ps4 — |Game Studies Blog|

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: 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: Everybody’s Gone to the Uncanny Valley

The lush golden haze of Yaughton is quiet, but far from peaceful. Fictional places are weird things, they make space where formerly there was none, but they can feel like they’ve always existed. The never-was is hard to erase.