games — |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.

Representation, Non-humanMerlin SellerOctober 31, 2020TLoU2, The Last of Us, Fungi, games, ugly feelings and games, the mushroom at the end of the world

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’.

RepresentationMerlin SellerAugust 12, 2014cart life, consumer capitalism, critical play, don't starve, games, history of computer games, indie games, minecraft, realism, video game theory