digital landscape — |Game Studies Blog|

Dear Player: Confessions of a Pokémon Eater

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?

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.

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?

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?