I’m standing in a telephone booth, talking to myself from the past. “What’s it like to escape?” my past self asks, “Do you feel any different? Sometimes I’m scared I’ll get out and things will be exactly the same as before.” Continue Reading
As cliché as it may sound, the first moments of a video game tend to be among the most important. They’re when the game foreshadows the journey to come, or when they give you a small taste of the ideas that later parts of the story are going to develop. System Shock 2 stands apart from this: while its early moments achieve their goal of setting up the themes the game is going to explore, they also fully develop their own ideas within that brief span of time. More specifically, the opening to System Shock 2 engages with and deflates the sort of fantasies we expect from first person shooters. Where its peers use military themes to make the player feel powerful and reinforce ideas of self-betterment, System Shock 2 denies both by remaining true to the mundane realities of military life. Continue Reading
Game jams are not without controversy. Ostensibly a community-based event that fosters enthusiasm and creativity, game jams do not always reflect these ideals in practice. As the lead organizer of two game jams in Waterloo, Ontario, I’ve had the opportunity to develop a perspective on what this event is—and no, it doesn’t live up to its hype, but jamming is not a terrible idea. The enthusiasm, creativity, and community promised by game jams are important and needed in a performance-obsessed society, and although game jams do not always deliver on these ideals in practice, they have the potential to do so. Continue Reading
I write this, Mr. Johnson, because your work resonates with me. I respect you and I think when you write, you aim for the same targets I do. On paper, Offworld Trading Company is exactly the type of game that sparked my interest in strategy games in the first place. It’s receiving some very positive press and has already sold over 100,000 copies. That’s great. I hope it does well for you. I won’t be buying it, though. It has to do with your company’s co-founder and president Brad Wardell. Wardell’s decision to associate with a group of people that have had demonstrable and undeniably negative effects on the gaming industry is something I have a lot of trouble with. While that group may adopt the language of platform holders to hold their harassment at arm’s length by calling it the work of “third-party trolls,” they still provided the platform for those abuses to be carried out and are unable (but more often unwilling) to take responsibility for that. Continue Reading
According to The Division, America is very, very sick. The nation is stricken with “Green Poison,” a fatal, highly contagious disease. New York City, ground zero for this devastating pandemic, has fallen into chaos and ruin. Quarantined survivors are forced to scavenge through the garbage bags and abandoned cars that fill the streets. They are trapped by their protectors, a Joint Task Force (JTF) comprised of police and military personnel that impose endless checkpoints, martial law, lethal measures in the event of non-compliance. Backed by agents from the secretive Strategic Homeland Division, the JTF exchanges near-constant gunfire with the violent groups that roam the crumbling city, killing at random. The Division is a portrait of America on the cusp of outright failure as a functioning state. Continue Reading
So I’ll start with quick praise for Emma Vossen’s piece and the inspired and inspiring video for SSHRC. It’s a brave reflection on graduate student precarity, academic responsibility and this idea of middle-state publishing. That Emma is doing this in the context of game studies and in the spirit of inclusiveness and positive change is even better. I am a faculty member. I read it in all its middle state glory and I want to honour the valuable labour and contribution there with a response. Maybe it’s better to be outside academia for Emma’s arguments to take hold. I don’t think so. Her arguments are at the heart of our vocation as academics (and certainly as game studies scholars). Maybe Emma thinks this makes it harder for her to get an academic job, I think the opposite and many of my colleagues will agree. Continue Reading
If you are an academic you are probably achingly familiar with the phrase “publish or perish”, which has become the motto of our broken system. Publishing has become a numbers game and as someone in game studies, it’s hard not to see it as a game. If as a grad student you ask someone with a job how to get a tenure track job, they will often tell you the exact same things: “It’s very difficult to get a job but if you publish X many journal articles in journals of X quality and go to conferences X Y and Z and then cast your net wide enough you will get a job.” That is the formula I’ve heard 100 times: publishing along the party line = job. After you get a job, you might have to write a book to get tenure, but that book must be for an academic audience and must be published with a “good” academic publisher. Continue Reading