You know what I love? Unreliable narrators. I love stories where I can’t trust the storyteller. I love how such stories draw attention to the way they are presenting me information, the way they insist that I be critical and suspicious, and the way they show me that every story is presented from a particular point of view. In videogames in particular, I love how this unreliability of the narrator (usually the playable character) feeds into everything I experience in that world.

I love being forced to wonder if I am seeing this world as it really ‘is’ — or just how my character wants me to see it.

A long time ago, the idea of a BioShock movie was touted, discussed by several interested parties, developed, looked at, considered, and then lost to presumably development hell.

Now it seems that the father of Bioshock, Ken Levine, may have quietly taken a machete to the whole idea behind the scenes.

“There was a deal in place, and it was in production at Universal — Gore Verbinski was directing it,” said Levine in an interview at the recent BAFTAs. “My theory is that Gore wanted to make a hard ‘R’ film—which is like an age 17/18-plus, where you can have blood and naked girls. Well, I don’t think he wanted naked girls. But he wanted a lot of blood.”

“Then Watchmen came out, and it didn’t do well for whatever reason. The studio then got cold feet about making an R rated $200 million film, and they said what if it was a $80 million film—and Gore didn’t want to make a $80 million film.”

“They brought another director in,” he continued, “and I didn’t really see the match there. 2K’s one of these companies that puts a lot of creative trust in people, so they said if you want to kill it, kill it. And I killed it.”

Given how many truly, truly awful game-to-movie adaptations exist (mostly courtesy of Uwe Boll), perhaps it was all for the best.

Source: Eurogamer

You know what I love? Violent videogames about videogame violence. I love the trend over the past few years (and the last year especially) to examine the various ways that violence functions in videogames. I love the way that these games aren’t so much trying to claim that videogame violence is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but the way they simply want to understand it better, the way they simply want to respect its power more.

Of course, I am talking about games like Bioshock, Spec Ops: The Line, Far Cry 2 and, more recently, Dishonored, Mark of the Ninja, Hotline Miami and the still upcoming Far Cry 3. All of these games, in their own way, ask questions about the ways violence is both depicted and deployed in videogames — the way violence is used against the player, and the way the player uses violence. They want to help us as players have richer and more nuanced understandings of just what violence is doing in these games.

Very little is said of games that change their stripes mid-development. Oh sure, they receive tweaks all over the place all the time, but complete overhauls? Shooters, as it turns out, are some of the most tampered with productions in video game entertainment today. Let’s look at some of the biggest stripe-changers — the games that almost got made.

Zenimax’s visual design director Victor Antonov is hailed as the artistic maestro behind Half-Life 2, and now he’s making Dishonored. Having a chat over at Eurogamer.net, he’s told them that the games industry is stagnating, that fiction in games has had a very bad five years. “There have been too many sequels, and too many established IPs that have been ruling the market. And a lot of them are war games. And they’re great projects and great entertainment, but there’s a lack of variety today.”

Dishonored is being compared to Bioshock, which released back in 2007 and which, as Antonov points out, has almost nothing in common with Dishonored. “We’re doing a historical piece, a retro-futuristic piece, which has pretty much nothing to do with BioShock except for the fact that it doesn’t take place in the far future, but has references to the past. And, unfortunately, BioShock and Dishonored are the only two games that go into that fiction for the past – how many years?”

Source: Eurogamer.net