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Dear Player: DOOM Actually

DOOM means ‘hope’ means ‘doom’. Id’s 2016 DOOM is a game of flouting expectations: it succeeds where critics anticipated a flop; it reinterprets nostalgia without being either typically modern or old-school; it is a game with the trappings of horror but in which the demons are scared of YOU. To me, DOOM signifies ‘hope’ for a decrepit genre, and I think it paints the player as a villain in order to show us what we’ve been missing all these years.

Flow, Mastery, UncategorizedMerlin SellerJuly 5, 2016critical theory, Csikszentmihalyi, Doom, Doom 2016, flow, FPs, game mechanics, game studies, games are art, history of computer games, merlin seller, Naomi Clark, video game studies

Dear Player: Over-Flowing Games

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: 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: Bioshock Infinite, Repaying a Debt

have a dream where I open my office door. It’s black and white, and I know I’ve done many things, but I don’t know what I’ve lost in the process. The virtual is tragic and farcical, here and not here, welcoming and reifying, and in playing BioShock: Infinite we see its price.

UncategorizedMerlin SellerSeptember 27, 2014art games, bioshock, BioShock: Infinite, critical play, Elizabeth, game ethics, game mechanics, infinite, melancholy, video game studies, virtual worlds