gamestate » Reviews http://www.gamestate.org All games are serious games, but some games are more serious than others. Wed, 07 Sep 2011 17:20:20 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Boing Boing: Games To Get http://www.gamestate.org/2010/02/boing-boing-games-to-get/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=boing-boing-games-to-get http://www.gamestate.org/2010/02/boing-boing-games-to-get/#comments Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:47:54 +0000 Garrison http://www.gamestate.org/?p=667 logo.png
I’ve just discovered Boing Boing’s ongoing “Games to Get” series, a great collection of (mostly) indie studio games for various platforms. Many of my latest obsessions are there: Plants vs. Zombies, Chime, Clash of Heroes, Drop 7. Definitely worth reviewing.

]]> http://www.gamestate.org/2010/02/boing-boing-games-to-get/feed/ 0 The Lost and the Damned at The NYTimes http://www.gamestate.org/2009/02/the-lost-and-damned-at-nytimes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-lost-and-damned-at-nytimes http://www.gamestate.org/2009/02/the-lost-and-damned-at-nytimes/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 19:35:57 +0000 Garrison http://www.gamestate.org/?p=553 The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel has a nice review of GTA‘s new downloadable expansion, the evocatively named biker scenario The Lost and the Damned.

Schiesel gets it right, I think, when he observes that

All sorts of games are about visions of power, often accompanied by violence. But most titles are set far away from what most people would consider the real world….

Most designers fear… questions [about social responsibility]. Rockstar Games, maker of Grand Theft Auto, does not. The company appears to recognize that it is not necessarily irresponsible to portray the real world’s underbelly. After all, Americans love gangsters and criminals in their entertainment. Americans even like to see the bad guys win once in a while.

I’d go a bit further. Beyond “not necessarily irresponsible,” I see GTA as a reasonably sophisticated meditation on cruelty and contemporary America’s lack of empathy. The horror of the “real world’s underbelly” is hardly the point of GTA: It’s the inhumanity of its glossy surface.

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