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 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 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 MoreWe’ve all heard some of the origin myths of film – the audiences who closed their eyes and threw up their hands to protect themselves from oncoming trains. But where are the video game myths? Where is the moment of horror? Where is the body?
Read MoreIn defence of generic games
Read More*Bip, bip, bip*. Better put that away – the Alien can hear your interface. In Alien: Isolation, an epic space-tragedy, you spend more time talking to your retro-engineered tools than other human beings. Stuck in space, you’re main enemy is technology.
Read More
