Destructive Tumbleweeds and WereBeavers

Attuning to Time and Space in Don’t Starve Together

Brandon Rogers

Dropped into a wilderness with no instructions, no inventory, and no end goal, Woodie the Lumberjack and Wilson the Scientist wait for my partner (Adam) and I to take control and guide them around Don’t Starve Together’s randomly generated world. These characters have the skills to craft tools from sticks, scavenge food from animals, and properly cook berries and meat over a campfire. In return, we as players must lead them to resources and develop a strategy for keeping the characters alive. The only problem is that we have no idea what we’re doing. Continue Reading →

Getting Good: An Introduction to the Becoming Machine Series

Nick Taylor 3 Comments

As a researcher who studies games and their practices, communities, and industries, I am deeply interested in the ways that my own proficiency with games (or lack of) modifies how and what I know about them. To take a pithy example, my years-long experience playing in Guild Wars 2’s PvE scene affords me some insight into the ways that the game has evolved to create some opportunities for incidental collaboration between players while suppressing others. At the same time, my utter incompetence with the game’s PvP play leaves me less capable (and less willing) to investigate it – to ask, for instance, how the Guild Wars 2’s meta has evolved in response to the demands of top competitive guilds. Continue Reading →

The Trouble with Bodies

A Trans Reading of Nier

Cayla Coats 3 Comments

Last year, my friend convinced me to play Nier for the first time. Upon initially booting up the title, it seemed like a typical grimdark male power fantasy with severely floaty controls and a muted, masculine aesthetic. Today, I consider it the only mainstream video game I have played that embodies the trans experience. Over the course of my time with Nier, what at first seemed to be a weak narrative scaffolding attempting to justify fetishized violence transformed into a subversive work of empathic queerness. The game has a series of endings, each building upon the last, culminating in a nuanced network of meaning-making. Through these multiple playthroughs and endings, a cohesive queering of the text emerged in my player experience, with the intersection of my own lived-in qualia of being a trans person and the game’s transgressive body politics acting as the thematic core. What follows is the result of this—a deeply personal close reading of Nier as a triumph of trans narratives. Continue Reading →

First Person Podcast Episode 17

Isometric RPGs with Special Guest Cameron Kunzelman

Alexandra Orlando, Rob Parker, Chris Lawrence, Cameron Kunzelman

This month on the First Person Podcast, special guest Cameron Kunzelman joins Chris, Rob, and I to talk isometric RPGs.  How and why has the genre persisted after all these years? What function does long form textual narrative have in today’s… Continue Reading →

Sex Workers and Video Games

An Exploration of the Relationship Between Sex Work, Gender, and Violence in AAA Game Titles

Kaeleigh Evans and Emma Tarver 2 Comments

Despite being described as the world’s oldest profession, sex work occupies relatively little space in the mainstream media, with the distinct exception of video games. From the 1982 Atari title Gigolo through Leisure Suit Larry and all the Grand Theft Autos, sex worker characters have been present since the popularization of the medium itself. Although countless studies have researched violence in video games and the sexualization of women in video games, there has yet to be academic research on sex workers and video games – a topic that sits at a unique intersection of those two prevalent themes. The inseparability of violence and sex work within sex worker narratives is a relatively newer phenomenon, according to news media research (Hallgrímsdóttir et al., 2008), and researchers have found these gameplay narratives to increase Rape Myth Acceptance by various psychological studies as well (Beck et al., 2012; Gabbiadini et al., 2016; Stermer & Burkley, 2012). Continue Reading →