Applying theory to play - The Game Studies Musings of Merlin Seller MA Mst (PhD) Lecturer University of Edinburgh
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.
Read MoreThe world is your human-computer-interface. I want to talk about toys, magic, fetishes and yet more toys. To collate some thoughts on the increasing diversity of gaming as an experience, this short piece focuses on new platforms. It’s about video game interfaces, the expanding range of ways we’re able to interact with, or indeed inhabit, virtual worlds.
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 MoreI want to talk about how we might ‘excavate’ games, explore their ruins and their leftovers, and by doing so I want us to reflect on the paranoid way in which we’re learning to play.
Read MoreWhat 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.
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 MorePlay The Beginner’s Guide. Really now. Stop reading and play Beginner’s Guide. That’s all I needed to say. But for those of you’ve already experienced it, here’s a lot of stuff that I don’t need to say, but (with some regrets) I really want to.
Read MoreThis 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.
Read MoreThe 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.
Read MoreGet your anoraks on (and alter their connotations) as I tell you a story about weather in games. From the earliest skybox to the first particle effects and on into the VR future, game design has increasingly recognised the importance of atmosphere. One of the key illusions of the Game is the filling of negative space with the appearance of air.
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