What I liked in 2015

2015 wasn’t as terrible as I might have made out in my last post. I have even enjoyed some of it. I built and painted a citadel giant, which is an awesome kit. I played a bunch of Mortal Kombat X and Bloodborne. I went on holiday to Sweden and ate mushrooms that I picked myself, jumped into an inlet of the Baltic in the cold and dark and generally did a bunch of things that I assumed would kill me but actually didn’t. I ran an unsuccessful Kickstarter and ate a scotch egg that cost £10.

And Doctor Who had it’s best season in years.

Here’s some of my favourite writing on games from the year.

No amount of external incentivization (not least of all this sort of incentivization) could counter the fact that Battlefield Hardline is a game built for lethal violence.

Austin Walker’s Review of Battlefield Hardline hits a lot of hard notes. I still think it isn’t hard enough on the game, but it is plenty angry as it is.

I typically approach games as an authoritative voice to which I am trying to adapt. Indeed, I can get a little neurotic about how much I like throwing myself at the mercy of a system that isn’t actually capable of caring how well I please it.

Line Hollis’ mixtape of fourth wall breaking games is a lush read, even though I haven’t played any of the games on the list yet.

Throughout, artificial life is associated with labour and human life with suffering.

Mark Filipowich’s look at Binary Domain, another game I haven’t played but have enjoyed reading about, is my favourite of his from a very strong year on his blog.

History has shown us that technology is often used as a weapon of colonization; more technologically advanced countries use the tools they selfishly hoard in order to subjugate the rest of the world.

Inkle’s 80 Days was one of my favourite games of this year and Yussef Cole’s discussion of Jules Verne’s colonialism and how it is averted in the game is wonderful.

Hub Worlds are defined by their banality. They’re weird structures that receive more criticism than respect because they’re thought of as boring, empty spaces that serve no meaningful function. Hub Worlds act in stubborn resistance to the intense and measured process of manipulating a game’s conditions and rules to achieve the goals it puts in front of us, a process we associate with “satisfying” “gameplay”.

Zolani Stewart’s #sonicstudies got real this year with an in depth, 3 part look at Sonic Adventure. I’ve even played Sonic Adventure.

Bioshock Infinite is not a good game. It’s full of inexcusable racism, lackluster combat, and big ideas it doesn’t have the courage to do justice to. You play as a white man with brown hair who saves a girl who has powers she uses solely to help you, and you solve the rest of your problems by indiscriminately shooting people. There is no explaining away so much of what it is, and at this point enough ink has been spilled on its failures that they don’t need to be rehashed here. But for all the things it gets wrong — and it’s so, so many things — it gets so many things right about trauma.

This is probably cheating a bit because I was an editor on this piece, but then again Riley MacLeod’s look at Bioshock Infinite and trauma was a pleasure to work on.

And that’s it. I’m probably missing loads, but I do have the mind of a sieve and terrible bookmarking habits. Enjoy your winter festivities!