A new magazine, with a bold mission statement:
You’ve probably thought that. Or read it maybe. Or overheard it. Well, if not, then we’re telling this to you now. What we hear is that people who “play games” are too immature, too uneducated, and too short-attentioned to focus on anything other than the killing, robbing, and leveling up. Feelings? Reflection? Discourse? No, thank you.
We can do better.
We are fixated on a single question: “What does it mean to play games?” We want to be what early Rolling Stone was to rock n’ roll or Wired was to tech. We want to look like the Fader and walk like the Believer. We’re talking about the long format read on the creative minds behind blockbuster and indie game titles sided by personal essays about what games mean to our daily little lives.
Kill Screen is the natural extension of a maturing games industry. Far from the sensationalist juvenilia that dots the web and more accessible than the lofty rhetoric and gamespeak of academics, we’re approaching a beloved medium on its own terms as fans and as critics.
Coupled with world-class design, Kill Screen will serve as the voice for a generation of consumers who grew up on games and now wants to talk about them with the same wit and rancor that can be found in dialogues about film, television, etc. We are a professional, curated approach that respects the time constraints of the older game player and aims right for the brain.
http://killscreendaily.com/pages/who-we-are
Here's a taste of the "discourse" on offer:
This sense of being trapped in a pedagogic exercise is inseparable from the core meaning of Zelda. Skyward Sword is a learning simulator, a near-perfect progression of object lessons—physical and logical—that revive in adults the forgotten sense of amazement in learning, while remaining uncomplicated enough to engender a sense of grown-up mastery in younger players. This trick cannot be completed without the invention of a latticework of dishonesty so imaginative it veers into the supernatural. It is a world where dragons can send you underwater to collect dozens of fish shaped like musical notes and where playing a harp causes glowing cryptograms to shine through your skin.
In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Ludwig Wittgenstein defined the "mystical" as things that cannot be put into words, inhabitants of an order of existence outside of our own universe, incapable of being described or understood by our rational brains. Skyward Sword imagines singing dragons, glowing tattoos, and an hereditary struggle between good and evil in which some village kid will always wind up the green tunic'd hero and a blonde-haired royal is kidnapped in perpetuity.
It's a game where logical thought mutates into dreamy mysticism, simultaneously lucid and absurd. When Zelda is possessed by the spirit of the Goddess and entombed in a floating glob of amber, you must learn to play a song on a harp and collect three golden triangles to get her out of it again. When a giant drawbridge door is locked, you must find a tool to unjam the gears that keep its chains in place. It’s all perfectly linear and direct, and yet preposterous at the same time. Skyward Sword is an initiation rite into our ability to simultaneously make perfect sense and be cryptically incoherent. It is the synthesis of our brains' fixation on linear logic and its antithetical eagerness to swoon in a cloud of superstitions projected onto heavens above us.
http://killscreendaily.com/articles/rev ... ward-sword
"lol" barely does it justice. It makes even Leigh Alexander's writing seem palatable in comparison.
