Like many people, when I first started playing Forgotten Anne it felt like I was playing inside of a Studio Ghibli film. The game is a cinematic adventure platformer that contains beautifully illustrated graphics, amazing and adaptive choregraphed music and seamless animations. At many times it looks and feels like […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
Or… What would a game studies talk look like if I didn’t cite any hetero white cismen OR work from after 2006. Because when I say intersectional feminist game studies I also think part of the path forward is developing better inter-generational critical game studies.
Vampires do not appear to hold the same appeal in media as they once did, but why? Portraying and playing with our deepest fears, not least of which is death—or worse, becoming the monster ourselves—some of these creatures spent the ‘90s, the aughts, and the first half of the 20-teens struggling with what they are, striving to reconcile their monstrosity with the human they long to still be, and, typically, falling in love with human women.
Since I’ve been writing about game design and the amateur mafia community I’ve been playing with, I’ve noticed more and more how little information there is, in an academic sense, on the processes of game design. A colleague recently came to me for suggestions on behalf of one of her students […]
Video games allow us to play in the realm of the macabre. We can be monsters, killers, and super villains. We can exist in worlds that are full of human wreckage, zombies, death, decay. Like our fascination with post-apocalyptic movies and books, video games allow us to explore countless realms […]
I’ve been pandering to my gaming nostalgia of late, replaying childhood favorites like Sly Cooper, playing new games that adhere to retro aesthetics like Celeste, playing basically anything by Nintendo (who seem to be masters of evoking a nostalgic vibe in all their games). During my latest phase of nostalgia, […]
Late last year, I stumbled across an ad for Mosaic, a film-based interactive story app helmed by film director Steven Soderbergh and starring Sharon Stone. Intrigued, I downloaded it immediately, but I never got very far. At the beginning, at least, “interactivity” seemed nonexistent, and while I appreciated the story for […]
Last year I walked into a store dedicated to board and card games for the first time. I love board games but it is not always easy finding a store that is the analog equivalent to GameStop. And usually when I do find them, they are far away. So when […]
I bought Fallout 4 as a holiday gift for my partner and me back when it released in 2015, but after playing for maybe 45 minutes, I put it aside. Since then, I’ve picked it up a few times, but never for more than one short play session—until late last […]
Since I began studying my online Mafia community, I’ve been doing a lot of wider reading in technical communication, looking at foundational texts to fill in around things I’d studied before. It’s meant digging into the backlog of articles and books I’d put off—the pile of “read later” items always threatening to […]
When I first wrote about the online social deception game community I joined, I mentioned my failed attempts to get my hands on game development documents for pedagogical purposes. When I began to play mafia with this group, and to learn more about how the community functioned, my project was […]
Over the last couple of years, I’ve tried like hell to get my hands on game scripts and bibles. After assessing the lack of good informational texts and examples for students interested in writing games, or writing for game studios, I couldn’t think of a more pressing need or a bigger […]
This past Saturday night, after a long summer hiatus, I sat down at my desk with my dice and my computer and ran a session of my digital Dungeons and Dragons campaign, Shards of Aeridas. The game lasted five hours, all of which I spent frantically typing into chat windows […]
In the 50th year of the journal of College Composition and Communication, in 1999, Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams began their essay “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies” with a statement they call aphoristic, but that remains an important reminder we […]
A few months ago, I wrote about A Normal Lost Phone and the layered experience of inhabiting another through the use of their phone as an empathy device, so when I stumbled upon another game that used a similar approach, I picked it up immediately. But while A Normal Lost […]
In the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time considering so-called “walking simulators,” first as I dug into different definitions of games, and then, as I moved away from that, into perceptions of games and the experiences they offer. One of the games that comes up most often […]