Markus Persson has the body of a politician but the features of a rock star: Fixed, handsome eyes and a deep-dimpled smile that offsets his baldpate and thickening torso. Perhaps this is why, when he visited Las Vegas in 2011 for the first international convention held in honour of Minecraft, the video game he designed and built, a young mother strode up and asked him not to kiss her baby, but to sign it. “I lean in with the pen and the child immediately starts crying,” he recalled as we talked in the stratospheric hotel suite he was staying in for the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month. “I recoil and apologise – I mean, it’s not like I’m setting the kid on fire or anything – but she insists. It was a frightening moment for me, and not just that natural shock of making an infant cry.”

Since the game’s release in 2009 Minecraft has sold in excess of 20 million copies, earned armfuls of prestigious awards and secured merchandising deals with LEGO and other toymakers. It has also made Persson rich. Last year the 33-year-old programmer earned over one hundred million dollars from the game and its merchandise. Unlike the young San Franciscan tech millionaires, with their start-up chic and Ivy League determination, Persson – better known to his global army of teen-age followers by his internet handle, “Notch” – has a raggedy, un-marketed charm. He is, by his own admission, only a workmanlike coder, and he is not a ruthless businessman. “I’ve never run a company before and I don’t want to feel like a boss,” he said. “I just want to turn up and do my work.”

Persson and his game continue to confound the wisdom of videogame critics, consultants and publishing mavens. For one, Minecraft looks nothing like the multi-million dollar blockbusters that usually line GameStop’s shelves; its graphics and sound effects are rudimentary. It is also wilfully oblique, with no instruction manual and few explicit goals. At first, you are deposited in a unique, procedurally generated world built from a palette of colored 1×1 square building blocks comprising its mountains, valleys, lakes and clouds. Faced with this canvas, at first your task is mere exploration, charting the terrain around you.

Then night falls and monsters rise: dead-eyed zombies, skeletons, and camouflaged creepers that pursue you with terrifying single-mindedness. Now you are fighting for survival, digging a shelter with your bare hands and cowering in the dark till the sun shoos your tormentors back into hiding. The next morning you can choose to turn your cave into a castle, venturing out to gather the necessary raw materials to laminate your new abode’s floor or to build a stove onto which you can cook your meat. Or you can dig down to the centre of the earth, searching for rare materials to fashion gleaming armour or indestructible pickaxes. Other players embark upon a grand design, recreating some famous piece of architecture, or monument using the game’s fundamental materials. However you choose to express your creativity, every night you must retreat into your creation to hide.

This disempowerment runs contrary to the ideas of most video games. “Infinite power just isn’t very interesting no matter what game you’re playing,” Persson said. “It’s much more fun when you have a limited toolset to use against the odds. Usually a new player to Minecraft doesn’t make it through the first night. They’re just not prepared for the danger. It’s a harsh lesson but it establishes the rules.”

Persson stopped working on Minecraft in December 2011 in order to pursue new projects. One, a complex virtual boardgame with card game elements, dubbed Scrolls is set for release later this year. A second, the unpronounceable 0x10c, a trading game set in space influenced by the U.S. science fiction television series Firefly and the seminal 1984 British computer game, Elite, is still in the early stages of development.

Is Minecraft a once-in-a-lifetime success — a “Tainted Love,” a Tetris? — or a foundational work for the next great video game auteur, like Sim City and The Sims creator Will Wright? Persson is unequivocal. “I definitely think Minecraft is a freak thing, a once-in-a-lifetime success,” he said. “There’s no way you could replicate it intentionally. And yes, I’m starting to feel writer’s block as a result. I’m not sure if it’s pressure to repeat…” He paused, looked to the floor, groping for the source of this creative impasse. “Actually it is the pressure to repeat. And with Minecraft it was just easier because nobody knew who I was. Now I post a new idea and millions of people scrutinise it. There’s a conflict between the joy of being able to do whatever I want and the remarkable pressure of a watching world. I don’t know how to switch it off.”

Persson grew up in Edsbyn, a provincial town near Sweden’s east coast. “My strongest early memory is of my dad dragging me through very deep snow on a sled,” he said. “I looked up at him and he seemed annoyed at me. Perhaps it was tough work dragging me, or perhaps I had been crying. And I realised that — hang on — he’s actually a real person, with his own perception of things. It’s not just me looking at things; he is also looking at things.”

It was in Edsbyn that his father, a railroad worker, taught Markus to use the family computer, a Commodore 128. “We had a number of bootleg games — some weird Mickey Mouse tower game and Balderdash. The first game I actually bought myself with my own money was The Bard’s Tale.” Computer magazines of the day would print strings of code on their back pages, which could be transcribed by the reader to create a playable game, and this code-by-numbers task gave Persson his first experience of what would later become his profession. “My sister would read the lines out to me and I would tap them into the computer,” he says. “After a while I figured out that if you didn’t type out exactly what they told you then something different would happen when you finally ran the game. That sense of power was intoxicating.”

When he was seven, the family moved to Stockholm. Persson fell in with a crowd of schoolboy programmers when he was thirteen, and they competed with one another to create the most impressive effects on their Atari STs. “One time I managed to fill the screen with huge text that scrolled incredibly quickly,” he recalled. “My friend was on vacation so I put the code on a disc and attached a post-it note saying ‘Look what I did!’ and left it in his mailbox. ” By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to make games for a living, but his teachers advised him to study graphical design, which led to his first job as a web designer. “I didn’t stay there because I was a bit arrogant and thought I could just go and make games,” he says. “But then the dot-com crash happened and I couldn’t get a job.”

After two years living at home with his mother, Persson landed a job at a web game company, where he worked as a programmer and designer on no fewer than thirty Flash games. In his spare time, he continued to work on his own projects, entering competitions to make games with tight memory constraints in order to focus his creativity. “I was learning things about game design in my day job,” he said. “But really it was the puzzle-solving nature of programming that appealed.” When Persson began work on Minecraft in early 2009, he knew that this was the game he had been waiting to make. He went part-time at his job in order to free up more time to work on the game and finally, handed in his notice on his birthday, June 1, 2010. Despite the bold step into full time indie game development, he never envisaged Minecraft becoming such a widespread success. “I expected it to be about 6-12 months of work, and hoped that it might earn enough money to fund development of a subsequent game.” He released the full version on TK and within 12 months the game had been downloaded more than six million times, and Persson was struggling to keep up with player requests for new features and bug fixes while simultaneously trying to deal with problems closer to home.

During Persson’s teen-age years his father relapsed into substance abuse, an illness with which he had battled with for years, unbeknownst to his children. The drinking ended Persson’s parents’ marriage, and he became estranged from his son for a few years. Persson’s father moved away from Stockholm (“both to avoid the city’s influence and to isolate himself”) but remained interested in and engaged with his son’s work. “He usually gave me the fatherly version of game criticism, saying they’re all brilliant, of course,” says Persson. “When I decided I wanted to quit my day job and work on my own games, he was the only person who supported my decision. He was proud of me and made sure I knew. When I added the monsters to Minecraft he told me that the dark caves became too scary for him. But I think that was the only true criticism I ever heard from him.”

