Difficult Writing

A Response to Emma Vossen’s Publish or Perish

Bart Simon 1 Comment

So I’ll start with quick praise for Emma Vossen’s piece and the inspired and inspiring video for SSHRC. It’s a brave reflection on graduate student precarity, academic responsibility and this idea of middle-state publishing. That Emma is doing this in the context of game studies and in the spirit of inclusiveness and positive change is even better. I am a faculty member. I read it in all its middle state glory and I want to honour the valuable labour and contribution there with a response. Maybe it’s better to be outside academia for Emma’s arguments to take hold. I don’t think so. Her arguments are at the heart of our vocation as academics (and certainly as game studies scholars). Maybe Emma thinks this makes it harder for her to get an academic job, I think the opposite and many of my colleagues will agree. Continue Reading →

Playing with the Past

Michael Hancock

A sizable subset of game studies focuses on history, whether in the form of the history of videogames (Carly A. Kocurek’s Coin-Operated Americans) or the preservation of videogames (James Newman’s Best Before; Raiford Guins’ Game After). A third approach is to examine how the videogames themselves depict history, and that approach is taken in Matthew Wilhelm Kapell and Andrew B. R. Elliott’s essay collection Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History. Playing the Past joins the ranks of other recent history-focused videogame essay collections, such as Early Modernity and Video Games by Tobias Winnerling and Florian Kershbaumer and Digital Gaming Re-imagines the Middle Ages by Daniel Kline, but distinguishes itself with a firm vision of what videogames have to offer studies of history. Continue Reading →

Design and the Broken Game:

Wayfinding and Affordance in Shelter

Matthew Schwager

Shelter is a game about figuring out what the hell to do next. You play as a mother badger trying to guide her children to a new den. Gameplay consists of roving across predatory landscapes, securing food in the process, and feeding this food to your kids. This sounds fun. For me, it was not. Continue Reading →

The Ethics of Commodification:

Game Modding and the New Digital Economy

Judy Ehrentraut

With the emergence of the active Web 2.0 user and their relationship with affective labour, more media consumers have transformed into producers. Despite the liberation that this has offered some, cyberspace has allowed institutions to wield corporate and political power over Internet users by providing the tools for them to effectively commodify themselves (Hermosillo). Through collective intelligence, which Henry Jenkins qualifies as the mobilization of the skills of the masses, companies have been accused of appropriating online user-generated content for commercial purposes. As a result, theorists such as Tiziana Terranova have insisted that the new digital economy that is run by “free labor” consumes culture by embracing productive activities while simultaneously exploiting them. Continue Reading →

“Bullet Feels”

First Person Podcast Episode 6

Emma Vossen, Betsy Brey, Shawn Dorey, Alex Fleck, & Phil Miletic

Episode 6 of the First Person Podcast will discuss the critical darling Undertale. We cover the attempts at gender neutrality, the ups and downs of pacifism, the anxiety produced when mixing bullet hell and RPG elements and the barriers to entry when playing such a meta game. This podcast is full of spoilers so we recommend you play Undertale first if you were planning on it. Continue Reading →

Unraveling Anthologies

A review of Unraveling Resident Evil

Betsy Brey

Over the past few years on listservs, social media, and at conferences, I’ve seen more calls for anthologies focusing on a single game rather than a theme. Single-topic anthologies are common enough outside of game studies, but this does indicate a certain level of canonization (which has been traditionally resisted) occurring in the field. Continue Reading →

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY

Are games becoming the factories of the future?

Sonia Fizek 1 Comment

Industrialisation and automatisation were expected to fulfil the human dream of spending fewer hours working allowing us to devote more time to non-labour activities, such as playing. The machine was supposed to relieve us from the drudgery of mundane, repetitive tasks. During the Industrial Revolution, it would serve as an alternative to human muscle and replace our manual labour at assembly lines and in manufacturing. But in the Digital Revolution, the machine would start taking over tasks dependant on our cognition, such as calculating. As Norbert Wiener proclaimed in the early 1950’s, the automatic machine, when used for the benefit of humanity rather than serving profit-oriented goals, could increase our leisure and, as a result, contribute to the enrichment of our spiritual lives (1954, 200). By and large, the automaton could have liberated humans from the need to work. It did not. Continue Reading →