Tag Archives: video games

December 17, 2014 – Arsenal For Democracy 111

  By

AFD-logo-470

Topics: Torture Report, CRomnibus spending package, video game review – This War of Mine. People: Bill, Nate. Produced: December 15th, 2014.

Discussion Points:

– Torture Report: Why US actions after 9/11 are symptomatic of a wider unresolved White Supremacy in American policymaking and society — and why torture and drones are the logical extension of daily police brutality and accidental shootings.
– CRomnibus Spending Package: Should Democrats and President Obama have stood more firmly on principle against the new funding measure even at the cost of a shutdown?
– Political Pop Culture: Nate reviews “This War of Mine,” a survival game set in the Siege of Sarajevo

Episode 111 (53 min)
AFD 111

Related links
Segment 1

– Boston Globe: 20 key findings of Senate’s CIA torture report
– Arsenal For Democracy coverage of the 2014 Torture Report
– Arsenal For Democracy archive coverage of the 2009 Torture Memos

Segment 2

– AFD: The Terrible CRomnibus
– NYT Dealbook: Wall Street Seeks to Tuck Dodd-Frank Changes in Budget Bill
– Huffington Post:The Levee Breaks: Democrats Rage Against Obama Over Wall Street Giveaway
– AFD: US prepares to give sacred Native land to Australian mining firm
– AP: Federal budget would raise limits on big donors in campaign finance

Segment 3

– AFD Review by Nate: My War
– Steam: “This War of Mine”

Subscribe

RSS Feed: Arsenal for Democracy Feedburner
iTunes Store Link: “Arsenal for Democracy by Bill Humphrey”

And don’t forget to check out The Digitized Ramblings of an 8-Bit Animal, the video blog of our announcer, Justin.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

My War

  By

New video game review: “This War of Mine”

Scavenging in the ruins of a bombed-out school, Pavle was able to locate wood, water, scrap parts, tobacco and vital medicine for his compatriots. Icy temperatures had led to an outbreak of sickness in the ruined building that Pavle and three other survivors were squatting in to avoid snipers. I had neglected to build a vital furnace in the early days of the game. Pavle’s nighttime excursions, which often meant dodging armed patrols and hostile civilians, were critical for gathering the food and supplies necessary for the daily struggle for survival in “This War of Mine.”

An image from one of the trailer videos for "This War of Mine."

An image from one of the trailer videos for “This War of Mine.”

Released last month on Steam for Windows, Mac OS, and Linux by the Polish company 11-Bit studios, “This War of Mine” is a gritty, haunting simulation of life during the Siege of Sarajevo in the war in Bosnia. By day, you race to construct everything from armchairs to moonshine stills. By night, you must risk everything to find the supplies vital to survival. The game is reminiscent of Minecraft in both its addictiveness and the depth of its crafting system. I played for hours straight, angrily restarting when I felt I had done a poor job of gathering resources (or when my characters started starving). Before long, you are anxiously cooking food and carefully apportioning supplies, lest any of the characters you’ve become invested in die from wounds, sickness, starvation, or suicide.

The game forces you to make complex moral decisions that could potentially affect your group’s morale. If you aid the various neighbors who come calling for your assistance, you will lose a player for the night but increase the happiness of your group. Steal from from a family and, despite the necessities of survival, your group might get angry. Sometimes it pays to do both — I once traded medicine to a sick old man and then cleaned out his basement of rare supplies and weapons, darting out the back exit when the old man’s son came to check on the noise downstairs. In another incident, Zlata raided a supply crate with a neighbor and I was later offered food and cigarettes by soldiers if we ratted out our neighbors as supply crate thieves (I refused). Cigarettes and books can also increase the group’s happiness.

Smart players will find ways to survive through the barter system. Moonshine and homemade cigarettes can be traded for food and medicine with a traveling salesman, soldiers or friendly civilians. Trade for and cook with vegetables to double food yield.

