Essay

Where Games Take Place

Street Songs from the Soundplay Game Jam

JASON HAWRELIAK

If you’re like me, a videogame’s music is a big part of the overall play experience. I remember games like Fallout 3 (Bethesda, 2008) and Bastion (Supergiant Games, 2011) for their soundtracks as much as for their gameplay. Sometimes I would stop “playing” these games just to enjoy the atmosphere created by the music, even when it meant certain death. I’m always on the lookout for games which utilize music in some new or interesting ways, so I was excited when a friend pointed me towards Street Song, developed by Pietro Righi Riva and Nicolò Tedeschi of Santa Ragione games… Continue Reading →

Sustainable Fiction

Between Interactive Drama and Videogames

KENT AARDSE 1 Comment

Heavy Rain exists in the amorphous folds of generic labeling brought about by the blurred boundaries of digital media. What do I mean by this? Simply, that with increasing frequency artifacts are being created which do not fit neatly into already established categories. Heavy Rain (Quantic Dream, 2010) is one such artifact. In one sense, it’s clearly a videogame, right? It’s played on the Playstation 3 system, I hold a controller in my hand, and my input controls the action on the screen. Upon completing the game, however, Heavy Rain presents the user with a trophy that contains the text, “Thank you for supporting interactive drama.” This small addition speaks volumes to the developers’ desire to change the perceptions of what videogames can accomplish… Continue Reading →

Kill to Progress

Hotline Miami, American Psycho, & Violent Processes

Rob Parker 2 Comments

It is this feeling of participation in the unspeakably horrific that rises up at the end of every chapter of Hotline Miami, a video game that was released last October (developed by Dennaton Games and published by Devolver Digital.) Hotline Miami is frequently noted for its aesthetic parallels to the 2011 film Drive but I contend that it also has a more profound mechanical and philosophical debt to American Psycho. I bring up this particular parallel because it calls attention to two things that tend to be neglected in video game studies: that reading is itself a participatory act and that there are meta-procedural cultural contexts in which video games cannot help but exist… Continue Reading →

Ludic Topology

Serres, Linear Time, and the Ethics of Game Design

Steve Wilcox 1 Comment

Recently my research has taken a turn towards Michel Serres and his complex, topological conceptions of space and time. In “Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought,” Steven Connor lucidly describes Serres’ work across a range of subjects and texts. In a subsection entitled “Ethics and Topology” Connor offers the following summary: “The reason for preferring a vision of topological time to a system of linear time is because the latter is founded on and sustained by violence. Linear time is formed out of the monotonous rhythm of argument, contradiction and murder.” What follows is an extension of this criticism to linearity in video games, especially those titles that seek to criticize the very mechanics of linear gameplay, such as Far Cry 3. The overarching claim here is that video games are not violent for their content but for their very structure, for their portrayal of time as successive, and inherently progressive… Continue Reading →

The Talking Dead

Dialogue Trees & Player Agency in The Walking Dead

LAUREN BURR

Greg Miller at IGN boldly stated that “people will reference the series over and over as the benchmark for story-telling in games. And historically, it will stand as the game that reinvented or at least repopularized adventure games.” And he’s not the only critic expressing such high opinions. Most recently, The Walking Dead took home the “game of the year” award at the 2012 VGAs. So why such great disparity? And what does it mean when a mechanically simple point-and-click adventure game–which gives a player almost no room for exploration or alternate gameplay–purports to “tailor” a “story” to each individual player’s choices? Continue Reading →

Horrific Controls

Resident Evil 2 & the Mechanics of Fear

KENT AARDSE 1 Comment

Resident Evil 2 provides us with an illuminating take on how the controls of a game can play into its immersion. At the time of release, and still to this day, the control scheme of Resident Evil 2 has been the one aspect of the game constantly criticized. The controls are sluggish, requiring the player to constantly press up on the directional pad in order to run forward, regardless of the direction the on-screen character is facing. This is in stark contrast to the majority of other games in which a direction is pressed on the gamepad to correlate with the direction the character is moving on the screen. In retrospect, though, this might just be one of the hidden strengths of the early Resident Evil games, and one of the very reasons for viewing Resident Evil 2 as being a truly definitive survival horror game… Continue Reading →

Über Other

Mortality, Morality, and the Nazi Zombie

JASON HAWRELIAK

In her 2011 book Reality is Broken (2011), Jane McGonigal argues that videogames can in fact be used for “good:” through harnessing the countless hours gamers spend solving puzzles in videogames, we may be able to solve “real world” problems, such as inequality, sickness and conflict. I really like this idea, and though I’m not sure I quite share all of McGonigal’s optimism, I do think that videogames serve some vital functions – cultural and psychological – outside of particular play experiences… Continue Reading →