July Omnitopic: Weakness

(We’re only running a week or so late. Blame Steam! Steam, father of all lies! Mother of all untruths!)

Video games are about power. When we have power, we have fun, or so the story goes. Power lets us do what we want, when we want, and it’s what makes us love games where we don’t love other media. In a film, you can’t be powerful. You can watch revenge, but you aren’t doing it yourself. In Grand Theft Auto, those pedestrians you just obliterated with a sixteen wheeler were victims to your power, not to some faceless actors’.

But what about when games take power away from you? Yahtzee posted an interesting musing about this phenomenon months ago, and we liked it so much we thought to make it the topic of this month’s ubiquitous omnitopic: weakness.

Of course, weakness can involve other things: games we love that we shouldn’t, bad games we think about even when we try not to, games that we want to make artificially harder. All of these are components of weakness, and it’s these many angles we’ll attack this month.

Okay. You and weakness, you’ve been introduced. Good. Now I’m off to play Iron Grip: Warlord and Magicka. Huzzah!