Persson would occasionally visit his father in the Swedish countryside. On one spring visit a few years ago, the pair drove to a frozen lake to walk his father’s dog. While drinking coffee and eating sandwiches on the water’s edge, the dog ran out onto the ice, which gave way moments later. The pet plunged into the paralyzing water, thrashing for a few moments, before dozily resting its front paws on the lip of the ice. To Persson’s dismay, his father lay down on the ice and began hoisting himself towards the dog. “I’m running around all over the place, looking for a long stick,” he said. “I don’t know what I was planning on doing. It just seemed important to find a stick right then. I found one, turned around and saw my dad right next to the dog at the exact moment the ice broke loose, and tipped him in. I screamed. A moment later, he stood up. The water only came up to his hips.”

Persson says the most upsetting thing about the episode was the speed at which a beautiful scene turned into disastrous one, and the dizzying effect of instant shock turning to instant relief. This emotional journey was later echoed in 2011 when Persson was planning his father’s return to Stockholm. Persson had just rented an apartment for his father on the outskirts of the city, when FATHER’S NAME shot himself in the head. “I now have an entire life to live without him existing,” he wrote on his website last Christmas. Persson not only had lost his father, he began to worry about protecting himself against the demons he had battled with. “I feel like there is this looming cloud over my life. Those quiet thoughts: ‘Oh, it happened to him and this stuff sometimes goes in generations.’ I think I just have to ensure I don’t isolate myself. That’s what he did he did, out there in the countryside.”

This pressing desire to integrate, to live in community is reflected in Mojang (Swedish for gadget), the company Persson founded when Minecraft’s maintenance and development became too much for one man to bear. The company, which employs twenty-odd people, has a flat management structure and loose working hours. “When you have the kind of success Minecraft has brought you can just choose yourself the way you want to do things,” said Persson. “I don’t want to feel like I’m in charge or anything. Of course, it doesn’t really work that way because we all know I’m the founder but I try to have a studio where people go to make games for the fun of it, not just because some investor has said we have to make money.”

Persson is an outspoken critic of publishers, whom he believes curtail creativity in the games industry in search of short-term gains. He once accused Electronic Arts of “methodically destroying the games industry,” a criticism his independence from the studio system frees him to make. “Publishers might be a necessary thing,” he said. “But it’s inevitable that they will shift the focus from games being made by people who want to make good games to people who want to make money.” That the power balance in the video game industry is shifting in favour of independent creators – in 2012 the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft overtook Activision’s blockbuster Call of Duty: Modern Warfare as the most played game on the system – benefits players more than anybody, in Persson’s view. “The more studios that can remove themselves from the publisher system, the more games that will be made out of love, rather than for profit,” he said.

An outspoken defender of digital rights and freedom of speech, Persson also campaigns against those who would seek to financially gain from controlling the internet. (In December, he donated $250,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the US-based international non-profit digital rights group.) “The internet is this great and generous piece of human evolution and then we have corporations and governments trying to lock it down for short term profit,” he said. His interest in freedom of expression can be seen in Minecraft’s DNA, a game in which players have recreated everything from the Taj Mahal to the Starship Enterprise, the latter of which has attracted litigious interest. “Soon after the impressive video of that creation went around the internet I was sent a cease and desist letter from Universal Studios. I had to explain that we hadn’t made it. It’s a bit like sending a letter to Adobe because somebody drew a copyrighted image in Photoshop.”

It is this sort of stand that has made Persson a well-liked figure in the independent game movement. But at the same time, he can afford to take the anti-corporation stance. Each Minecraft sale flows straight to Mojang’s pocket – there are no middlemen – and, since the game is digitally distributed, there is no physical product to manufacture, store, or ship. After Minecraft, none of his subsequent games need to turn a profit. In 2011 he gave his £2.2 million Mojang dividend to his employees. “The money is a strange one,” he says. “I’m slowly getting used to it but it’s a Swedish trait that we’re not supposed to be proud of what we’ve done. We’re supposed to be modest. So at first I had a really hard time spending any of the profits. Also: what if the game stopped selling? But after a while I thought about all of the things I’d wanted to do before I had money. So I introduced a rule: I’m allowed to spend half of anything I make. That way I will never be broke. Even if I spend extravagant amounts of money, I will still have extravagant amounts of money.”

Even so, Persson’s extravagancies are somewhat practical. He flies to events in private jets and throws large hospitality parties for fans, such as the one held in San Francisco a few days after we met. (When Justice, the A-list DJ he had booked to play the event, was refused entry to the US at the last minute, Persson phoned Skrillex to perform as a stand-in). “Other than that I don’t know,” he says, picking his ear. “I have the latest computer?”

With his expansive following, Persson is able to spread the wealth too, at least indirectly. Getting ‘notched’ — whereby Persson directs his followers towards a new game — is the dream of every indie game maker. It can result in tens of thousands of sales. In a very real sense, Minecraft’s maker is a kingmaker in the video game realm. “There are so many sides to that,” he says. “I try to tweet about the games I love and feel passionate about. But it got to the stage where I could ‘make’ a small studio and so it began to feel like a duty. I started promoting games that I wasn’t so enthusiastic about.”

Following his father’s suicide, Persson has been simplifying his life. He has moved on from active Minecraft development, and he has committed to not being coerced into promoting people and products in which he does not fully believe. Last year he also divorced from his wife – a former moderator on the Minecraft forums – whom he had been dating for four years, and married to for one. “I’m a little confused by love,” he said. “I am a romantic person and maybe have this Hollywood perception of love… but then it’s never really like the movies. I didn’t really have much luck with women when I was younger so on some level I feel like I don’t really belong. Maybe everyone feels like that to some degree.”

The sense of not belonging is, of course, the essence of teen-age existence, and perhaps it is this enduring quality that Persson’s youth following responds to, as well as the example he presents of the nerd made good, of success in the face of a certain emotional vagrancy. It’s this innocence that has, to date, informed his games. Minecraft is at its most beguiling when experienced with a child’s ambition: to explore, to create and to share those experiences with others. But the 18 months following Persson’s departure from Minecraft’s development has changed his life in irreversible ways. It will be harder for his next game, 0x10c to express the same artful simplicity. Regardless of whether he can successfully break the writer’s block or not, at 33 Persson is moneyed and storied. What ambitions remain for the epitome of the indie success story? “I have the ability to get code done but I’m impatient and it’s scrappy as a result,” he said. “Maybe that helped me with Minecraft as it came quickly. But, well, at some point I’d like to actually become a good programmer.”

This article first appeared in The New Yorker.

