Commentary

Conceptualizing Mountain

Braydon Beaulieu

On July 01, 2014, Irish artist and filmmaker David OReilly released a video game called Mountain. In this game, there are two roles: “God,” who looks at (and sometimes looks out for) Mountain, and “Mountain” who talks to its God and endures whatever comes its way. Mountain, a mountain ripped up from its roots, hangs within its own atmosphere (weather included) suspended in space. It rotates slowly upon its axis. There are almost no controls. You begin the game by sketching pictures as responses to prompts (such as “Birth” or “Logic”) that purportedly generate (or “seed”) your unique mountain. The keys in the player’s ASDF and ZXCV rows play chimes that can speed up time. You can zoom in and out in order to view Mountain up close or see it as a kind of lonely asteroid against the backdrop of the galaxy. Continue Reading →

Drawing the Line

Ethan Ham 16 Comments

Being a contemporary artist comes with the knowledge that a significant portion of society is hostile to what you are creating. When people outside of the insular art world view your work, there is a good chance that they think “that is not art,” even if they are polite enough not to utter it. Lately, I have been hearing similar statements in the game world; that a given interactive fiction, or a role-playing game, or a massively multiplayer game is “not a game.” Sometimes the dismissal seems motivated by a desire to protect some cherished form of game, other times it comes from a more dryly academic desire to define and categorize. Continue Reading →

Why Pro Evolution Soccer 6 is

One of My Favourite RPGs Ever

William Kemp 3 Comments

It was a hazy, mid-May afternoon in when PES United faced off against Merseyside Red in one of the greatest games in the English League’s history. It had to come down to this: Merseyside Red had stolen the title from PES United the previous season when PES United’s captain Iouga went down with an injury—and the club’s chances went down with him. In the off-season Merseyside Red swooped in to sign Ordaz, who had made his name with PES United. Continue Reading →

Bioshock to the System:

How Gaming Reconnected Me With Childhood Trauma

Mathew Wells

Game scholarship tends to require researchers to assume a detached perspective on their materials of choice. While our first Nintendo console may have wowed us as children, and while modern games like Fallout 4 may continue to draw us into hours-long play sessions, we have to set aside our emotional relationships with such titles when it is time to get to work. No academic journal is going to publish an article on how sad The Last of Us made us, or how excited we were to finally vanquish those pesky Aztecs in Civilization. We might record such responses from others if, for example, we take an ethnographic approach in our research. But it is our own feelings, and our own affective responses to the games we play, that are often silenced. But what are we losing by adopting such a perspective? Continue Reading →

On well-formed fiction

and Her Story

Sam DiBella

The presence of meaningful choices or, barring that, the illusion of meaningful choices has long been a considered a solid standard for a successful narrative game. Normally, developers do this by creating multiple possibilities for the story to follow, allowing player actions to alter the course of the story. Instead of creating an enormous amount of possible states, Her Story, a story-based game by Sam Barlow, experiments with allowing players instant access to its entire story, provided players use the right search terms. Her Story’s structure, and how it differs from other narrative games, is the key to understanding how Her Story functions as a successful narrative game. To do so, I’ll have to explain the computational concept of the finite state machine, why it is a good model for narrative games, and how Her Story’s state machine differs from those of interactive fiction. Based on Barlow’s personal work in interactive fiction and the genre’s place as the earliest style of narrative video game, I will stick to comparisons between Her Story and interactive fiction (IF). Continue Reading →

We’ll Fight For Our Future

How Phantasy Star II's Dungeons Structure its Narrative

Brian Crimmins 1 Comment

Before Sega retooled the series for MMORPG audiences, Phantasy Star was one of the most prominent JRPG franchises of its time. It had always remained ahead of the pack by experimenting with themes and narrative models years before its rivals could catch up. The first Phantasy Star game featured a slight political dimension to JRPGs seven years before Final Fantasy would do the same. And its sequel only continued that trend. One of the first RPGs for the Genesis, Phantasy Star II strengthened the political themes with a grim narrative and Daedalian dungeon design. Continue Reading →