Alexandra is a first year PhD student in the English department at the University of Waterloo and a copy-editor at First Person Scholar. Her research interests include narrative theory and game studies. More specifically, she hopes to treat video games… Continue Reading
In this article I put forward the idea of procedural ethics. Procedural ethics is a way of studying videogames, videogame culture, and the videogames industry that focuses on both the computational and ethical aspects of gaming. This theory is born from the desire to move beyond some of the limitations of current theories used to study games, making questions of ethics and people central to any study of games. Procedural ethics argues that procedures are not just the in-game algorithms, images, and text that force the player to make a decision or to agree to participate in a particular world. Rather, they are made up of everything that went into that procedure being programmed, including the developer’s history, the community, and the player’s experiences, as well as the socio-cultural context surrounding the game and the player. Continue Reading
It would be safe to assume that I qualify as a horror fanatic. I’ve played a large quantity of games in this genre including: Quake, Doom, F.E.A.R., Penumbra: Overture, Bioshock, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, The Last of Us, Cry of Fear, Nanashi no Game, Dead Space, SCP – Containment Breach, Slender: The Arrival and Slender: The Eight Pages, Clock Tower: The First Fear, Resident Evil, System Shock, and a slew of others (many that I’ve watched but am not brave enough to play). These games share many common elements that solidify their position in the genre such as dim lighting, monsters, disorientation, analogue disruptions, and a thematic narrative wherein the player/avatar is subsumed within a labyrinth of horror that they must navigate through in order to resolve the anxiety and unease of both their environment and the stories they occupy. I think that the most enjoyable of these games combines engaging storylines within an environment that has more monsters and evasion as opposed to jump-scares and continuously present monsters. As time has gone on, however, I’ve noticed that similarities that draw the horror genre games together have become really monotonous. Continue Reading
As 2014 draws to a close, #GamerGate continues. A number of articles have been written in both popular and academic publications attempting to describe, critique, and comprehend GamerGate. What has yet to be discussed is the challenge of undertaking research… Continue Reading
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
Game designer Warren Spector once said that well-designed games “provide compelling problems within an overarching narrative, afford creative opportunities for dealing with these problems, and then respond to players’ choices with meaningful consequences” (Jenkins and Squire). The term he chose for this matrix of creative design and player choice was “possibility spaces.” Space is a constant across almost all videogames, and it comes up frequently in videogame discussion in a variety of different ways: stage design, level structure, gameworld, playground, virtual world, sandbox, hub, PvP zones, instances (in an interesting conflation of space and time), arena battles. For all these frequently bandied-about terms, there’s a relative lack of theory surrounding what space in games means. Von Borries, Walz and Böttger’s 2007 anthology Space Time Play does an admirable job displaying the scope of the issue, but the book is more a survey that aims for breadth rather than depth. Michael Nitsche’s Video Game Spaces: Image, Play, and Structure in 3D Game Worlds goes beyond their starting point in order to fully investigate how players and designers orient and narrate journeys through 3D game worlds. While the book can meanderat times, at its best it is a detailed analysis that raises new perspectives and tools for discussing videogames. Continue Reading
In this post I develop the concept of procedural realism in videogames. By procedural realism I mean those game processes that strive to represent real-world systems in a manner deemed accurate or realistic. What I want to explore here is the politics of procedural realism, something I pursue by examining what game developers choose to represent ‘realistically’ and what they choose to represent ‘unrealistically’ or, in certain cases, not at all. These decisions are political in the sense that they have implications for various subjects. Continue Reading