I wrote a lot about how I think the “satire” of GTA V isn’t especially edgy or effectively satirical. In the Guardian, I’ve written about some games that I think are genuinely subversive, where the satire is effective or the sense of transgression — doing things you aren’t supposed to do — feels meaningful.

If you liked my feature on the culture of the 1990s as it pertains to video games and you missed the concurrent talk at Nine Worlds, I’ll be giving a version of the talk at GameCity 8 in Nottingham later this month! I’m set to do a few fun things at the festival this year, which always coincides with my birthday, so stay tuned — meanwhile, make your plans to come along!

I’ve done another letter series with Quinns, this time about The Last of Us:

“I’m going to die,” I thought. My heart in my throat, awestruck at the craftsmanship and power of this scene.

But he doesn’t die, of course. The games industry is not yet ready to pry the gun from the man’s hand.

The letters format isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it’s really important to me to contextualize games with life and relationships. If you’re new to the letters and like them, Quinns and I have tackled Persona 4, romance games, adventure games and Far Cry 3 — you can find those at Polygon’s Features section. Our first set was at Gamasutra, about Dyad, of all things.

Another of my monthly columns for Edge has come online, this one for the magazine’s 20th anniversary issue. It’s mainly about evolutions in how we talk and write about games, and what “for everyone” might mean in the generations ahead.

In a post-Columbine, post-9/11 America, the Grand Theft Auto series became a powerful statement on moral panic, and a bold mirror to my country’s values. Its friction with the media climate was a necessary provocation as we steered firmly toward an interactive era. It ruffled the right feathers for the right reasons.

I just read that 1 in 28 people in the United Kingdom has bought Grand Theft Auto V. I don’t know if that’s right, but I do know the newest game saw $1 billion worth of sales in its first two days. We don’t need data to know how huge it is.

What’s the relevance of GTA V now that games have “won”? It no longer feels cutting edge, but like a reinforcement of the status quo. Its “equal opportunity offender” approach is, like, Comedy Central circa 2004. Its offenses are mute, as boring as corporate rock.

It was once an incisive critique of the Western tendency to disclaim responsibility for its endemic problems and instead blame video games. Now its tacky misogyny and frat jokes feel purposeless. It’s gone from oppressed to oppressor, and has nothing new to say.

In my critique, I explain why it’s fitting — and sad — that the game is about people who don’t know how to move forward, who keep slipping back into their old clumsy hungers and mistakes like they can’t figure out anything else to do, neck-deep in a gluttony of nice cars. Static, depressing, mean old bullies.

I think everyone has seen the critique already over the weekend, but just in case, it’s an actual real critique, not like the satirical review (that has actually been made into a song by Jonathan Mann (“This is Why We Video Gaming“), with a really catchy chorus that just seems to dispel the black cloud ’round this whole thing every time I hear it).

I still play GTA V, mind. One only bothers demanding more from things they care about, right? Here’s Helen Lewis (with quotes from Simon Parkin, Carolyn Petit and me!) at the Guardian talking about enjoyment and admiration of GTA V and problematic things in general.

At the New Yorker, Parkin wonders how evil a video game should allow you to be. “Should allow” is a very dangerous pairing of words in video games, but he handles it well. His piece on the life and work of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the former president of Nintendo who recently passed away, is also excellent and enlightening.

My “GTA V review” and the subsequent audio performance I posted yesterday circulated much more widely than I anticipated. I guess I tapped into something — our sickness, maybe, of the black and bilious pall that enters fandom and the media that surrounds it whenever a successfully-hyped, major commercial release appears.

It was a protest on my part, and I’m comforted that it resonated. I gave an interview at the Daily Dot explaining myself a little better.

Today, I published an interview I did with Raphael van Lierop, a former AAA veteran who, after years at THQ’s Relic studio, moved to a quiet part of Vancouver to work on an independent game with some talented colleagues who’re also from the traditional development scene.

