Thedap

The Dragon Age Podcast

Betsy Brey and Elise Vist

This month we are having a very general discussion of Dragon Age as a series with two of our FPS editors Betsy Brey and Elise Vist. We discuss a whole variety of stuff in this hour including what it is about Dragon Age that makes people obsessively play these games over and over, the differences between Dragon Age and Mass Effect, the in-game politics, histories and philosophies of the games, and the focus on romance and sexuality within the universe. This podcast does contain spoilers, especially for Dragon Age 2, but is mostly general discussion about the series. Continue Reading →

Miguel Sicart’s “Beyond Choices”

The Design of Ethical Gameplay

Jesse Porch 1 Comment

It’s no stretch to say that many videogames are viewed as an avenue for posing ethical questions to modern players. “Morality points” and “moral choices” are well-publicized features of various types of games, such as the Renegade/Paragon bar in Bioware’s Mass Effect RPGs or Dishonored’s (Arkane Studios, 2012) options to deal with major targets via murder or various sinister yet non-lethal responses. Yet as the title of Miguel Sicart’s book Beyond Choices suggests, perhaps merely focusing on presenting choices fails to reach games’ true potential for raising ethical questions in an interactive medium. His book instead urges players, developers, and academics alike to embrace not just the possibility that games can address deep ethical questions, but to explore the ways that the medium is especially well suited to do so.
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Drawing the Line

Ethan Ham 16 Comments

Being a contemporary artist comes with the knowledge that a significant portion of society is hostile to what you are creating. When people outside of the insular art world view your work, there is a good chance that they think “that is not art,” even if they are polite enough not to utter it. Lately, I have been hearing similar statements in the game world; that a given interactive fiction, or a role-playing game, or a massively multiplayer game is “not a game.” Sometimes the dismissal seems motivated by a desire to protect some cherished form of game, other times it comes from a more dryly academic desire to define and categorize. Continue Reading →

Why Pro Evolution Soccer 6 is

One of My Favourite RPGs Ever

William Kemp 3 Comments

It was a hazy, mid-May afternoon in when PES United faced off against Merseyside Red in one of the greatest games in the English League’s history. It had to come down to this: Merseyside Red had stolen the title from PES United the previous season when PES United’s captain Iouga went down with an injury—and the club’s chances went down with him. In the off-season Merseyside Red swooped in to sign Ordaz, who had made his name with PES United. Continue Reading →

How to Talk about Videogames

A Book Review

Niv M. Sultan

Video games can resemble movies and mountains, novels and the novelty of a trip to France, and even people. However, because playing them evokes commonalities of form and effect with a multitude of other experiences, society largely treats the video game as a patchwork media monster rather than a distinct medium. In How to Talk about Videogames, Ian Bogost puts forward an initially puzzling idea: that to make sense of what video games are, what they do, and how they do it, game critics should treat their subjects like toasters. Continue Reading →