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 MoreDOOM 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.
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 MoreVideogames 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.
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 MoreCat’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...
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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