games are art — |Game Studies Blog|

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: SOMA and the Body

Videogames can offer us a vast range of sensory experiences, but we tend to talk about them in terms of text: narrative and code, signifiers and rule sets. What does it mean to see or touch a virtual world? Focusing on SOMA, and drawing on Deleuze and Haraway, I want to explore how this game configures bodies and sensation.

Flow, UncategorizedMerlin SellerFebruary 5, 2016games are art, horror games, merlin seller, phenomenology, SOMA, video game studies, video game theory

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.

FlowMerlin SellerSeptember 23, 2015critical play, critical theory, digital landscape, game art, games are art, Mad Max, mad max game, movie games, play, procedural rhetoric, ps4, ship of theseus, video game studies

Dear Player: Can a Fish Play a Game? Converting the Animal

Cat’s are players, get over it. Heck, Crows can even play games with structural linguistics. But what about something as uncompetitive as their prey? Last year a project from the student hackathon HackNY (2014) used motion sensing technology to enable a fish to ‘play’ Pokémon Red...

UncategorizedMerlin SellerFebruary 26, 2015animal turn, conversion, fishplayspokemon, games are art, games interface, merlin seller, Octodad, Pokémon Red, translation, video game studies

Dear Player: Punching Paintings, Where Form Meets Function

What 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...

IntroductoryMerlin SellerJanuary 16, 2015cart life, critical play, depression quest, games are art, gone home, kentucky route zero, lim, merlin seller, minecraft, punchamonet, video games