Designing Games for Affect

A Two-Year Post-Mortem

Kaelan Doyle Myerscough

For games, affect theory lets us look at a game’s mechanics, visuals, soundscape, systems of interaction, and forms of movement as contributing to a specific affect. In my Master’s thesis, I focused on the affect of intimacy, which I understood as a vulnerable, precarious closeness, the feeling you might get sharing a passing look with a stranger on a train or opening up to a friend about an insecurity. I looked at Overwatch, The Last Guardian, and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild to see how they created different kinds of intimate affects. I found that each game, in its own way, created a sense of intimacy through its systems of interaction, visuals, sound, and temporality. Continue Reading →

There is No Escape

How Hades Connects Game Genre and Greek Myth

Jacob Hamill

So how does Hades fit into the history of refiguring Greek mythology? The theme of fate and the extent of free will is the connective thread. If roguelikes are designed around the experience of dying and restarting, then permadeath is a mechanic that makes players think about the decisions taken, what has led them to death, or consequence persistence. Procedurally generated content ensures that no two runs are exactly alike, making the weight of our decisions ever more impactful. Continue Reading →

First Person Podcast Episode 44

YouTube Game Analysis

Giuseppe Femia, Sabrina Sgandurra, Alex Chalk, and Patrick Dolan

Welcome to the 44th episode of First-Person Podcast. This is part two of our three-part series that we are doing to examine how games are introduced to us and played with on YouTube. For part two, we are going to be looking at the Lore Analysis videos that get worked into the mainstream YouTube feed every so often. And, yes this was my way of working in a reason to talk about Dark Souls. Continue Reading →

FPS Direct Spring 2021

We Don't Have Zelda News Either

FPS Editorial Staff

It’s March, and that means spring is almost here! Though, for us in Ontario, it also means we’ll be experiencing “second winter” before summer mysteriously appears. And with a new season comes a new FPS update! We’re very excited to announce and highlight our newest and our upcoming projects geared towards expanding the Games Studies community into other spaces and/or conversations. Continue Reading →

Persona 5’s Ann Takamaki is Derailed By The Gender Politics Of Pop Music

Stacey Henley

Ann Takamaki is the only ‘band member’ who appears to resent the role given to her, and she is clearly cast as ‘the sexy one’. Often, ‘the sexy one’ translates to vacuousness or lack of intelligence. Being sexy and being a bimbo are often the same things when it comes to pop music, with the media of the early ‘00s depicting Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera especially as airheads. Imani Perry writes that “women are often presented as vacuous, doing nothing but swaying around seductively” (2004, p. 137) in music videos, but this is one stereotype that Ann Takamaki breaks. She is ditzy and bratty but has clear agency, demonstrated both through the fact she is a competent party member and through her actions and dialogue as the game progresses. Continue Reading →

First Person Podcast Episode 43

Parasocial Play on YouTube

Giuseppe Femia, Sabrina Sgandurra, Alex Chalk, and Patrick Dolan

To commemorate our transition to YouTube, this is part one of a three-part series that we will be doing to examine how games are introduced to us and played with on YouTube. For part one, we are going to be looking at the Parasocial play involved with a lot of retro and modern YouTube content. From Walkthroughs to Let’s Plays, this is the foundation of our YouTube gaming experience. Continue Reading →

Cinders and Fantasies of Womanhood

Gabriel Elvery

The figure of Cinderella has been divisive; its reception highlights oppositions present in feminist thought: namely the conflict between second-wave and postfeminism. Fien Adriaens (2009) describes second-wave feminism’s stance as “the idea that femininity and feminism are oppositional, mutually exclusive and that the adoption of one of these identities (feminine or feminist) can only be achieved at the expense of the other.” This positions second-wave feminism in critical opposition to “Cendrillon” as well as conservative retellings such as Disney’s 1950 film Cinderella. Indeed, critics have argued that fairy tales portray women as “weak, submissive, dependent and self-sacrificing” and that by example this encourages young girls to “adopt these desires, which are deemed appropriate within patriarchy” (Parsons, 2004, p. 137). Continue Reading →