Applying theory to play - The Game Studies Musings of Merlin Seller MA Mst (PhD) Lecturer University of Edinburgh
I crave candy. It’s a hunger I share with 7yr-olds and cartoon characters. Much has been written about how this primal urge, Niantic’s Pokemon GO, is either saving or dooming a generation (and its road traffic). But we’ve had ARGs and fandoms before, why is this craze proving so provocative?
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MoreI 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.
Read MoreWhat 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.
Read MorePlay 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.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreHeard 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.
Read MoreI once found a paper crane on a train. Left there. Some ordinary magic.
Read MoreWhat 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...
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