I’d like to pick up a small part of last week’s discussion on games, narratives, and experience, as the idea of environmental narrative bled into my seminar papers this semester as well. If we want to think about games as a matter of being – as in, what happens when we […]
Games and Rhetoric
173 posts
There has been a lot of discussion over the past week about Ian Bogost’s recent article in The Atlantic entitled, “Video Games are Better Without Stories,” an article in which Bogost argues, ultimately, exactly what his title says–that is, that the idea of games seeking to tell stories is an […]
Trigger Warning: Mentions of Rape, Sexual Assault During my last year of college, I took a film course while getting my English minor. The course itself was pretty fun: an in depth analysis of “bad” film and what made it so bad. The instructor, however, was horrible. While I have […]
Many games, particularly smaller indie games, present limited experience, and these limitations can manifest in myriad ways. Firewatch takes place over a single summer. Depression Quest is all text, with text options denied as its driving mechanic. Reigns is a series of yes/no decisions. Some games, though, ask you to […]
For me I think it all started with Civilization: Beyond Earth and by it I mean that colonialism saturation point with games. To be honest most games are tales of white saviors and colonialism, but that particular iteration of Civilization was one that I had been anxiously awaiting since it was […]
Last week, I was at an academic conference, presenting on a game I and a colleague created for classroom use. It’s a big conference, and I got to listen to a lot of very smart scholars hold forth on all the things I’m interested in, from first-year writing to games […]
Last month, I wrote about Reigns, the Tinder-influenced game of decisions, in which players take on the role of a monarch and lead a nation through a dynasty of successive rulers. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the game, about what the interconnected internal structures mean, and what […]
Recently I was updating my CV, because I’d been putting it off, of course, while things piled up, and when I was done I marveled at how much space was dedicated to collaborative items. If I was in the sciences, that wouldn’t be anything out of the norm, but it’s […]
(This piece contains a content warning for anti-semitic commentary present in some of the links and images) Anyone tuned into the YouTube community who hasn’t been living under a rock in the last two weeks is aware of the current controversy surrounding Disney and YouTube pulling their support for popular […]
Exploratory adventure games, narrative adventures, spatial adventures, environmental adventures, narrative explorations—different, certainly related phrases, all used to describe games that rely heavily on exploration to craft an experiential story. Walking simulators often overlap heavily here, but with games like Her Story, for instance, there’s not much (or any!) walking, so we needed […]
Reigns, released late last summer, situates the player as king of an ancient kingdom, located somewhere faintly European, somewhere in the early 7th century. But you’re not one king; you are all kings, a long-reaching dynasty of king after king, each taking up the crown upon his predecessor’s fall. The […]
I’ve always been a sucker for worldbuilding. One of the reasons I play tabletop games like D&D is the opportunity for intense integration of history, legend, and lore, and most of my favorite video games have similar functions. Whether it’s reading up on the extensive codices found in the Mass […]
For the past few semesters, I’ve been playing text adventures once or twice with my students (9:05 and Zork). For most the format is completely unfamiliar—typically, I have one or two students who’ve at least heard of text-based games—and they struggle with the step-by-step commands. Look. Open. Take. Read. It’s […]
This week, I was re-reading Donna Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perception,” and I had one of those revelatory moments that come only when you’ve read something a million times already, when you have absorbed and understood it and are free to […]
I spent a large portion of my winter break on the road. I went up to Minnesota to visit my parents for a week, and as soon as I touched down in Indianapolis I began my drive South to visit my partner in Kentucky and my friends in Alabama. Other […]
Because it is terrifyingly easy to lure me into anything related to attempted organization, I’ve recently made a bullet journal. The idea is simple: a self-designed journal/planner that allows more flexibility than a traditional planner (something I’ve never been able to keep). I keep to-do lists, and notes, and love […]