Although not an impossibly difficult or complex game, “This War of Mine” is appropriately unforgiving for beginners — only after several runs though were my citizens comfortable after a week. My really only complaint is the limited space in some characters backpacks — only a few characters had anything beyond 10 spaces. While frustrating, this really forces the player to make tough choices about supplies. Perhaps the controls for guns could be a bit better, as my scavenger is often killed by bandits before I can fire. That’s probably on me, however, and not my civilians.

While not one of the flashy, cinematic shooters that dominate game shelves these days, “This War of Mine” is a more compelling and realistic war game than any “Call of Duty” released recently. Highly addictive and challenging, “This War of Mine” is a must-own on Steam.

Why #INeedDiverseGames Is Vital To The Future Of Gaming

  By ,

An interview with Tanya D, the creator of the hashtag, by the 8-Bit Animal.

It’s no secret that modern gaming has been littered with games starring the same White male protagonist. Sure, they have different names, faces and voices, but they are typically the exact same character.

Gamers who aren’t White men have long voiced annoyance at the lack of diversity in gaming going back years, but it took Ubisoft’s seemingly gleeful omission of a female protagonist in the latest Assassin’s Creed title to bring this discussion to the forefront.

Recently, the hashtag #INeedDiverseGames created by Twitter user @cypheroftyr (Tanya D.) with the intent of shedding light on the lack on the lack of diversity surrounding in game characters.

As a longtime gamer myself, I can’t think of very many major games released over the last console generation that aren’t starring a White male protagonist, so this discussion is long overdue. Clearly, a lot of other people on Twitter shared the same opinion.

Tanya, a gamer for some 20 years, has seen the same general lack of diversity in gaming over the years that a lot of us have, but she spoke out about it.

“It happened because I was up and angry at video games at like 6 in the morning,” she said. “Being frustrated with the fact that game companies can make a game with a WOC [woman of color] protagonist, then turn around and say that women are too hard to animate in the same breath. That I often see the same retread, of the same man-pain-fueled, frigid girlfriend, or wife, or child, for the sake of the PLOT, and the same blonde/brown haired scruffy White dude protagonists in most of the titles out there. Then when you do have a female lead, it’s rare, and there is still misogynistic crap I have to wade through to enjoy the storyline.”

She also added that she’s “Sick of being the thug, the ho, or the disposable, uninteresting stereotype in games.”

The hashtag gained steam and continues to generate traffic, as it has been a seemingly perfect foil to the disjointed hatespeak disguised as a rally for ethics reforms in gaming journalism that was sparked by #GamerGate. Unlike the hostility coming from #GamerGate supporters, those involved in #INeedDiverseGames have been relatively civil, even when expressing dissatisfaction towards the industry.

Has Tanya seen much negativity directed towards her or the hashtag?

“Luckily no,” she answers. “I’ve avoided harassment from GG’ers [GamerGate “activists”] and the reaction has been mostly positive. That said; there’s a lot I’ve missed thanks to Blockbot and Blocktogether tools on Twitter. Some of it still slips through because Twitter’s mute and block functions aren’t worth anything. The only real backlash that I’ve given much attention to is the usual ‘MAKE YOUR OWN THEN’ rejoinder, which makes me see red. It’s never that simple.”

In most instances, titles developed by people of color aren’t often funded or distributed by major publishers. An example of this is Never Alone, a game developed and financed by a Native American community in Alaska.

Meanwhile, Grand Theft Auto V had a development and marketing budget of $265 million to create and advertise the title, and Destiny’s budget topped out at around $500 million. Many indie games are made for what many would consider less than a fraction of the typical big budget AAA title. Read more

Never Alone: Video game brings an Alaska Native story to life

  By

Note added January 11, 2015: We are hoping to have a review of the game available on this website soon from one of our correspondents. Unfortunately, he has reported that there’s a bug that stops the game about a third of the way through. You might want to wait for it to be patched before buying the game.

NPR recently reported on a very cool video game that brings to life a traditional Iñupiat adventure story from Alaska. It’s called “Never Alone” and is produced by “Upper One Games,” a studio founded in 2013 by Cook Inlet Tribal Council of Alaska to help promote the native cultural heritage to a new generation of its members and to the wider world.

