Essay

From Monopoly to Metal Gear

A Survey of Ludic Satire

Steve Wilcox

Let’s talk about satire and games for a moment. Where these two intersect successfully we find critical, thought-provoking works that challenge contemporary social, cultural, political, or ideological beliefs. For this article I’ll adopt a rather loose definition of satire as an attempt to critique accepted beliefs through “irony, derision, or wit.” And while there are a wide range of beliefs worthy of criticism, I’m interested here primarily in accepted notions of violence and aggression as a means of resolution in mainstream videogames. The argument put forward here is that games provide a new form of criticism, ludic satire, that emanates from choice. Continue Reading →

Modal Rhetoric

Multimodal Metonymy in Videogames

Jason Hawreliak

Before our August hiatus, I wrote that game critics and theorists need to be timely and accessible if we’re going to influence the games industry and gaming culture in general. I believe in that approach very much, but our persuasive goals needn’t always be so pragmatic. It’s nice to exercise different intellectual muscles from time to time, and that’s what I’m doing here. In this essay, I’m interested in a very basic but difficult question: How do we extract meaning from a videogame? How does it signify to us, the players? Continue Reading →

Interpellation & Apocalypse

Communication, Coercion, and Identity in Journey

Meghan Blythe Adams 1 Comment

American game developer thatgamecompany is known for producing innovative games intended to provide players with moving, thought-provoking play experiences. In their most recent release, Journey, the player-character is a robed figure crossing a series of gorgeous landscapes toward a light emanating from a far mountain. Journey’s narrative simplicity, striking visuals, and innovative game-play have made it critical and commercial success, receiving many awards and becoming fastest-selling game ever in the Playstation Store (“Journey Breaks PSN Sales Records”). Continue Reading →

Meaningful Play

Anti-Immersive Aesthetics in Serious Videogames

Judy Ehrentraut

Educational and/or serious videogames have seldom been popular among mainstream game audiences, but that hasn’t stopped the recent onslaught of indie developers from trying to use their games to explore complex themes outside the realm of pure entertainment. Games that try to engage players in meaningful play are often criticized for not being enjoyable. Yet, is that because they aren’t well designed, or is it because audiences aren’t used to games that don’t try to heavily immerse them in computer graphics? Continue Reading →

Feed-Forward Scholarship

Why Games Studies Needs Middle-State Publishing

Steve Wilcox 12 Comments

In the next few pages I will outline two major forms of scholarship. One relies on feedback and the other on feed-forward. Let’s start with the former. Feedback scholarship shares a number of similarities with cybernetics. The phrase ‘cybernetics’ comes from the Greek word meaning steersman, as in the one who steers a ship. The man or woman steering a ship responds to the environment by adjusting the direction of the boat. In this case, the wind and the water provide feedback and the person steering the boat acts as a homeostatic mechanism, adjusting the course according to the feedback. Increasingly, I get the feeling that Games Studies is focused on maintaining the course but there’s not a lot of focus on the ultimate destination. In other words, Games Studies scholarship is inherently homeostatic. Continue Reading →

Where’s the Sex?

The Walking Dead, Sex, & Parenting in the Zombie Apocalypse

Emma Vossen

Just over a month ago, Robert Kirkman sat down for an interview on BBC America to discuss what makes his series The Walking Dead a transmedia success. Amid groans and jokes from other men on set, Kirkman spoke about his series for what it is: a soap opera. He explained that “Twilight is to Dracula as The Walking Dead is to Romero movies. I’m the Stephanie Meyer of Zombies. I watched Romero movies and I was like, yeah, but what if they had more kissing?” (BBC). Kirkman agued that it isn’t the zombies that make his comics and show so popular, but rather the traditional soap opera elements such as romance, betrayal, and sex. The zombies are merely the backdrop, the fictional conditions which make the show and the comic socially acceptable to like. Continue Reading →

Pipe Trouble

The Politics of Definition

Michael Hancock 2 Comments

One of the perennial questions of game studies is the basic question of definition: what is a game? And many discussions surrounding games can be traced back to it. The narrative/ludology debate is an obvious one: is a game a story? It’s there in Ian Bogost’s caution against framing games as “limp skins” that don’t properly exist without the player to finish the circuit: does a game have to be played to be a game? And, most recently, it’s there in works created in Twine, works that address issues rarely, if ever, voiced in mainstream videogames: can these things be games at all? (For my two cents: yes; no, but it’s usually more interesting if it is; and yes, of course.) Continue Reading →