Hinterland Games’ The Long Dark takes a unique approach to the survival genre, minus the “horror” or the “post-apocalypse.” It’s about braving the wilderness, surviving the world’s slow decline in a harsh climate where technology’s gone and knowledge is hard to come by. I think it’s a pretty neat idea — I love the survival genre, but I have had enough zombies. Way enough.

Grand Theft Auto V is the fifth game in Rockstar’s epic fun mayhem but also serious grown up storytelling franchise. This game’s world based on a major American City is even bigger than the last GTA, and that one was pretty big. You can do a lot of things, but not too many things, just enough things.

Most of the things you can do are helicopter, base jump, shoot, drive, run, swim. Whether or not you can swim in GTA is very important. There are even more unique cars with satirical names like a Jaguar except it starts with F and the writing is very witty. You can also go on the internet in GTA and it’s all sick and funny just like the real internet where you’re reading this very review and about to get mad. Only in truly interactive entertainment do our souls see a mirror and that is exactly what Rockstar has told us it is doing since it started making GTA games.

Instead of only playing as one gross man who commits crimes and swears a lot, you get to play as three different ones. My press kit says this is a narrative innovation. You can’t be a woman. I could be lazy and say this is because women do not commit crimes or swear and nor should they want to, but instead I’m going to come right out and say it’s misogynistic. What, you want to leave me death threats? Go for it! Games are about feeling powerful, and about you getting your way!

Anyway the thing with 3 different guys doesn’t really do everything they said it was going to do, but whatever, it’s the culmination of a great vision and this is why we video gaming. Back to the thing which matters, which is is this GTA better than the GTA which came before it. If you like GTA, sure it is! If you like GTA you should buy this game. I know I will. It’s a cultural revolution 9.7/10

(*I haven’t played this game yet, but boy am I fucking glad I didn’t actually have to review it).

UPDATE: Here is an ‘audio performance’ of this review.

I went to Paris for the very first time to attend Ubisoft’s Digital Days, and while there I got awfully ill, so apologies for the lack of updates. This is, as many of you on Twitter pointed out, how 28 Days Later starts, I think.

While in Paris, though, I did manage to do an interview with the Child of Light leads, a trio I found incredibly candid and impressive.

It’s an unexpected story: The creative director of Far Cry 3 felt uncomfortable both with the game’s dark subject matter and with questions about how much creative input one really can have on a team of some 600 people. We discuss the team’s trying to find themselves in a JRPG-inspired, stylishly-illustrated game about a young girl who can fly. The bros at Ubi call it “the fairy game”, internally.

Child of Light uses Ubisoft’s 2D art-focused Ubi-Art framework, which the company’s made to enable its teams to do more small-team, creative multiplatform games (the touchscreen mobile explosion brought good 2D art back into fashion). So does Valiant Hearts, the new character-driven WW2 adventure game, which I thought looked awfully sweet.

It was a funny feeling, to be able to go to Paris from London on a train, to feel only a short ride away from another nation’s border. I’m in the New Statesman today writing a little more about Papers, Please, and how it’s helped me explore my attitude to national security as an American abroad.

Continuing with my plots to place extraordinary games in mainstream publications, I also did a feature on Gone Home in the Atlantic, celebrating the way restraint on the design side and a more minimalistic approach to storytelling seems to offer games more opportunity for narrative impact than piling on a kitchen sink’s worth of tech.

Related: I ought to buy GTA V this week, I guess. I imagine that like all GTAs, it will be bigger than the last one, will require the phrases “mayhem” and “satire” to describe, and I am liable to end up wondering whether gamers are horrible people, or whether the game is making fun of gamers and/or horrible people. I mean, it’s a GTA. 10/10.

Papers, Please and Gone Home are among my favorite games of this year so far, as is Michael Brough’s 868-HACK, a roguelike of sorts set in the guts of a neon machine. Read all about it in this interview I did last week.

Still getting over being ill, so if I owe you an email/a reply to an email, please be patient.

