|Game Studies Blog| — |DEAR PLAYER|

What I want to do in this piece is question what we really mean when we use Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi’s term ‘Flow’, and the implications a wider spectrum of Flows might have for our understanding of games.

Flow, Materiality, Space, UncategorizedMerlin SellerJune 22, 2016art games, critical play, flow, game mechanics, merlin seller, ps4, trackmania, trackmania turbo, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: Far Cry Primal and Digital Archaeology

I want to talk about how we might ‘excavate’ games, explore their ruins and their leftovers, and by doing so I want us to reflect on the paranoid way in which we’re learning to play.

Mastery, Materiality, Space, TimeMerlin SellerApril 7, 2016archaeogaming, critical play, Far Cry, Far Cry Primal, history of computer games, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: Gender and Love in 'Life is Strange' and 'Firewatch'

What does it look like to see gender done 'well'? Firewatch and Life Is Strange both subvert traditional femininities and masculinities, propose new forms of affective intimacy, and also question the position of the player and their relationship to the game in terms of flow and mastery.

Flow, Gender, Mastery, RepresentationMerlin SellerMarch 4, 2016art games, critical play, firewatch, game mechanics, game studies, gender in games, life is strange, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: SOMA and the Body

Videogames can offer us a vast range of sensory experiences, but we tend to talk about them in terms of text: narrative and code, signifiers and rule sets. What does it mean to see or touch a virtual world? Focusing on SOMA, and drawing on Deleuze and Haraway, I want to explore how this game configures bodies and sensation.

Flow, UncategorizedMerlin SellerFebruary 5, 2016games are art, horror games, merlin seller, phenomenology, SOMA, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: The Beginner’s Guide to Everything

Play The Beginner’s Guide. Really now. Stop reading and play Beginner’s Guide. That’s all I needed to say. But for those of you’ve already experienced it, here’s a lot of stuff that I don’t need to say, but (with some regrets) I really want to.

FlowMerlin SellerNovember 4, 2015critical play, davey werden, narrative games art games, stanley parable, the beginner's guide, video game studies

Dear Player: Mad Max and Theseus' Ship

This is the Dead Barrens of Mad Max – a world recycled, perturbed, lost and found. The player stands at the edge of a game world well aware of its limits. I turn and I jump back into the centrepiece of the game, a bricolage of scrap, pistons and oil all grinding against each other in an effort to become a car called the Magnum Opus.

FlowMerlin SellerSeptember 23, 2015critical play, critical theory, digital landscape, game art, games are art, Mad Max, mad max game, movie games, play, procedural rhetoric, ps4, ship of theseus, video game studies

Dear Player: Everybody’s Gone to the Uncanny Valley

The lush golden haze of Yaughton is quiet, but far from peaceful. Fictional places are weird things, they make space where formerly there was none, but they can feel like they’ve always existed. The never-was is hard to erase.

Representation, Space, TimeMerlin SellerSeptember 11, 2015archers, art games, critical play, critical theory, dear esther, Everybody's Gone to the Rapture, indie games, interface, medium, ps4, radio history, uncanny valley, vanishing of ethan carter, video game studies, video game theory

Dear Player: The Wind in The Witcher

Get your anoraks on (and alter their connotations) as I tell you a story about weather in games. From the earliest skybox to the first particle effects and on into the VR future, game design has increasingly recognised the importance of atmosphere. One of the key illusions of the Game is the filling of negative space with the appearance of air.

SpaceMerlin SellerAugust 6, 2015draw distance, fog of war, Proteus, rain, Silent Hill, skyrim snow, Spate, The Witcher, The Witcher III, video game meteorology, video game studies, weather in games

Dear Player: Remasters and Time-travel

Some say this is a player’s end-of-days in which our nostalgia-drenched and risk-averse media culture recycles old games to justify new machines. Maybe they’re right. Okay, maybe they’re ‘me’, but the ‘flowering’ of remasters in recent years has drawn a lot of comment, apocalyptic …and even utopian.

Flow, TimeMerlin SellerJuly 24, 2015didi-huberman, grim fandango HD, journey, journey game, last of us ps4, philosophy of time, remastering games, zombie games

Dear Player: Death Driving Games

Heard of the ‘death drive’? Well this time it’s literal. Nought to self-destruction in 60 seconds. A recent sub-genre has caught my eye – a species of racing/runner which blends an ironic horror with a species of racing. What do I mean by that? Racing towards the player’s own doom, this is a kind of game where victory is defeat, self-destruction is progress.

Flow, MaterialityMerlin SellerMay 29, 2015art games, critical play, death drive, Distance, Mad Max, merlin seller, Race the Sun, self-destruction, video game studies