Gameology 2.0

I have a new review up at Play this Thing, of Cryptic Comet's new PBEM TBS Solium Infernum.

In working on this, I became wrapped up in just how contemplative the game is. No animations, no time pressure, just interesting art, design, and flavor text (but almost no plot). I'm working on a paper on the deliberate incorporation of board game elements into original video games, but some of what I came up with isn't what I'd expected to find.

Thoughts?

It's been too long since I posted anything to gameology. Most of my work online in the last year has been for Play This Thing! and I'm looking into becoming a regular blogger for Alltern8. My hope is that doing a daily blog will help keep the juices flowing, allowing me to post more often here as well.

In case you're curious, here are links to my reviews for Play This Thing!
(newest to oldest)

Gratuitous Space Battles

Well, its been months, rather than the “week” I projected after my last post, but that's life in Graduate school. This post also wound up needing to be much longer (three times as long) despite having a much narrower focus. Also, I haven't added anchors to make the footnotes work. Oh well - I'll try to make time to do so tomorrow. As this post involves a critique of the conventions of Fantasy as a genre, including J.R.R. Tolkien's classic Lord of the Rings (LotR), I hope to to draw at least as many hostile posts as I did with “Muslim Massacre, Roach Toaster and Iji.” We'll see.

Before I can get into Battle for Wesnoth (Wesnoth) specifically, I need to establish a baseline for racial and postcolonial issues in fantasy fiction, including games. This is the part that would be least controversial in a purely academic setting, but that I expect will be most controversial on-line.

One of the things that is too often lacking in Games Studies, and almost completely in popular writing about games, is comparison of work by different creators across the mosty obvious lines of "genre." In less than a month, Play this Thing has reviewed Tr00jg's turn-based strategy/puzzle game Roach Toaster, Remar's multiplot platformer Iji and Sigvatr's condemnation garnering Robotron-like Muslim Massacre as if these highly contemporary games were completely irrelevant to each other. (nota bene: in addition to being contemporary, these games are all single-programmer freeware)

RPGs and Strategy games have always shared a uneasy and disputed border. Any pencil-and-paper DM who ever had to fudge a few rolls to save his players from an ignominious death knows this. CRPGs are more extreme in this dimension, as they generally substitute endless stat-building for the social dimensions of tabletop gaming, even in MMORGs.

Strategy games, especially fantasy strategy games, often and only increasingly incorporate hero units built on experience based CRPG systems. Given that some standard of equivalence (or deliberate inequity) of forces and a differentiation of units according use and cost are mainstays of strategy and tactical warfare games, hero units can easily become a problem.