Gransys, the green and not-so-pleasant land through which players hacked and thwacked in last year’s grand fantasy adventure, Dragon’s Dogma, displayed a certain anonymity despite its rugged handsomeness. It had to do with environmental cliché: those blanketed meadows, weathered cliffs and sinister forests stretch across all fantasy fiction from Middle-earth to Westeros, a tradition that Capcom’s game all too eagerly followed. After 60 years of landscaped tributes to Tolkien’s imagination in books, film and video games, there are few hills and valleys you could scatter with orcs that wouldn’t feel wearyingly over-familiar.

Bitterblack Isle is a cove that leads to a cavernous underground network of halls, runnels and spiral stairways and the heart of Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen – Capcom’s part-expansion, part nip-and-tuck of 2012′s blueprint. It isn’t a cliché in the same way, but it is nevertheless familiar.

It’s in the ghostly messages that sound out when you walk past the smoke-gripped corpses that punctuate its hallways, offering mortal warnings of what lies ahead – or of what, for that particular cadaver, lies behind. It’s in the rangy skeletons that lunge at you with cricking knees and the hollowed knights (seemingly quickened by their demise) who hop and jab with rapiers. It’s in the curious helpers you meet along these mossy, cobbled pathways, who speak in off-kilter regional English accents and who will happily sell you useful herbs and armour, yet never quite convince you of their trustworthiness.

You never hear the bullet that kills you, or so they say. Neither do you foresee the magic bullet that saves you – at least, City Interactive didn’t. 2010′s Sniper: Ghost Warrior, a budget release from the Polish publisher known only for its low-rent productions, unexpectedly changed the lives of its creators.

The game, a first-person shooter that draws heavy influence from the sniping missions in Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare titles, sold more than 2.5 million copies in the 12 months following its unassuming release, generating profits in excess of $25 million and booting its maker from the low leagues towards blockbuster development. As such, this sequel arrives bedecked in Cry Engine 3 colours with 10 missions spread across a three-act structure, all pieced together by a greatly extended team.

The kernel of appeal at the heart of any sniper game is the rhythm of planning and execution as you wiggle down in the dust, hold a finger to the air to estimate wind strength and direction and line up a reticule on a target 800-odd metres away. Ghost Warrior 2 pays off a well judged shot with a lingering slow-motion camera that tracks the bullet as it twists through the breeze. Then, a hit pause before it enters your target’s body with a crunch and a splat. There’s none of Sniper Elite V2′s X-ray pornography here, revealing the bullet puncturing a lung or severing a testicle, but the effect is similar: a mixture of light titillation at the fatal power you wield over an unsuspecting person, and light disgust at the way in which you’ve chosen to express it.

In Ghost Warrior 2, this central action is nested within three types of mission. In one, you act as the lone wolf, sprinting down a narrative corridor the designer has laid for you, eliminating close targets with a knife or silenced pistol and distant targets with a crouch and snipe. The second type – which draws most heavily upon Modern Warfare’s sniping excursions – pairs you with a spotter, who runs alongside you through a level, calling out targets, instructing you when to wait for the search light to pass and offering whispered encouragement for well aimed shots.

The third and final type is perhaps the strongest of the set and has you set up a .50 calibre rifle on some mountain or watchtower before taking out targets up to 1.5km away while a distant group of friendly soldiers work their way through an enemy compound. In every case, this is a game that prizes action and spectacle over grim realism, lighting up targets in your display so you rarely have to run your concentration over a landscape – but there’s still a certain shooting gallery appeal running through the repetition.

The driver towards completion (as is universally the case in Modern Warfare games and their myriad cover versions) is the thrill of the shoot-them-before-they-shoot-you challenge, rather than the sub-Clancy convolutions of the plot. Ghost Warrior 2′s story is a mesh of clichés, both on the macro level of its HVTs and ICBMs, and also in the detail of its dialogue, filled with banalities such as “Let’s get this show on the road” and “Cry me a river”. Stitched into this patchwork of impact-free familiarity is the odd moment of sharp interest – in particular, the scene in which you’re required to photograph acts of genocide from a derelict building as they occur in a distant muddy field – but these moments are too few.

At times, it’s a beautiful game, particularly during the latter stages in Tibet, but in general the team fails to work the engine as hard others have. These days the Modern Warfare template is only successful when it’s delivered with a machine-gun volley of distinct ideas, presented with the flair of an action movie director. In this regard, City Interactive just can’t keep up, and the thin, insubstantial core of the corridor shooter template is more fully revealed.

The game also inherits some of Modern Warfare’s ugliest cinematic tricks, killing you if you wander just a few steps from the linear path and breaking the game’s own rules at certain points – for example, when it wants your position to be compromised for narrative purposes. You can climb over small walls and hoist yourself up onto ledges, but only those that serve the designers’ purposes. It’s a clutch of treacheries that build an unshakeable sense that you’re flitting through a set, not a world.

Read the rest of this review here.

The Greek myths, those vivid tales of gods and monsters, have been retold through the centuries via whatever artistic medium is popular at the time. From the loose oral-poetic tradition of their origins through literature, sculpture, painting and, more recently, theatre and film, the towering cast of Olympus has never strayed far from the western consciousness – these myths maintain their power even though their relevance as religious instruction faded long ago. God of War brought the myths (or, at least, the spirit of the myths) to video games, and Sony’s series has remained true to its source, presenting the guts and glory of the ancient Greeks in perhaps their most spectacular and garish form yet.

This prequel maintains the myth, just, but does little to embellish it. The God of War series is beginning to stray from its source material as each new tale in the series presents us with fresh gods and monsters to batter and revile, but their theme is always unwavering vengeance, and their style is always gore, fortissimo gore. Despite the huge number of ways to rip and rend your opponents, the action is increasingly without meaning or a broader purpose.

Ascension begins with just such a gruesome scene: protagonist Kratos, chained atop a stone column, is being tortured by one of the Furies, a repugnant netherworld goddess who raises her arms to flatter her breasts before seeping attack bugs from her pores. Break free of her grip and it’s mythology as usual as you’re propelled through the world, dissolving grunts into crimson mist with your Blades of Chaos, killing off larger, named foes via the series’ divisive QTE finishing moves, and hauling yourself through the scenery by latching onto the glinting hook points.

As ever, the combat manages to maintain a certain slick unfussiness despite the huge array of offensive options. The refined animations slip together in a seamless, dazzling flow. Enemies offer visual tells for when they are about to attack, allowing an alert player to roll out of the way with a flick of the right stick. By the end of the game, you’ll have four elemental properties to add to all attacks (fire, ice, electric, soul) each selected by a swift (sometimes mid-combo) tap of the d-pad.

