|Game Studies Blog|

Within Horizon we see a fictional world that reflects on the very consequences of generating artificial worlds. It also engages deeply with a conventional tension in Science Fiction as a genre between the world and its inhabitants, and asks us as players to consider where empathy, responsibility, interest and ownership lie in a work which would be monstrously complex by any other medium's standards.

David O'Reilly's award-winning game Everything allows the player to be everything-but-human as well as everything and human. The artist's fascination with games stems from an interest in 'being' more than 'doing,' and throughout the experience of Everything he draws on the late philosophy of the (late) Alan Watts, to provoke thought in the player with a smorgasbord of 'things.' What this game proposes is a wobbly re-jigging, even full inversion, of our common Weltanschauung.

You're Batman. But you're not really feeling it today. Maybe something's caught in your gravelly throat, or maybe you're interested in playing a game, perversely, as a spectator to your own fate. What does it mean to reject both the power-fantasy and the responsibility of choice as the player of a game? What does in-activity 'mean' in the context of an interactive medium?

Game mechanics can make us cry with sadness, cower with terror and cringe with guilt, but we tend to forget about the tears we shed with laughter. As a legacy of consumer technology, with categories based around mechanics, game design and reception has taken a different approach to genre than film and literature... but what might characterise humour which is unique to games?

Ever wanted to be an alien? How about settling for feeling alienated? What does it mean to find meaning in a game? In gaming, the player performs the game, the game is incomplete without the player and takes its full form in the moment of play... ...Games aren’t a one-way street, meaning is not intrinsic to them, but the product of contingency. As No Man’s Sky plummets to the lowest ever aggregate user rating on steam, and faces a flurry of exceptional litigations, I think it is worth reflecting on gaming as a collaborative medium which can value possibility over content...

Tying, pulling, pushing, swinging, flipping, pressing, this is a game about feeling through time – a process of translation and transcription, between the analogue and the digital, the textual and the experiential, the camera and the pencil. Perhaps what Naughty Dog has best captured is the loving memory of a good game played, or indeed the way we remember through play. Drakes journal is a space of ludic memory as is the game as a whole.