Blips: Previously On...

Sources: Charting the edges of avant-garde videogames, Keeping the Cold War quiet in CounterSpy, Twitch gears up to conquer the final frontier: mobile
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

Just wanted to pop in and quickly plug three (!) articles of mine that popped up on Kill Screen the past couple days. First is a feature on DePaul professor Brian Schrank's new book Avant-garde Videogames, which frames experimental games in an art historical context. The chart above is an image from the book, detailing the categorical field that serves as the basis for many of the book's chapters. As you'll find out from my article, I think it's a tremendously useful book, especially for someone looking for that art context. I have so many avant-garde games to seek out now that I had never even heard of before.

Next up is a review of the Cold War-inspired side-scrolling stealth game CounterSpy. It's a game I quite enjoyed, but found the design to be pretty unforgiving if you don't play it very well going into the final run-up. It's stylish as all get out though, and now that I've got a handle on what to watch out for, I'm actually pretty eager to dive back in and play through again. I do wish that you could hide incapacitated guards and avoid firefights more frequently that the game allows. It is supposed to be a stealth game after all.

Lastly is an article about Twitch's mobile broadcasting aspirations. This article was written a while ago, but other bigger Twitch news kept popping up. Glad it finally got out the door because mere hours later, the Amazon buyout news hit. I think the challenges of bringing broadcasting tech to mobile platforms is pretty interesting, but I wholly expect the story to get buried amongst all the other news surrounding that company. Ah well, maybe someone will click it by accident.

Blips: Crowdplayed Out?

Source: Was Twitch Plays Pokémon an anomaly or the way of the future?
Author: Dan Solberg
Site: Kill Screen

My apologies for the extended absence on this blog, but moving halfway across the country will shift your priorities around for a while. But now things are near back in order and actually looking quite promising. With any luck I'll have some exciting announcements forthcoming on Low Cutoff in the near future. Until then, let's get to the blips.

Gonna lead this off with a story of mine that was published on Kill Screen during my hiatus. It's about Twitch Plays Pokemon and the phenomenon of crowdplay. I'm not convinced that crowdplay is the way forward, but I do think it could be a way forward for thinking about play structures on a larger, sociological scale. Many of the tools being put in place to make crowdplay development tools more accessible feel aimed at recapturing TPP's energy, but I'm sure there will be folks who get their hands on those tools and use them to totally subvert that system in interesting ways. Thanks again to the people at Overwolf for contributing to my piece.

Blips: Livin' Life Live

Source: Lethal Frag and the lonely, growing world of livestreaming
Author: Darren Davis
Site: Kill Screen

Video game livestreaming is a bizarre development. It's not without its merits, but that doesn't discount how weird it is. In an essay for Kill Screen, Darren Davis examines the self-imposed 2-year livestreaming challenge of Lethal Frag. On the nightly 2-hour program, Matthew McKnight would play indie games and interact with the chat stream on his Twitch channel, and he'd go on to do this for 731 days straight. While many livestreams are about having an interest in the games being played (particularly with competitive titles), Lethal Frag and many others are more centered on the on-camera personalities. It's not all that different than a piece of long-form, endurance performance art, but McKnight didn't embark on his challenge to make an artistic statement so much as to turn playing video games into a living wage, albeit a seemingly lonely, draining one.

I've watched some livestreams, and regularly tune in to the live happenings over on Giant Bomb, but for me, the appeal is already beginning to wane. Conversing in a livestream chat is exhausting, though knowing that you're a part of a live audience does add a fun bit of theatricality. When something unexpected or outrageous occurs on screen, the chat explodes into a hyperdrive of replies and emoticons that's pretty amusing, but is also more or less the same every time. The shows themselves have an improvised energy to them that, in the right hands, can be tremendously entertaining for even hours at a time. Watching random people play games will get old fast, but when you can "spend time" with certain on-screen personalities, it begins to feel like you're watching a friend play. But at some point the improv takes too long to get where it's going and the outlandish reactions of the players can feel forced and cloying. I realized that the time I've spent watching others play games live on the Internet is time that I could be playing games for myself.

I don't expect or want livestreaming to go away, but I hope that we can trim the fat a bit on the path to the impending normalization of the form.