When I talk about games, I tend to focus on the big stuff. What are the new enemies like? How awesome are the new weapons? Quite frequently, we speak in broad generalizations. The guns in BioShock Infinite “feel good” or, depending on your opinion, are generally uninteresting. The sound of a single gun firing or the amount of audible scratches in every voxophone rarely receives much attention. These features are minute, infinitesimally small in relation to the rest of the game. But together, all these small things matter. Tiny design choices in all games help build readable, compelling, and realistic worlds and systems. For designers who care, it’s the small stuff that makes all the difference.

When little pieces of a game irk you, it is easy to brush them aside as mere quibbles. No one likes a nitpicker, but sometimes, the small stuff can also be immensely damaging. Take Legendary, the recently released Marvel-themed deck-building game. After writing my piece on Legendary, I strolled around the internet looking for reviews. Among nearly all assessments of the game, while overwhelmingly positive, players of the game criticized the lack of variety of the art on the cards.

Last time I talked about the Expo Hall, the show floor for video games, and the Tabletop area, the show floor for non-video games. They are, however, a fraction of the entire convention.

They comprise the majority of the bottom most floor of the convention center. The floors above it consist of a single hallway that wraps around the inside edge of the building leading to various rooms filled with various additional activities. The most notable, or at least the most widely advertised, are the panels.

In the wake of the Great War and a Spanish flu epidemic, T.S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land with considerable help from his friend and mentor, Ezra Pound. Ostensibly, The Waste Land is a shell-shocked reaction to the spreading wars and disease that would define much of the twentieth century. But beyond that, The Waste Land is also a poem about poetry. Along with the literal ruins left by the First World War, Eliot and many other high modernists felt that culture itself was in ruins—that art, thought, and history were being destroyed.

Nearly every line in The Waste Land is a reference to a classical text from the European, the Indian, the Chinese, Biblical, or the ancient Roman heritage. The poem switches perspectives and languages frequently and without warning, and Eliot’s footnotes are a separate, parallel poem that is often intentionally misleading. The Waste Land is a logistical nightmare, spiraling through numerous histories, miming and parodying lines and legends that frequently disorient and frustrate its reader. Combing through the lines of The Waste Land is combing through the wreckage of a thousand years of writing, uprooted and discarded in a way that must mean something.

There have been a lot of people writing about the violence in Bioshock Infinite. Some say there’s too much of it and thst it detracts from the story. Others say its fine and that it adds to the game’s themes. I’m inclined to agree and disagree with both sides.

Yes, the level of violence is extreme at times, and yes, that violence is important to understanding the themes and characters, but I also don’t think that there’s enough extreme violence to properly express the themes that the game is trying to present. Bioshock Infinite should be more violent, or at the very least, its violence should be treated with more gravitas. Either way, there shouldn’t be less violence, but there should be less combat.

In the new Tomb Raider, the phrase “A survivor is born” pops up at the title screen and just as the credits roll.  It sums up the game’s narrative tone.  Instead of the dual-pistol-wielding, dinosaur-killing, quip-making Lara Croft, we get a character who struggles through uncertainty and ends up thriving in the face of overwhelming adversity.

From a plot-based perspective, everything is against her: Lara is betrayed by equipment, people, and even the weather.  On a surface level, it seems like a tense survival situation, but the game’s systems don’t always match this sense of urgency.  The drama of the game’s plot and the relative predictability of its systems demonstrate how difficult it is to portray survival situations in video games and how increasing visual fidelity will make it even more difficult to do in the future.