The imagery is stylised and cartoonish, but nevertheless macabre – its own kind of violent pornography. Sufficiently weaken an elephant-headed Juggernaut, for example, and in the finishing ‘minigame’ (to use the game’s own word) you must dodge its frantic swipes while stabbing at its head before, in one final, uninterrupted move, rending open its skull, exposing the brain as it twitches and fades to a lifeless grey. In a later battle with a Chimera, you tear its wings from its body one by one over the course of the fight, and the way in which the animal’s fading strength and resolve is represented in the animation is effective – almost affecting. The gruesomeness may be consistent with the stories from which the game draws its inspiration, but it’s undeniably a one-note take on Greek mythology and now, after tens of cumulative hours daubing the God of War series’ halls with blood, its impact has been muted.

Read the rest of this review at Eurogamer here.

Every summer holiday I’d lay awake on the narrow bed and listen to the only other piece of furniture in the room – the hulking wardrobe, as the beetles dined. This was the nightly ritual at my grandparents’ cottage, where the insects would feast en masse during the dark, tapping their mandibles loud against the wood till they finally stilled, replete at dawn. It was the closest I came not to adolescent rage but to adolescent madness: whipping from my bed, torching the light and poring, murderously over the bedroom furniture for something, anything to obliterate under thumb.

Nowadays the diners are gone, dispossessed by decay perhaps, as the wardrobe’s grain grumbled past its sell-by years ago. The house is all decline, its ceilings fissure-scrawl maps, its walls threaded by varicose veins of damp. It’s been this way since I can remember – close to three decades – but it never really seemed to matter very much before. The house was held together by warmth and love.

The beetles aren’t the only evictees. My grandfather departed shortly before Christmas, siren-wailed into a local hospital’s waiting bed where the staff mended what they could before making the grim pronouncement: he could not return home. His care was too much for my wearied grandmother to provide; he would need to find a new place to live.

The benefit of terminal illness – and it’s a grim benefit, but a benefit nonetheless – is the schedule it brings. Sure, the sentence is elastic: they might give you two months and you cling on for twelve, or two weeks and you’re wilted and gone in a day; but terminal illness and its prognosis sets the pace of one’s decay.

Mere old age – the sort of old age my grandparents are suffering – has none of that. It’s all unwelcome surprise, slo-mo shock horror. Death grows in us like a baby, its presence felt more each year, its strengthening kicks acting as reminders of our inexorable decline. But death’s final birth remains, for many, unannounced. It arrives to crown old age when we’re least expecting.

This is the problem for the elderly couple separated by unsynchronised degeneration. One remains in The Home, healthy but lonely, clinging to the household debris of memories. The other is sent to A Home, cared for but lonely, sitting in some medicinal chair facing a window on to a road that winds back to the old house and its memories.

Who is worse off in the arrangement? The left-behind, with her uneasy freedom and schedules that swivel around the visiting hour appointment, or the intrepid handicapped, deafened with drugs and the aggressive scent of industrial-scale linen-washing? He too awaits the visiting hour, but with a sapless tongue, his time now measured by the rising yellowy-tide in the catheter bag and the unwavering TV schedule.

“I’m not going yet,” my grandmother says, defiantly, all weekend as I stay with her. “There’s too much to do around this place anyway. And I’m certainly staying put till I’ve drunk all of the homemade wine.” We both laugh, long and eagerly – more than the joke deserves, but less than we need to.

Over our weekend together this becomes our battle cry of united defiance whenever a reason for moving out reveals itself. “Not yet!” she says. “Not yet!” I echo.

But she is preparing. She’s been preparing for years now, asking my brother and me to point out the household objects we’d like to inherit when the day comes. She would stick Post-It notes to these items’ bases with the relevant sibling’s initial drawn on in marker pen. I always saw this as a morbid request, and felt greedy and uncomfortable in answering her. But she was just preparing, trying to take care of things; being a good grandmother.

“I’m worried that he’s not eating enough,” she says, later. “Maybe I should move in to ensure he’s getting enough food?”

I point out that she is paying an extortionate amount for her husband to stay in The Home’s care and that it’s the staff’s responsibility to ensure he is putting enough away. “Yes,” she says. “Yes you’re right. I’ll get your father to have a word with the staff.”

“That’s the spirit!” I say. “Not yet!”

She smiles, ruefully.

The government has been trying to improve the lot of our ageing population of late, or at least trying to appear to try to improve their lot. For many, the final years of life consume everything that was built up beforehand, at least in financial and material terms. Last month the coalition committed to fund any care that an individual might require over £75,000 (a full £40,000 more than economist Andrew Dilnot recommended in his review). That, of course, doesn’t go towards the cost of care in a new home, only treatment. Regardless, a financial solution can only ever be a partial solution. There are deeper, wider factors for any couple facing a care home, ones that grow yet wider if the couple in question cannot move together – factors to do with guilt, loyalty and the incomprehensible pain of a separation that was not asked for.

I have my own cause for worry too. The house (fissured, varicosed) is also close to freezing. My grandparents were born pre-war and, like many farmers of their generation, live as if rationing was still in angry effect. Heat is doled out from the electric fire in momentary burps, before the ‘off’ switch is thriftily flicked and yet another woollen cardigan slipped into.

“You eat too quickly,” she admonishes, often.

To be this cold inside a home is unsettling for the contemporary human, who reasonably expects walls and rugs to offer adequate shelter from the cruel elements. I take two hot water bottles to bed and watch as steam rises, not just from my breath, but also the ambient heat of my fingers. She’s not ready to move out yet, psychologically but also physically. And yet, this is no place for an elderly lady to decline, drawn smaller by the temperature, diminished by the absence of warmth and love.

Sleep is death’s brother. But in this sort of cold, they’re twins. There’s no longer even the insect’s tap to act as a heartbeat indication of life any more, the questing micro-jaws whose nibbles and scrapes can keep a man warm through mere irritation. All that’s left is the air of cold immobility that precedes decay. And the questions – those unanswerable questions.

My grandmother wakes me first thing with a rap at the door. She’s still wearing the headscarf she slept in, tightly wrapped and tied beneath her chin. She’s eager for me to hit the road, grateful for my company and the various errands I helped her with, but ready for me to be on my way now. The new day has brought with it fresh challenges and to-dos which I am not to be a part of and, moreover, she’s worried she’s keeping me from my own familial responsibilities. This is the curse of the kindly matriarch left behind: managing everybody else. “Come on,” she says. “Time for you to get home.”

We lock eyes and I smile.

“Not yet!” I say. “Not yet.”

This article first appeared in the New Statesman here.

There’s a moment at the start of Tomb Raider Legend – Crystal Dynamic’s first Tomb Raider game, released in 2006 – when Lara Croft, the archaeologist destined for spinal troubles in later life, meets an armed guard standing with his back to her at the yawning mouth of a Bolivian tomb. She lines up a pistol headshot and moments later he slumps noiselessly to the ground. A voice in Lara’s earpiece asks: “Any idea who he was?” Lara replies: “I haven’t the foggiest.”

