Search Results for: Emma Vossen

FPS 2.0

An introductory editorial from the new FPS EIC

Emma Vossen

Hi, I’m Emma and I’m the new Editor in Chief of FPS! After his many years as EIC, Steve Wilcox has graciously left this position to me after a few months of training. In fact, we (the outgoing editors of FPS) have been training a whole crop of new editors for the past few months in an effort to maintain FPS’s longevity. Student-run publications and programs have a habit of cropping up and then disappearing soon after their inception because fortunately/unfortunately people must eventually graduate. Many of our existing editors are now either in the process of graduating or have already graduated; they are looking for jobs or have already landed great ones and while this doesn’t mean they wanted to walk away from FPS it does mean they have less time to devote to it than those of us still picking away at our games related dissertations. This turnover is especially important if we want to keep up our current publishing schedule where we publish new games related content for our audience from a vast array of talented authors every Wednesday all year long (with a short break in august and december so we can all breathe). It’s not easy getting quality work out there every week, but we manage to do it without fail because of the devoted work of our (totally unpaid) hard-working editorial team. I owe a great debt to all the previous editors of FPS including Steve Wilcox, Jason Hawreliak, Michael Hancock, Kent Aardse and Meghan Blythe Adams for all their hard work on FPS making it what it is today. Keep your eyes peeled for great things from these fine folks! Continue Reading →

New Directions, New Destinations

An Editorial from the Outgoing Editor-in-Chief

Steve Wilcox

As you’ve seen over the past couple weeks we are going through a changing of the guard here at First Person Scholar. At this point many of the founding editors have either graduated from their programs, or are in the midst of doing so. For myself, I am in the final stages of my dissertation and so I too am moving on. And it’s high time that I did so. It’s not that I’ve grown tired of FPS—far from it in fact, as evidenced by the many thank-yous below! But at the same time the role of an editor-in-chief should be to bring a direction and destination to a publication and I think the longevity and success of a site like FPS will be measured by the range of people at its helm, the multitude of directions it goes in, and the variety of destinations it seeks to arrive at. What I’d like to do in this post is to briefly reflect on my time here at FPS and then formally introduce the team of people who will be taking FPS in those new directions, towards new destinations. Continue Reading →

Looking Back & Looking Ahead

An Editorial from the Essays Editor

Jason Hawreliak 1 Comment

I have no idea where the field is going, but I can say where I’d like it to go in general terms. I hope to see a further focus on two concepts in particular, subjectivity and complexity. Subjectivity is important for the obvious reason that videogames are played by humans. A critical methodology that ignores subjectivity is, in my view, missing an important piece of the puzzle. As Stephanie Jennings puts it, “the critic’s subjectivity, experiences of playing a game, and even personal identity are… part of the game text under analysis.” The idea that objectivity is desirable or even remotely possible in criticism is, in my view, absurd. Sure, we can discuss the formal characteristics of a thing, but the characteristics we choose to examine and how we interpret them is going to depend on the person. Luckily, I think we’re at the point where the push for objectivity is disappearing and more or less confined to the comments sections for AAA game reviews. Still, the examination of subjectivities is something I’d like to keep seeing. Continue Reading →

FPS – Year Two

Looking Back & Looking Ahead

FPS

Today First Person Scholar turns two years old! We’d like to take this opportunity to look back on the year that was and to look forward to the years ahead. And so what follows are various ways of looking at FPS circa 2014—there’s a word cloud generated from all of the articles published this past year, stats on hits and popular articles, and thoughts from the FPS team. Before all that, though, we’d like to thank you for being a part of First Person Scholar for the past two years. Your readership, contributions, comments, favourites and retweets have made this site something we’re very proud to be a part of. Thank you! Continue Reading →

Casual Surveillance

Why We Should Pay Attention to Candy Crush Saga & Other Casual Games

Stephanie Vie 1 Comment

I’ve long identified as a gamer. First I learned how to program in BASIC and create simple computer games, thrilled that I could influence the action in such a kinesthetic, immediate way. Later I enjoyed playing games on various systems—Frogger and Adventure on my Atari 2600; Bubble Bobble and The Legend of Zelda on that old-school gray Nintendo Entertainment System; Parasite Eve and Silent Hill on my PlayStation; Nintendogs and Animal Crossing on my sweet pink Nintendo DS that accompanied me on many an airplane ride to an academic conference. One thing has remained consistent, despite the changes in hardware, peripherals, and gaming systems over the years: I still gravitate towards games that I can play on my own in sessions as short or as long as I like. I prefer first-person gameplay to massively multiplayer, and I find that I enjoy games with relatively simple rules and controls–games that I can pick up, learn quickly, play for a while, and then put away again for some time if I wish. Continue Reading →

Intimate Publics

Towards Creating Supportive Spaces for Women in Games

Emma Vossen

You may have caught a piece we ran last week that discussed GamerGate broadly as a movement. This commentary is Part 2 of that piece and examines the divisions between people who play games from a more personal perspective. In this part, I illustrate my experiences as a member of the Games Institutes Janes (GI Janes) here at Uwaterloo as fodder. Furthermore, this piece also discusses the new direction we are taking the Commentaries here at FPS. Continue Reading →