II players.
• Danielle Riendeau spoke with the developers of Captain Toad about their creative process.
• Carolyn Petit wrote about her problems with Bayonetta as a character with sexual power.
• A commenter on a story about This War of Mine shared his own experiences being around combat.
• Susan Ardent reflected on how Dragon Age: Inquisition distributes power between men and women.
• Chris Kohler found out how Sony eventually got around to re-releasing Vib Ribbon.
• Georgie Cato explored the feasibility of the kind of global pandemic depicted in The Last of Us.
• Sam Barsanti walked around the various player-owned neighborhoods of Grand Theft Auto Online.
• GB Burford suffers from extreme pain, and wrote about how Dragon Age's impacted it.
• Chloe Cross found someone who's going to spend an entire month in virtual reality.