Not all galaxies are created equal, however. Space has obsessed video-game designers for reasons both practical (it’s easy to render a void) and conceptual (it’s easy to explore a void from an armchair). In this way, its stylish storytelling is guided by true-to-life instants of weighted chance. Success often depends on favorable dice-rolls, but the game is at its most enjoyable when you’re forced to contend with failure. Written by the Karelian-Estonian novelist Robert Kurvitz, the game explores substantial themes with a light touch, and the urge to untangle the town’s mysteries intensifies with progress. But, for those who think games have the capacity to take us to novel, joyous, or illuminating places, here are eleven that, this year, seemed to light a way forward.ĭisco Elysium opens with a double mystery: Who killed the security guard swinging from a tree outside your hotel? And why have you, an amnesiac detective with a drinking problem, been sent to investigate the murder? Together with your abstemious partner, you explore a washed-up, working-class coastal town, interrogating mostly uncoöperative residents as you piece together the broader socioeconomic context of the killing. These contradictions inhere in every medium, of course. In the face of criticism, one can say that games are mere entertainment, incapable of causing harm in the face of praise, the same games can be presented as ways to change hearts and minds for the better. It also exposed the often opportunistic beliefs of video-game supporters. For anyone who believes that the medium has the potential to be something more ambitious, though, it was a dispiriting refrain. It was a reasonable response, perhaps, from an executive who believes that his job is to sell toys to teen-agers.
of Blizzard (and, curiously, a bit-part actor in “Moneyball”) told a journalist from CNBC that he didn’t think his company’s games should be political. In the Military Times, a writer argued that it was a “curious place to finally draw the line in the sand,” given that the premise of Call of Duty revolves largely around killing people. marine, wrote that the game was a “nearsighted glorification” of an illegal weapon, and that it didn’t depict the effect that white phosphorus “has on the human body in any kind of realistic way.” Others waved away the concerns. (Such weapons can melt human bone and were allegedly used against Syrian children earlier this year.) Critics complained that including the weapon was irresponsible. This year’s kerfuffle centered on how Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the series’ latest installment, allows players to use an incendiary version of white phosphorus, a chemical weapon prohibited under international law. The results are huge sales and inevitable controversy. Although the games borrow the aesthetics of real-world conflict (their settings have included America’s war in Vietnam and the Second World War), they tend to simplify context and forgo commentary. The Call of Duty series, which is published by Activision Blizzard, the second largest American game company, combines military-grade firearms with the Rambo-grade fiction that a white man with a gun can obliterate an army of foreigners.
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