I don’t judge indies and friends who feel it’s necessary to go to PAX in order to make headway in an incredibly biased industry, or friends who want to present in a brave, admirable attempt to be a positive force in a toxic space. Lots of people are doing everything they can to participate and make change in the community and I respect their choices.

But Elizabeth Sampat basically sums up how I feel in her piece here. Do you want to be part of a community where we listen and learn when we upset people by accident? Or one where we’re encouraged to become ever more militantly self-righteous and make jokes at the expense of people we alienate?

It’s not a crime to misspeak, or to be ignorant. You are not a bad person simply because you’ve never learned to think about the needs of people less fortunate or less-heard than yourself. But your goodness — and more importantly, your potential to do good in the world as a major organization like Penny Arcade — is determined by what you do after the mistake, when the harm you’ve done is pointed out to you.

When you have the opportunity to make a huge difference as respected figures in a community, do you use it to broadcast your own self-righteousness, or to teach people to be better to one another? Do you learn from the mistake, or do you keep making more, with such stubbornness and consistency that people begin to suspect you’re probably either deeply troubled or at worst, a terrible ass?

It shouldn’t be a tough choice. One in six women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. Your friends, moms, sisters, daughters, partners (and let’s remember rape is not uniquely a women’s problem — far from it). How would you feel as a parent (and the PA founders are dads), or a colleague, or friend of a survivor, as part of an organization that probably still has boxes of Dickwolves shirts lying around?

These shirts were printed to make fun of the outrage of survivors and the people who care about them. They are literally an emblem of a refusal to care, and Mike Krahulik has just said he “regrets” pulling them from the merchandise table. And people cheered. PAX is still a place where people cheer for this.

This is also fresh off the heels of Krahulik’s transphobic remarks and his non-apology for them, and now the organization says it refuses to “engage” the discussion anymore. If this is how its public face behaves, think of what they’re like when they feel free to be honest. I find my outrage challenging to contain. This is video games?

I personally don’t understand how the founders of the PA organization can sleep at night without having admitted to a massive wrong turn in its relationship to its community and without having expressed a commitment to change, learn and re-earn trust. Probably all the money they make from the convention helps. I would rather it wasn’t our money.

Also, when I tweeted about never going to PAX, someone called me a “slanderous wench.” I want to be affronted, but feeling like I’ve just been damned by a pirate is kind of exciting.

This isn’t an article about video games. In fact, it has nothing to do with video games.
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At Nine Worlds this past weekend in London, I talked about how a confluence of different things happening in music, film and culture in the American 1990s conspired to undermine the corny consumerist patriarchy that alienated so many, especially women and weirdoes, in the 1980s.

Here’s an article adapted from the talk — I’m told the video will be online in a few days, and I’m eager for you all to see it because it has loads more anecdotes and context. And even a little singing, which was maybe a dubiously-advisable communication tactic, but oh well.

Gone Home is out, and in a lot of ways it’s about similar things. About being a Riot Grrrl, about quiet revolutions of the self in the world. I have so much more to share and to say on that, but let’s give people some time to actually experience it for themselves. In the meantime, here’s a spoiler-free interview with The Fullbright Company’s Steve Gaynor on the brilliant design and how it came from need, constraint and graceful restraint.

More on all of this soon. I’ve actually played a number of incredible games in the last… week (!) that I can’t wait to talk more about with you.

The key thing I hope people take away from my writing on the 90s is this bit:

“This is why feminism matters in games: Not as a feel-good issue, not as ‘political correctness,’ and not even because inclusivity is morally-correct or more economically viable. It’s because it’s a key component in disrupting the status quo, the oppressive ideals that constrain and prescribe on behalf of everyone who wants to participate, men included.”

Related: My newest Edge column just came online, addressing the common misconception that diversity means “dumbing down” games. Uh, no, dudes.

When I wrote my little reminiscences of Leisure Suit Larry last week, I thought back on a game that to me wasn’t so much about a loser hunting for ass, but about illuminating how depressing is that particular occupation.

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