Essay

“Press A to Shoot”

Pokémon Snap-Shots and Gamespace Ownership

Alexandra Orlando and Betsy Brey 2 Comments

Drawing from the international popularity of the Pokémon series, Snap repositions gameplay from the role-playing mechanics of earlier games. Due to its in-game mechanics and integrative real-world mechanisms, Snap shifts the definitions of digital subjects and photographers, illustrating the complex relationship of subject and shooter in digital photographic practices. Ultimately, the practices portrayed in Snap prove to be deeply imbalanced experiences in terms of power dynamics, complicated by the popularity of the Pokémon series which encouraged players to “catch ‘em all.” These competitive practices extended beyond digital spaces with the intersections of print and digital photography and the gamification of photographic practices as taught and presented by the game. Continue Reading →

Link Dons the Mask of Truth

The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask’s Postmodern Critique

Chris Lawrence

It’s lonely at the top of the mountain. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has reigned supreme more or less uninterruptedly as the Greatest Game of all Time in popular culture for nearly two decades. Other challengers have periodically risen from the masses (The Last of Us, Journey, whatever GTA game came out last, etc.), but the conversation always finds its way back to Ocarina. Conversely, Nintendo has been accused of sitting on its creative laurels with nearly every Zelda game they’ve put out since Ocarina. It’s an unenviable position: how do you navigate the already precarious balance between convention and innovation when the foundational title you put out ten sequels ago remains such an enduring sacred cow? Continue Reading →

The Malkavians’ World

Representations of Mental Health in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines

Ansh Patel 1 Comment

Games, we know, do not have the best reputation in terms of representation. Through the decades, games have gained notoriety for excluding people who aren’t seen as their target audience: especially women, people of color, and people of different sexualities. On top of that, certain genres—particularly military shooters and horror games—have developed a reputation for stigmatizing people with mental illnesses. Too often these games equate people who have a mental illness with monsters and/or villains. For example, Silent Hill (Konami, 1999) … Continue Reading →

Procedural Ethics

Expanding the Scope of Procedures in Games

Alex Layne 1 Comment

In this article I put forward the idea of procedural ethics. Procedural ethics is a way of studying videogames, videogame culture, and the videogames industry that focuses on both the computational and ethical aspects of gaming. This theory is born from the desire to move beyond some of the limitations of current theories used to study games, making questions of ethics and people central to any study of games. Procedural ethics argues that procedures are not just the in-game algorithms, images, and text that force the player to make a decision or to agree to participate in a particular world. Rather, they are made up of everything that went into that procedure being programmed, including the developer’s history, the community, and the player’s experiences, as well as the socio-cultural context surrounding the game and the player. Continue Reading →

The Tyranny of Realism

Historical Accuracy in Assassins's Creed III

Adrienne Shaw

I confess to having a love-hate relationship with Assassin’s Creed. Every game in the series is beautiful. The stunning landscapes, architectural and historical detail, acrobatic player-character and smooth (for the most part) gameplay are incredibly satisfying. Certainly there were many critiques of the repetitiveness of the first game. The modern-day component of the story and Matrix-esque Animus which acts as the deus ex machina to help explain why, as Desmond’s ancestor, the player can access databases full of historical information is arguably a bit cheesy (though no more so than most game narratives). Continue Reading →

Heterotopia & Play

A Rapprochement Between Foucault & Huizinga

Tobias Unterhuber 3 Comments

What have gardens, graveyards, brothels and videogames in common? What might sound like the beginning of a joke for one, is in fact the introduction of a theoretical approach towards videogames which uses a concept popularized by the French philosopher Michel Foucault: the heterotopia. Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia originated in the 1960s and was – besides a short paragraph in Les Mots et les choses and an article in Architecture, Movement only explored further in a radio report for France Culture on December 7th 1966. Nevertheless it was used extensively by academics in the fields of film, literature and culture studies and there were also some ideas to make it fruitful for Game Studies, for examples look at Keith Challis’ Games as Heterotopias or at Gamereader.net. But I want to start with the basics and show, at least in sections, that the concept of Heterotopia is related with Johan Huizinga’s notion of play. Continue Reading →

Rapture Through Russell

BioShock & Bertrand Russell's Authority & the Individual

Ciarán Ó Muirthile 5 Comments

Many commentators and reporters have ascribed the downfall of BioShock’s Rapture – the Adam addicts, the horrifying cruelty and the shocking race towards self destruction – to the game’s desire to satirise the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. GameSpy summed it up entirely when, in a preview, Li Kuo said “To fully appreciate the storyline of BioShock, you may want to read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.” Despite this quick conclusion few, if any, reporters or columnists give any serious thought as to exactly how Rapture falls. The answer, as often as not, boils down to some synonym of greed, selfishness or avarice (Khalil “BioShock Ayn Rand”). Rapture is a place of “philosophies, ideologies, and excess” as described by Aaron Linde of Destructiod with a “relentless desire for more” (Reed “BioShock”). Continue Reading →