No such murderous nonchalance from Lara at the start of this Tomb Raider, Crystal Dynamics’ prequel to the 17-year-old series. As she wanders, battered and torn by a shipwreck, on the unwelcoming rocks of Yamatai (an island almost as hostile as its inhabitants, the Solarii) she murmurs in distress at the idea of having to murder somebody in order to survive. Her first kill is in self-defence, a gun that goes off in the middle of a hand-to-hand struggle, taking her aggressor’s scalp with it. She trembles in horror, shuffling hurriedly away from the twitching evidence of her mortal sin.

Still, they say the first kill is always the hardest, Lara. Indeed, five minutes later her body count is rising through the 20s and there’s not a single crease of remorse on her young face. By the time she’s fully plundered the macro-tomb that is Yamatai (an eastern Bermuda Triangle into which planes and ships are irresistibly drawn and wrecked), her kill count is of genocidal proportions. Small wonder by the time she made it to Bolivia she was shooting first and not bothering to ask any questions at all.

This Tomb Raider is also a game that asks fewer questions of its player than in the past. Previous titles offered a series of elaborate environmental puzzles, Croft nobly throwing herself at nature, a solitary key with which to unlock the ludicrously well-maintained tombs of Tibet or South America.

These grand spatial conundrums required the player to stand back, observe and, bit by bit, work out how the giant cogs might fit together in order to yield their ancient treasure. In this Tomb Raider, by contrast, the tombs are few and their raiding is entirely optional.

In the main, your task is to chase the spectacle of the story. A tale in which Lara must save her scattered surviving companions from the gruesome rituals of the Solarii, upgrade her skills and weapons and explore off the beaten track for litter of varying degrees of worth: USB sticks, ceramics (fake and authentic) and the documents and possessions of previous, long-departed shipwrecked souls.

The only time when there’s a strain of the old Tomb Raider sense of having worked a thing out is in the tombs, a series of seven, voluntary, single-puzzle caverns. These offer some of the standout moments of the game, and are one of the few times you must run your gaze over the contours of the environment, hoping to snag onto a solution. No doubt it’s in these moments that Lara gained her taste for tomb raiding that would later characterise her career, but they are rare in this prequel.

This is not a superficial shift. By relegating puzzle solving to a sideshow, Crystal Dynamics has changed the nature of enjoyment players might derive from the game. In the past, Tomb Raider thrills derived from ingenuity and triumph – the satisfaction of planning a solution and executing it successfully (or happening upon it by chance).

In this game, the fun is found in thoroughness and endurance – the willingness of the player to search out every trinket in the environment, before chasing the plot with all of its exciting, challenge-less, Uncharted-style set-pieces – weaving through coniferous treetops by parachute, shotgun blasting wooden obstacles as you slide down a waterfall. In truth, almost nothing’s hunted here. There’s always a treasure map to guide you to each and every collectible and the option to lay an impromptu marker to laser guide you towards your mark.

That’s not to say that these designs aren’t gripping. Tomb Raider is relentlessly absorbing in the contemporary fashion, and the natural contours and relief of the island make the somewhat shallow exploration feel more believable than before.

Lara’s exquisite animation allows her to move through the world with unmatched grace, and the heavy emphasis on combat is more palatable thanks to its ease of interaction, Lara naturally crouching behind cover and switching between her bow, pistol, rifle and shotgun with rare quickness and ease.

As she discovers new tools (an axe for climbing, a rope bow for creating washing lines across chasms, fire arrows), so previously impassable routes open up (although in nowhere near such a satisfying or orchestrated manner as in Zelda, or the most recent Batman titles). But it’s important to note the fundamental shift at the heart of the game, one that contemporises Tomb Raider, but removes great chunks of challenge. The thrills are more sustained, but they are also muted.

Lara, however, is not as she gets thrown about with bone-jarring frequency. A great deal of Camilla Luddington’s voice-acting sessions have been dedicated to Lara’s oohs, ahhs and grrs of fleshly anguish. In a sense, it has the desired effect. The island of Yamatai is the crucible in which the older Lara was forged and her cries of physical misfortune probably demonstrate how the girl became a woman. Incrementally, she stops cringing in the bushes and steps into her role of a heroine modelled on the aristocratic British explorers of the early 20th Century: pioneering, fearless, cultured and somewhat standoffish. We watch as she loses innocence at the hands of experience.

In contrast to the previous titles then, Tomb Raider is a game about loss as much as it is about discovery – even if that loss is generally only expressed in the storyline, not the systems. It’s also a game about survival, in a way the previous games were not. The increased peril – which derives from both the Solarii and the island itself – places a greater emphasis on looting ammunition from fallen foes and on collecting salvage to improve your weapons. These violence-minded concerns that were largely absent in the past. In this way, Crystal Dynamics’ game loses the sharp focus of old, but gains a more wide-ranging appeal.

Whether you view this discovery as treasure or folly depends on your affection for the past, and the Tomb Raider artefacts that are now lost to it.

This review first appeared in The Guardian here.

Video games owe a great deal to the American bar. It was here, on sticky carpets, before glinting taps and amidst woozy patrons, that the medium made its public debut — when Atari founder Nolan Bushnell installed his first arcade cabinet, Computer Space, in the Dutch Goose near Stanford University in 1971.

The video game — a homeless invention — flourished in the drinking context. A year after Computer Space’s arrival Al Acorn, one of Atari’s first employees, was called to Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale, California where a Pong location test machine had malfunctioned. On arrival Acorn opened the coin box to issue himself free credits for testing, only to be showered with coins. The game had proved so popular that the coin mechanism was seized.

Atari soon began to use drinking establishments as impromptu venues for ruthless live user testing. A new arcade game would be stationed in a popular bar and, if it failed to exceed a set amount of earnings over the week, would be promptly dropped from production. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, video games lived or died on their ability to woo bar-goers. It was a symbiotic relationship: The games provided entertainment to fill the bars and help keep patrons drinking, while the bars provided the players to fill the machines’ coin slots with quarters.

In time, the arcade cabinet spread its wooden wings, befriending and moving in with the pinball and claw machines in amusement arcades, before finally being compressed and condensed into console form for the home. Years passed, and as the home system caught up with the arcade machine’s thrill and spectacle, destination gaming made way for convenience gaming: People didn’t get out so much, when it came to video games. Arcade machines were thrown out of bars onto the street like inebriated, broke customers, surrendering their space for quiz machines, karaoke sets and other mutant Atari offspring.

Video games owe a great deal to the American bar, but the American bar owed nothing to video games. The world and its technology moved on.

Paul Kermizian, however, did not.

…

“Sorry I’m stuck in a world of classic arcade games; I’m not that up on new technology,” Kermizian says, staring fretfully into his phone’s camera from his New York apartment. It’s a statement equal part apology and brag.

Kermizian owns an iPhone, but needed to set up FaceTime for this interview. He has yet to download any games for the device.

