|Game Studies Blog| — |DEAR PLAYER|

I once found a paper crane on a train. Left there. Some ordinary magic.

MaterialityMerlin SellerMarch 13, 2015art games, critical play, history of computer games, merlin seller, ps vita, Tearaway, video game studies

Dear Player: Can a Fish Play a Game? Converting the Animal

Cat’s are players, get over it. Heck, Crows can even play games with structural linguistics. But what about something as uncompetitive as their prey? Last year a project from the student hackathon HackNY (2014) used motion sensing technology to enable a fish to ‘play’ Pokémon Red...

UncategorizedMerlin SellerFebruary 26, 2015animal turn, conversion, fishplayspokemon, games are art, games interface, merlin seller, Octodad, Pokémon Red, translation, video game studies

Dear Player: Punching Paintings, Where Form Meets Function

What do videogames do? What do videogames want? This is a story about iconoclasm and blood, dystopia and freedom. To start thinking about videogames as an artistic medium, let’s begin with looking at how games comment on the art world. Let’s start with a painting...

IntroductoryMerlin SellerJanuary 16, 2015cart life, critical play, depression quest, games are art, gone home, kentucky route zero, lim, merlin seller, minecraft, punchamonet, video games

Dear Player: The Swapper and the Body-snatcher

We’ve all heard some of the origin myths of film – the audiences who closed their eyes and threw up their hands to protect themselves from oncoming trains. But where are the video game myths? Where is the moment of horror? Where is the body?

MaterialityMerlin SellerDecember 11, 2014art games, critical play, indie games, Swapper review, The Swapper, thing theory, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: Performing/Platforming

In defence of generic games

MaterialityMerlin SellerDecember 2, 2014casual games, critical play, flow, history of computer games, rayman, sound shapes, thing theory, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: Alien Objects and Isolation

*Bip, bip, bip*. Better put that away – the Alien can hear your interface. In Alien: Isolation, an epic space-tragedy, you spend more time talking to your retro-engineered tools than other human beings. Stuck in space, you’re main enemy is technology.

Materiality, RepresentationMerlin SellerNovember 14, 2014Alien, Alien: Isolation, art games, critical play, history of computer games, lacan, thing theory, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: Bioshock Infinite, Repaying a Debt

have a dream where I open my office door. It’s black and white, and I know I’ve done many things, but I don’t know what I’ve lost in the process. The virtual is tragic and farcical, here and not here, welcoming and reifying, and in playing BioShock: Infinite we see its price.

UncategorizedMerlin SellerSeptember 27, 2014art games, bioshock, BioShock: Infinite, critical play, Elizabeth, game ethics, game mechanics, infinite, melancholy, video game studies, virtual worlds

Dear Player: Go From A to B

‘Play’, as generated by games, is an exploration of limits. Because of the assumption of space in the medium, a huge proportion of games involve journeys. For a lot this is a trip from point A to point B (and if you’re unlucky, a backpeddle to point A with object p). On the face of it this seems natural considering the media to which video games still look. Books, TV and film are (to crazy-generalise) traditionally sequential media with linear narratives. Not only are they littered with thematic journeys and notions of progressive character development, but they assume a uni-directional experience of both figured time and literal consumption line by line or frame by frame. But what happens to structures and tropes like these when they’re made literal? What happens in a game where you interactively walk/fly/drive to a finish line?

SpaceMerlin SellerSeptember 5, 2014art games, critical play, dear esther, digital landscape, history of computer games, indie games, passage, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: Hotline Miami and Low Res Death

I’m puking on the pavement beside my DeLorian. I’ve just killed. A lot. Of pixellated people. And I’m throwing up a lot of pixels after that last one in particular. I bashed in a homeless person’s face with his own baseball bat just because he was between me and my car - the narrowness of the alleyway was the only logic I paid attention to.

MaterialityMerlin SellerAugust 29, 201480s retro gaming, art games, critical play, Drive, Hotline Miami, lacan, pixel, pixelation, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player – Games as Landscape: Learning to Live in Virtual Worlds

From side-scrolling levels to open-world fields of play, games generate space. From their inception, games have had to deal with the problems and possibilities of virtual spaces. In both making and playing we create spaces which are seen, heard and felt - psychological, philosophical and creative. Many games provide beautiful backdrops, but how do they allow us to interact with them as landscapes, to discover, break and reshape worlds?

SpaceMerlin SellerAugust 14, 2014critical play, digital landscape, history of computer games, indie games, Proteus, video game studies, video game theory, virtual worlds