This month on the First Person Podcast, special guest Cameron Kunzelman joins Chris, Rob, and I to talk isometric RPGs. How and why has the genre persisted after all these years? What function does long form textual narrative have in today’s… Continue Reading
Zoyander Street is a critical historical material semiotician of technology and art. He is Senior Curator of Critical Distance, Editor-in-Chief of Memory Insufficient, and a PhD student at Lancaster University, UK. “Games are the art of math”, argues Raph Koster.… Continue Reading
This month, for a special Valentine’s day episode of the First Person Podcast, we discuss the hit mobile dating sim, Mystic Messenger! We discuss some of our experiences playing the game and have some general discussion about dating sims. How do you choose routes in dating sims? Who does the genre appeal to and what are its audience limitations? What kind of relationships are portrayed in dating sims? Continue Reading
This month’s podcast is all about card games. We discuss everything from collectible card games (CCGs) like Magic the Gathering, to living card games (LCGs) like Android: Netrunner, to deckbuilding games like Ascension, and digital card games like Hearthstone. Why has this genre of game endured? What are the differences between the different business models? Which games have we been currently playing and which are the ones we had more time (and money) to play? Continue Reading
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s project in Phenomenology of Perception is to overcome what he calls the classical prejudices (1–93)—mostly, the belief in an objective world—by calling for a return to a proper description of phenomena. This can only be done by putting our unquestioned belief in an objective world aside. This leads to the discovery that the body, as an ambiguous and undetermined being, is our fundamental way of being in the world, and that all consciousness is perceptual. I will use this methodology to undergo a phenomenology of play, and describe the experience of playing a video game. Hopefully this will shed light on experiences of play considered marginal today. Continue Reading
2016 marked another year of milestones, new directions, and growth for First Person Scholar. We published our 200th piece, celebrated our 4 year anniversary and our former EiC Emma Vossen made waves on the Canadian research front with her award winning work on FPS– not to mention all the wonderful authors we got to work with! We here at FPS are starting things off right in 2017 with the announcement of something the team has been working on for over a year. Continue Reading
At First Person Scholar, we do Game of the Year differently. The rampant chaos of end of term and the general lack of time and funds that graduate students have means that getting through many of the latest releases is nearly impossible. Instead, we focus on the games we spent the most time with and the ones that the had the biggest impact on us in 2016. Continue Reading