“I’m just so not up on [current games], I guess,” he says. “I play a lot of Mappy these days. Oh! And I play a lot of Pitfall on my PlayStation 2. People give me a hard time because all I have are the classic collections, but when I play [current games] they’re not that appealing to me. They’re too realistic.

“If I want realistic, I’ll just look at my dog.”

Kermizian’s unwillingness to contemporize his relationship with video games is more than a preference: It’s a calling.

In 2004, he and some friends founded a Brooklyn bar that combines early arcade machines with American craft beers. Eight years later, the bar employs 50 staff across three locations (including one in Jersey City and one in Philadelphia), with a fourth bar planned for launch in Manhattan later in 2013.

Where the video game industry has largely turned its back on the arcade, Kermizian found himself at the spearhead of a new trend spreading across America: the bar-cum-arcade, or Barcade.

…

Kermizian grew up in central New Jersey in the 1980s. “It was very suburban,” he says. The local arcade was housed in a pizzeria — Little Italy — and there were some other, outcast machines stationed at a gas station a paperboy’s bike ride away. Kermizian was eight years old when he first started playing. He soon developed a taste for “cartoony” games over what he saw as the identikit space titles, falling in love with “weirdo” releases like Q-Bird, Dig Dug and his current favorite, Mappy.

“I was more into games that had characters and unusual storylines over just shooting stuff,” he says. “I remember as a kid so many of those games … like Space Duel and Star Castle, and they all seemed so similar to me. I wasn’t that into them. Little Italy pizza got everything — Mario Bros., Punch Out, Gauntlet, Dragon’s Lair, whatever was new. I hated Dragon’s Lair when it came out because it was hard to control. Plus it was 50 cents and that was a lot of money for me.”

“I was more into games that had characters and unusual storylines over just shooting stuff,” he says. “I remember as a kid so many of those games… like Space Duel and Star Castle and they all seemed so similar to me. I wasn’t that into them. Little Italy pizza got everything – Mario Bros, Punch Out, Gauntlet, Dragon’s Lair, whatever was new. I hated Dragon’s Lair when it came out because it was hard to control. Plus it was 50 cents and that was a lot of money for me.”

Kermizian’s interest in video games sustained through his adolescent years but began to wane at 13. “I think I just got into other stuff: baseball cards, sports and, later, music,” he says. “It didn’t really circle back around to video games until I saw one for sale really cheaply when I was much older.”

The game in question was Mappy, Kermizian’s first love, up for sale in a local classified advertisement. “I saw it in the newspaper and was just like: ‘Oh my God, I can buy a Mappy arcade game for 200 bucks?’ I had enough space so I went for it. And then next thing I knew I had four machines [Zaxxon, Tetris and a Pac Man/Ms Pac Man combo] in my apartment.”

At the time Kermizian was working in film and television but was eager to open a bar as a side business. “I had some long time friends who were also working in different creative fields and wanted to partner with me on the bar,” he says. “The idea of opening a bar and arcade came from us seeing how popular the video games were when I would have friends over or [host] parties. It seemed like a natural combination. We were all living in Brooklyn and in Williamsburg and so wanted to open something within stumbling distance of our homes.”

One of Kermizian’s friends came up with the name, which expresses the establishment’s gimmickry with rare economy: a bar themed around exotic beers and 1980s arcade machines. Then the group drew up a list of games they would like to install in their new bar. “We each made up our own list of ones that we thought were our favourites and also the ones we thought would be good; a line-up that people that hits like all different types of game play. We didn’t want too many Pac-man style maze games, too many multi player games, or driving games, for example.”

It sounds like a boyhood dream: drawing up lists of one’s favourite video game arcades to buy and position near one’s favourite beer pumps. But realizing the dream involved both cost ($250,000) and risk (the groups’ life savings & credit cards). Once a location was agreed upon the group worked on most of the construction between them (“everything but the electrics and plumbing – it was such hard work”). Then there was the crucial matter of sourcing the machines on the list.

Today Barcade has around 40 arcade machines installed at each of its three locations, with around 100 more kept in warehouse storage and they’re able to source almost any title they want. But in 2004 the team was inexperienced, generally buying cabinets on eBay and Craig’s List where prices were high and supply was low or irregular. “We didn’t get everything we wanted [for launch] but we had a good line-up, I think. Then we kept shopping after we opened and began swapping the games to see which ones performed well. It was about two years before we had a really strong good line-up and figured out which games out weren’t popular or that didn’t really work out the way we thought they would.”

Distilling the collection to the best-performing hits may have taken some time, but the recipe is now almost set, the line-up only changing twice a year at most, and only changing a maximum of three machines at a time. In 2013, the bankable hits are much as they were in New York arcades of the 1980s. “Ms Pac-man, Tetris, Galaga, Frogger: those are like, you know, the classics,” says Kermizian.

After a noisy opening, the darkened bar lit by the cathode glow of its attendant squadron of machines, success was quick and consistent. “The popularity surprised me,” says Kermizian, “and [the fact that] that it didn’t wear off, that it became a place where people came regularly. We were worried that this might be a lot of fun for people, but that they would only view it as a once-in-a-long-while thing. I was astounded at how many regulars we found right away, and how dedicated they became.”

In keeping with Kermizian’s rejection of contemporary technology (and perhaps his adolescent hatred of Dragon’s Lair’s extortionate, unaffordable 50 cents entry fee) all of the machines in Barcade still cost the same per credit as they did at launch. Either side of the bar quarter machines accept $10 bills and spew credits with a jackpot jangle.

“We have a tech guy who fixes the machines when they break,” he says. “Every time he comes in he complains at our prices, urging us to increase them to a dollar. My perspective is that people are going to put a dollar in the change machine every time, regardless of whether a credit costs a quarter, 50 cents or whatever. The average game for someone who just walks in, has a beer and puts a quarter in Donkey Kong is like a minute. Most people are not good at these games, especially on a Friday or Saturday night.”

But does today’s clientele come only for the ambiance, not the addiction? I ask Kermizian whether he ever sees patrons who discover these games for the first time, fail repeatedly but decide to work at it, improving their skills like the first generation of New York ‘vidkids’ (as the author Martin Amis described them in his 1982 book Invasion of the Space Invaders) of earlier decades.

“Definitely,” he says. “We have real classic arcade enthusiasts and some of the best players in the world are on our scoreboards. Those guys come in a lot, sometimes arriving as a group, converging from all over in a big meet-up so that none of our regulars can get on the games. But we’ve also seen people who have never really played classic arcade games at all go from playing their first games at Barcade to having a world class score on some game that they had never played before. It’s always fun to see that. Donald Hays has scores on our board, John Macallister, Ben Falls, all these guys who are world record holders.

