Representation — |Game Studies Blog|

Dear Player: Troubling Fungi and Desperation in The Last of Us Part II

What does it mean for a human to take on a fungus? In a rotting post-apocalypse, we can feel what it’s like to live a fungal life, to consume ourselves, to act in desperation ludically and narratively. Living beyond our time. There have been many contentious takes on this Summer’s biggest blockbuster, The Last of Us Part II (2020)– critiqued for having a laboured and dissonant moral rhetoric and for the problematic politics of its creative director; celebrated as a narrative of grief, depression and queerness; homophobically attacked for its representation of diversity as well as being legitimately challenged to handle queerness and race with greater nuance and depth. My reading here, however, follows Haraway’s (2016) injunction to ‘stay with the trouble.’ That life is messy, disturbing, and that that’s when it gets interesting.

Dear Player: Maybe media are better with fewer stories?

Maybe we keep having this conversation about 'stories in games' because it's not just about games, but about how we see the world? This is my take (/wish/prayer?) on the recent reignition of the ludo-narrative-debate-that-never-was: Bogost's article in The Atlantic and Walker and Klepek's responses on Waypoint.

RepresentationMerlin SellerMay 1, 2017Bogost, the atlantic, stories in games

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.

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.

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.

Dear Player: Game Realisms, The Rise and Fall of the Indie Game

I’ve torn a newspaper again. A few more mistakes like that and I may not be able to renew my trade licence, let alone afford a place to sleep. In my defence, the thing was so pixellated I couldn’t even make out the crease – but that’s Cart Life for you. What follows is a short and biased story about the changing nature of game fictions. This is an opening into the recent history of computer games and how they relate to the mode of production in late consumer capitalism and the redistribution of leisure time. Above all, it’s a story about one of the terms most often abused, by game critics: ‘realism’.