The game, which brought on board a number of respected veterans from the video game industry, was developed with extensive input — on plot, in-game art, and structure — from those who know the story best:

“We didn’t want this to be an outsider’s view of what the Inupiaq culture was. We wanted it to come from the people themselves.”

Never Alone is based on a traditional story known as Kanuk Sayuka and the experiences of Alaska elders, storytellers and youth. The story follows a young Inupiaq girl and an Arctic fox as they go on an adventure to save her village from a blizzard that never ends.

Game developer Sean Vesce has 20 years of experience in the industry working on action titles like Tomb Raider. He recently went to Barrow, in far northern Alaska, to watch the students play a demo of the game. He says that day was his most memorable experience from the project.

 
The puzzle platformer game will be released for Windows (via Steam), PS4, and Xbox One in November. Here’s the official trailer:

It looks like an incredible game, and it features a female lead playable character, as well as bringing both cultural diversity and an unusual structure (since it was built around the Iñupiat cultural/linguistic worldview and oral traditions, rather than around the industry-dominant Euro-U.S. cultural framework).

Here’s the gameplay description from the official website:

– Play as both Girl and Fox – switch between the two characters at any time. Girl and Fox must work together to overcome challenges and puzzles as each has unique skills and abilities. A second player can join at any time for local co-op play.

– Explore perilous Arctic environments, from tundra to coastal villages, from ice floes to a mysterious forest. Brace yourself against gale-force winds and blizzards; face treacherous mountains.

– Meet fascinating characters from Iñupiaq folklore – Manslayer, the Little People, Helping Spirits, Blizzard Man and more. Never Alone was crafted in partnership with Alaska Native elders and storytellers for true authenticity.

– Hear the story of Kunuuksaayuka as told by a master Iñupiat storyteller in the spoken Iñupiaq language — a first for a commercial video game.

– Unlock special video Insights recorded with the Iñupiaq community to share their wisdom, stories and perspective.

They also worked to appropriately balance the game play with the source material:

One famous Iñupiaq storyteller named Robert Nasruk Cleveland, born in the late 1800s, was renown for his storytelling skill. Many of the great examples of traditional Iñupiaq stories are closely associated with him, including the story of Kunuuksaayuka.

The Never Alone team located Robert Cleveland’s daughter, an Iñupiaq elder named Minnie Gray, to obtain permission to use the story as the inspiration and main narrative spine of the game. The team worked directly with Minnie to ensure that, as the story was adapted to the needs of a video game, it maintained the wisdom and teachings of the original.

 
Here’s another video on the impact they hope to have with “Never Alone”:

never-alone-screenshot

Yeah, so why *isn’t* Charlotte Corday in the new Assassin’s Creed?

  By

Charlotte-Corday-Paul-Jacques-Aime-Baudry-1860Look, I’ve never played any Assassin’s Creed games, and I’m not the first to say this, but how stupid do you have to be to make a French Revolution assassins game with no female character and then act like it’s because there weren’t any female assassins?

I also realize the games aren’t intended to be “historically accurate” by any stretch but there’s taking creative liberties with history to tell a story and then there’s just straight-up erasing history outside the context of the story, solely to justify bad decisions. And that would include making an outrageous claim like that.

Jean-Paul Marat’s assassination in 1793 by Charlotte Corday was a major trigger for the start of the Reign of Terror. I know I’m more in the French Revolution history than most — I believe I had a little copy of David’s The Death of Marat over my desk for about eight years for some unintentionally creepy reason — but Corday is, like, French Revolution 101. It had to have come up during the research for the game.

Moreover, French women in general played a huge role in the Revolutionary period, while radical women also played key roles. This reality has been repeatedly depicted in just about every other fictional or semi-historical version of the time period. Charles Dickens, way back in the Victorian Age when everyone was really giving women the short end of the stick, put a very important female character in a leadership role in his version of Revolutionary France in A Tale of Two Cities. So there’s really no excuse. Stop being lazy, Ubisoft.