“Then, of course, there’s Hank Chien…”

…

Dr Hank Chien first heard about Barcade by looking at the Donkey Kong world leaderboard. A few months earlier he’d watched the Seth Gordan movie, King of Kong, which documents the rivalry between two of the game’s best players, Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe as they compete for the Donkey Kong world record. Chien, curious about the game (although he was seven when it launched in 1981, the Taiwan-national had never played it before) loaded a version onto his home computer to discover a natural, latent talent for the game. Returning home from his day job as a plastic surgeon in New York, he would play Donkey Kong every night. After three months he reached ‘killscreen’, a point at which the game freezes due to a programing bug.

Eager to take his gift on the road, but unsure of where he might find a working Donkey Kong cabinet in the wild, Chien clicked through the profiles of the Twin Galaxies’ Donkey Kong scoreboard [the Guinness Book of Records-endorsed source for video game world records] to see if he could find a top player nearby. It turned out Benjamin Falls, one of the game’s top players, was also from New York.

“We immediately became friends and now I would consider him a mentor as well,” says Chien. Falls introduced his new protégé to a number of other top Donkey Kong players and invited him to Barcade, the only local bar in New York with a working Donkey Kong cabinet.

“Naturally Donkey Kong was the first game I played on my initial visit,” says Chien. “What grabbed me about the game were the constant improvements in your scores and the long-learning curve. No matter how good you are there are always ways to improve your game. Donkey Kong is also a concept-based game rather than one based upon memorization. There are no patterns to memorize but plenty of concepts to understand. In fact, people talk about patterns in Donkey Kong when really they are just guidelines. There are no patterns in Donkey Kong and the ones people refer to as patterns frequently fall apart.”

After another few months of playing at Barcade under the tutelage of more experienced players Chien was able to reach the killscreen consistently. “At that point I decided I would buy my own machine, record a killscreen, submit it to Twin Galaxies, sell my machine and be done,” he says. “However, I was still improving and by the time I got my machine I wanted more than just a killscreen: I wanted a million points. At the time there were only two official scores over a million (and a total of five players capable of achieving this) so it was an ambitious goal.”

The first time Dr Hank Chien broke a million points he was killing time before a plane flight. He had reached his ambitious goal but, with all the drawn-eyed hunger of the glory addict it wasn’t enough to hang up his cap and dungarees. Chien wanted more.

The first time Dr Hank Chien broke the Donkey Kong world record he was killing time during a New York snowstorm. “I broke the world record for the first time in February 2010,” he says. “There was a huge snowstorm in New York City that day. I had surgery that day and actually tried to go to work. When I reached my car, it was engulfed in snow up to the side view mirrors. I called my office and cancelled everything for the day. Being locked at home I decided to make some world record attempts.”

But Chien found he couldn’t get a game ‘started’. The game’s first few levels are more random and frequently players will take more risks since the stakes are lower. “This is why you’ll see even the top players dying very often in the early stages and sometimes taking hours before they play out a game,” says Chien. “I took frequent breaks and caught up on sleep throughout the day. It wasn’t until the evening that I was able to get a game started.”

Two and a half hours later Chien stood to his feet proclaiming: “New world record.”

Today, Chien visits Barcade once a week. “It’s a different experience for me now,” he says. “In my early days I went primarily for the games but now I go primarily to socialize. I think Barcade is flourishing since it targets an older market that can appreciate and reminisce about the arcade scene of the 80s. Also that generation is old enough to drink now… Most of the younger gamers would prefer to play at home on their consoles and interact over the Internet rather than in person.”

…

Younger gamers are, in a sense, the secret to Barcade’s success and its great ongoing threat. More than players like Chien, and the older pros, Barcade attracts young local patrons, typical of the Brooklyn bar scene, and for many of these visitors, the classic arcade hits of the 1980s were released long before they were born, familiar now primarily as cultural icons rather than living memories.

“When we opened in 2004, some of these games weren’t even 20 years old,” says Kermizian. “But now, eight years on, we find the ideal period of nostalgia keeps shifting on us as our customers are a little bit younger. So we’ve started to go with some early ‘90s games. You know, we’ve put Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in two of the three arcade locations and that’s our number one most popular game now. People just go crazy playing that.”

“On a good night, what does a single Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles machine make?” I ask, a little impertinently.

“I don’t know because we don’t have a counter,” he replies, a little gracefully. “At the end of the night we just dump a bucket of quarters out of the machine.

“How much is a bucket worth?” I ask, curiosity finally defeating all sense of proprietary.

“Probably like 50 bucks.”

All these years on, with prices unadjusted for inflation, the ageing arcade still offers a business then. But time continues to be the greatest menace to the arcade, even in the midst of this repackaged revival. For many, this parade of hands-on exhibits are little more than curios whose bleeps and flashes provide an atmospheric link to a past lone gone but, through Space Invaders’ and Pac-Man’s iconography, not forgotten – fashionable even. But fashions are transient. How long can the business model sustain?

“Well, I don’t know,” says Kermizian. It’s become very much a trend here in the US. Since Barcade’s success a lot of similar places have opened, especially in the last couple of years, all following our business model. It’s become a big thing, and, as with all trends, it’s going to be interesting to see if it lasts. There’s not a lot of like classic arcades opening, they’re all combining the bar aspect because that appears to work as a new recipe.

And Barcade itself? Is there a danger that it will go the same way as its precursors of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s? Will technology’s unstoppable plod render the bar arcade obsolete? “It’s sustained itself so far,” he says. “We’ve been able to put newer games in without compromising and making them too new. We don’t ever want to do that. I think there’s always nostalgia element but equally these games are so simple and so addictive and so deliciously frustrating… It’s clear that young people and people who are new to the games are enjoying them on their own merits… With that fact there’s a chance to just keep reaching new generations.

“But we’ll see. Who knows when you open a bar in New York City if you’re going to be there 8 years later?”

What’s certain is that the debt has been paid, balance restored: finally, there’s an American bar that owes a great deal to the video game.

This article was first published on Polygon here.

There’s gold in them there clichés – at least for a game-maker with a talent for subversion and quirky embellishment. This belief has underpinned San Franciscan developer Gaijin Games’ past titles, all of which have employed the prefix ‘Bit.Trip’ and all of which have adopted the fat pixel aesthetic of late 1970s Atari games. Partly responsible for the renaissance in vintage art styling in the independent game scene, Bit.Trip took pixels once viewed as crude and outmoded and made them stylish again, along with the sine-wail soundtracks that gave way to Hollywood orchestras in the 1990s (now an artistic choice rather than a technological constraint).

But Gaijin’s talent isn’t only for trendsetting. The developer’s more laudable quality is in taking the medium’s first principles (as laid down by Pong, Pac-Man and others) and spinning them into fresh, vivid shapes. Time and again the company has found gold in these clichés. That keen interest in tired or outmoded game styles continues with Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien, a game that slots into the so-called auto-runner genre, which is now – quite understandably – a bit weary. As in Canabalt, Jetpack Joyride et al, your character automatically runs from the left of the screen to the right, and you must dodge various obstacles in order to progress as far as possible.

