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.

Like many other Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing games, Scarlet Blade is a game in which a player designs a character, both physically, by selecting options that define their characters appearance, as well as functionally, by choosing a class (damage dealer, tank, support, etc.) to play.  That character is then launched into a world in which they will kill monsters, level up, collect loot, and craft items.  Nothing exceptional going on here in terms of the conventions of the genre.

The one notable difference between it and other games of this sort, though, among all of these fairly standard MMORPG conventions exists in character creation.  Simply put, there are no men.

PAX is a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Regularly the show and its Boston counterpart (the one PopMatters was nice enough to send me to) attract attendees in the tens of thousands. Each show has been larger than the previous one to the point that they no longer bother keeping track. Among all those masses of people are an equal number of varied experiences, some quite similar and others so fundamentally different they don’t even start at the same place. Their interests, their goals, their purposes and day-to-day, minute-to-minute desires are all fundamentally different. And somehow PAX finds a way to cater to them all.

Now this is true of any convention large enough to need police to corral people into the correct lines at the start of the show. And thanks to my press badge, my experience was going to be fundamentally different to the vast majority of people in attendance. PAX East is a fan convention, and while it may have started as a way for Penny Arcade to create a convention dedicated to all the things that site’s proprietors love, it really has moved beyond them. There’s a good chance that if you talk to a random person at the show that they wont know what Penny Arcade is or anything about it, only that they loving gaming, and that this is a convention hosted in their town or, as in my case, on their coast as a celebration of gaming. That part of PAX has remained the same.

Tomb Raider is ostensibly an action game, but it’s filled with an unusual amount of very specific horror imagery for an action game. It’s smart about how and when it uses these visual cues, and it’s clear that the developers understand how this kind of imagery affects us as gamers and people and even what such imagery represents within the greater context of the horror genre.