This is fantastic, always love reading what you put on the site. Literally have hours long conversations about your articles sometimes with my wife. Thank you for writing these.
This really means a lot to me. Thank you very much.
It's been a while since I discovered an absolutely wild video game name I didn't know before, but Buck Rogers: Planet of Zoom is really doing it for me.
@bigsocrates: Hey Socrates, thanks for the comment. You are right that the game world is surreal, but what I mean is that the surreal always has an element of clashing. Lobster Telephone is a surrealist work of art, but we can still recognise that lobsters and telephones are both real world entities that appear in the artwork roughly as they do in our world. It's the juxtaposition, and therefore clash, of the two that makes it surreal. The lamp in The Philosopher's Lamp is surreal, but we can see that it as a combination of two real things: string-like objects and candles. It's the combination and clash of the properties of these seperate entities that makes it surreal.
While on the realism-cartoony spectrum, Katamari Damacy is further down the cartoony end, we can still recognise a lot of things that would exist in the real world within the game. Cities and towns in Katamari have many of the features of real cities and towns, animals in the game are found in the shape and locations that their real-world counterparts are, hikers hang around campfires, baseball players gather on baseball fields, etc. But then there's some characteristic of those entities or the way they interact with other entities that is unrealistic. There's a clash between the two and rather than the game being surreal or realistic, it's that clash which neccesarily involves realistic elements, that makes it surreal.
@paliv: Thank you very much. You know, if politics is the power relations between people, I think it is part of every topic. And I think it is important to draw some boundaries. We have to say that we don't have room in our circles for people who are racist or sexist or transphobic. But who exactly people consider part of the "us" and who they consider part of the "them" can change a lot from person to person. And I think that even setting clear political boundaries, we can treat societal issues as complex and textured. In this article, I tried to take a hard stance against fossil fuel companies, but still describe the methods and nature of their destruction as complicated.
@therealturk: Thank you. I had to take length into consideration when writing this, so I didn't talk about every one of Hitman's features, but you are absolutely right that escalations and contracts can do a lot to grow a player's ability. Escalations, when done right, do that thing that a lot of wonderful strategy games do where they teach you to tackle a problem one way, and then put some obstacle in your path that means your previous approach is obsolete and you must start thinking about the level very differently. Then there were the Elusive Targets, which were really the apex of the challenges. Levels without saves wouldn't have been appropriate for developing player skill through the bulk of the game, but if you know you're only going to get one crack at a mission, you're going to spend more time in the missions where you can use all the features to practice, to make sure you can nail that target.
@sparky_buzzsaw: Thanks. I consider getting someone to play a game again high praise. I'm absolutely with you on the objectives that only seem to have one solution. I can't say I remember a target that you couldn't go after more than one way, but there are non-assasination objectives in 2 that do do that. Another Life is one of my favourite Hitman missions, but it felt so perfunctory to go back to that attic to watch the surveillance tape on every run. There certainly would have been more than one way to get the information from it.
@sparky_buzzsaw: Hey, I got around to reading this in full a few days ago and wanted to thank you for writing with this length and detail. It was very insightful.
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