Commentary

Sonic Meditation

How sound design in Inside creates a mindful experience

Andrea Luc

When I was younger, and I found myself feeling dizzy from too many thoughts swirling in my head, I’d sit on the stairs of our house and listen to the outside world bounce off the curved walls of our foyer – birds chirping, cars driving by, the stiff bones of our house settling – until inevitably, the noise fell to silence. I’d be sitting there alone again, until I’d hear something else and focus solely on that sound. It became a ritual. Continue Reading →

Virtual Bodies in Virtual Worlds

A phenomenology of play in video games

Benjamin Gattet 3 Comments

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s project in Phenomenology of Perception is to overcome what he calls the classical prejudices (1–93)—mostly, the belief in an objective world—by calling for a return to a proper description of phenomena. This can only be done by putting our unquestioned belief in an objective world aside. This leads to the discovery that the body, as an ambiguous and undetermined being, is our fundamental way of being in the world, and that all consciousness is perceptual. I will use this methodology to undergo a phenomenology of play, and describe the experience of playing a video game. Hopefully this will shed light on experiences of play considered marginal today. Continue Reading →

A Line in a Cyclone

Daniel Joseph

“If ‘to dust’ is ‘to kill’, ‘dust to dust’ is to render into nothingness.” – Hyperstition Laboratory

Dubai is surrounded and entangled by demons. Thousands of humans are dead. They have starved, been shot, or consumed and blasted apart by sand. You, the leader of a US Army Delta Force special forces team, are tasked to walk into Dubai and find out what happened. Continue Reading →

Working at Play

Alienation, Refusal, and Every Day the Same Dream

David Leblanc

There is, perhaps, no more of an innocuous fantasy video games can absolve than playing hooky from work for a day. And yet, in Paolo Pedercini’s Every Day the Same Dream, that refusal to concede to the droning and humdrum quotidian nonetheless feels subversive. A theory of alienation and its political potential, as it were, can help make sense of that affective experience of totally rejecting what is all too familiar: workplace boredom. Continue Reading →

Empathy is a Dish Best Served Digital

Matt Sayer 2 Comments
Chef Antoine from Dead Rising menaces with a meat cleaver

Wizards need food badly – and so do a lot of video game characters these days. Survival games like Don’t Starve and Rust make hunger a core gameplay mechanic, elevating food from a simple side dish to the main course. This can produce some fascinating conundrums: what if you’re a vegetarian but a game only serves meat? As a vegetarian myself, I find that the function of food in such games overshadows its form; I treat it as I would a health potion or a medkit. It’s a necessary concession if I want to play games like Rogue Legacy and Final Fight. Continue Reading →

Environment as Narratives

Firewatch Analysis

Jude Baril-Bédard

Firewatch is a narrative first-person game released in 2016 by indie studio Campo Santo. In this game, the player embodies Henry, a middle-aged man spending the summer of 1989 working as a fire lookout in the Shoshone National Forest, Wyoming. Studying Firewatch provides insight into the relationship between environment design and narrative experiences, since the latter is supported or emphasized by the former. Gameplay restricts players’ movement to a mountaintop, where they walk between trees and on top of rocky formations. I will unpack my shifting emotional response to the environment as I explored it. I felt the initial novelty and the awe induced by its technical prowess quickly subsided, creating in me a spectrum of affects. As the overarching narratives imposed themselves and interfaced with my reception of the game, they colored my reading, shining a new light on my surroundings. Continue Reading →