Future Legend of Rhythm Alien tweaks the formula in some consequence-rich ways. For one, each level has a start, a middle and an end and, if you crash into a ledge or fail to leap clear over the head of a spike-helmed Goomba, you are simply returned to the start of the stage to seamlessly try again: there is no death in this game. Protagonist CommanderVideo’s red sneakers never wear out and no matter how many times you throw him from a ledge into oblivion he’ll make another attempt without complaint or penalty, and with all the tenacity of one of Trials’ bike-riders.

For this reason your score for each of the 100-odd stages is derived not from time taken to completion but from the number of items you collect along the way. A stream of gold bars and red score-boost power-ups litter your path, requiring different timed jumps, slides and loop-de-loops for collection. Make it to the end of the stage having collected every available token and you’ll have the opportunity to fire your character from a cannon into a bullseye for some bonus score – essential for ascending to the higher end of the leaderboard.

While none of Gaijin’s creations look like music games in the traditional sense, they all place a firm emphasis on musicality, and Future Legend of Rhythm Alien is no different. The level acts as a kind of musical stave that CommanderVideo runs along, and the different obstacles act as ‘notes’ that are avoided or collected in time with the music. These hurdles require different button inputs (press down to slide through a tight gap, press X to smash through a wall, sweep the analogue stick around to run around a giant loop and so on) and each pick-up you collect has its own sound effect, the sample bedding in with the music, often producing the melody of the song.

Watch your hands as you play and you’ll see the basic interactions are pure Guitar Hero: you tap the relevant coloured button in time with the music. But the on-screen output of these interactions is that a lanky character leaps and bounds through a landscape. In this way Gaijin meshes the rhythm action game and the auto-runner to create an experience that feels at once novel and familiar.

Read the rest of this review at Eurogamer here.

The timing is, if not unfortunate, then perhaps lacking in tact. The issue of guns and their place in society is high on the political and cultural agenda. As Americans grapple with the philosophical and practical questions of whether assault weapons should be permitted in their society, sober reflection and careful deliberation is needed.

Into this context swaggers Serious Sam – never a man to bring a knife to a gun debate – wearing a wife-beater and a maniacal grin and brandishing a home-made stack of projectile weapons, mounted precariously atop one another. The shotgun connects to the assault rifle connects to the chainsaw and so on upwards in a kind of unwieldy contraption that even the most wild-eyed contingent of the NRA might shy away from endorsing.

Still, for all the unsubtlety, there is a chance Serious Sam Double D XXL could steer the conversation in a new direction. You see, the gun stack in this downloadable side-scrolling shooter can be loaded with a different sort of live ammunition: bees. Turns out guns don’t kill people – high-velocity projectile insects kill people.

Gun-stacking is Serious Sam Double D XXL’s finest trick, an amusing gimmick that allows you to rearrange your bank of collected weapons into almost any configuration provided you have the requisite number of connectors. A schematic-arranging option screen displays your armoury so far and, by dragging and dropping different guns onto one another, you begin to build your personal Heath Robinson firearm. There’s a joyful flexibility to the system as you create a stack of chainsaws or alternate between flamethrowers and shotguns and so on – and, with 30-odd guns to add to the pool of resources, the number of gun-stack permutations is extensive.

The temptation, as with all video games, is to curve your creativity toward the extreme, crafting a tower with six of your most over-powered weapons. But this is rarely the best strategy. Each weapon guzzles its own type of ammunition and so there’s a danger you’ll exhaust your supplies in moments if you fire everything simultaneously, leaving you in a face-off with a 30-foot armoured dinosaur with nothing but a series of impotent clicks to shoo it away. Rapid switching between pre-set gun configurations allows smart players to take a more strategic approach to resource management, and often less is more.

Read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

Nobody remembers their first kill. It’s not like the high security prison-yards, where they pace just to forget, dream-haunted. When it comes to video games, nobody remembers their first kill. If you can recall your first video game, well, then you’ve a chance of pinpointing the setting (over a blackened Space Invaders’ killing field? Atop a Sonic the Hedgehog green hill? Deep within a Pac-Man labyrinth?). But a name, date and face? Not likely.

It’s not just the troubling number of digital skeletons in the players’ closet that prevents recollection – although from Super Mario to Call of Duty, the trail of dead we game-killers leave behind is of genocidal proportions. It’s that these slayings are inconsequential. Remember the first pawn or knight you “took” in chess – the moment you callously toppled its body from the board? Hardly. Even if the piece had a name and backstory – a wife and children waiting on news back home, a star-crossed romance with an rival pawn – such details would have been forgotten the moment you packed away the board.

Most game murder (and its moments-older twin, game violence) leaves no imprint on the memory because it lacks meaning outside of the game context. Unlike depictions of death in cinema, which can trigger keen memories of the viewer’s own past pains and sorrows, game violence is principally systemic in nature; its purpose is to move the player either towards a state of victory or of defeat, rarely to tears or reflection. Likewise, there is no remorse for the game murder not only because the crime is fictional but also because, unless you’re playing for money or a hand in marriage, there is no consequence beyond the border of the game’s own fleeting reality.

Video games were deadly from the get-go. Spacewar! – the proto-game of the MIT labs played on $120,000 mainframe computers in the early-1960s set the tone: a combative space game in which two players attempted to be the first to gun the other down. From this moment onwards violence was the medium’s defining quiddity. This is no great surprise. Most sports are metaphors for combat. The team games – soccer, rugby and so on – are sprawling battles in which attackers and defenders ebb and flow up and down the field in a clash of will and power led by their military-titled “captains”. American Football is a series of frantic First World War-style scrambles for territory measured in 10-yard increments. Tennis is a pistol duel, squinting shots lined up in the glare of a high-noon sun; running races are breakneck chases between predator and prey, triggered by the firing of a gun. That video games would extend the combat metaphor that defines most human play was natural.

The arcades concentrated the metaphor into sixty-second clashes between player and computer, dealing as they invariably did in the violence of sudden failure. This was a financial decision more than it was an artistic one: their designers needed to kill off the player after a minute or so in order to squeeze another quarter out of them. Violence was part of the business model: in the battle between human and machine, the machine must always overwhelm the player. In such games, as the author David Mitchell wrote, we play to postpone the inevitable, that moment when our own capacity for meting out playful death is overcome by our opponent’s. This is the DNA of all games, handed down from the playground to the board and, finally to the screen.

The problem of game violence then – the problem that’s inspired a liberal president to call for Congress to fund another clutch of studies into its potential effects on the player – cannot derive from its existence or even its ubiquity. Violence is a necessary function of the video game. The problem must be to do with the aesthetic of the violence – the way in which its rendered on the screen. It is a question of form, not function – something that moves the conversation into the realm of all screen violence, a style concern.

This essay was first published on the New Statesman. You can read the rest of it here.