Michael Hancock is the Book Reviews editor on First Person Scholar. He is a PhD candidate in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. Currently, his grey matter is engaged in writing a dissertation on… Continue Reading
Opening Bio: Jesper Juulis the author of three books on videogames, starting with Half-Real back in 2005, followed by A Casual Revolution in 2010, and most recently The Art of Failure in 2013. He is currently a visiting assistant professor… Continue Reading
Educational and/or serious videogames have seldom been popular among mainstream game audiences, but that hasn’t stopped the recent onslaught of indie developers from trying to use their games to explore complex themes outside the realm of pure entertainment. Games that try to engage players in meaningful play are often criticized for not being enjoyable. Yet, is that because they aren’t well designed, or is it because audiences aren’t used to games that don’t try to heavily immerse them in computer graphics? Continue Reading
Nintendo’s recent release of Hyrule Historia has the internet abuzz about Zelda timelines and character sketches. This piece of ephemera is obviously worth picking up for a die hard Zelda fan, but its use value for a game scholar is more questionable. The text does contain pertinent “facts” about the Legend of Zelda universe but I am still unsure how much this information will change perceptions of the series, or the scholarship around it. This review will examine the many different sections of Hyrule Historia in order to discern what such an official piece of metatextual “history” can offer. Continue Reading
Kurtz (Heart of Darkness), the surveillance state (1984), Mr. Hyde (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), and the monster (Dr. Frakenstein): all are nuanced antagonistic forces that propel their respective narratives in order to address social and ethical issues. Compare that with an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, a planet approaching ecological disaster, an economy ever-reliant on dangerous loans and non-renewable resources, and you have to wonder: where are the quintessentially 21st century villains? Continue Reading
In the next few pages I will outline two major forms of scholarship. One relies on feedback and the other on feed-forward. Let’s start with the former. Feedback scholarship shares a number of similarities with cybernetics. The phrase ‘cybernetics’ comes from the Greek word meaning steersman, as in the one who steers a ship. The man or woman steering a ship responds to the environment by adjusting the direction of the boat. In this case, the wind and the water provide feedback and the person steering the boat acts as a homeostatic mechanism, adjusting the course according to the feedback. Increasingly, I get the feeling that Games Studies is focused on maintaining the course but there’s not a lot of focus on the ultimate destination. In other words, Games Studies scholarship is inherently homeostatic. Continue Reading
Just over a month ago, Robert Kirkman sat down for an interview on BBC America to discuss what makes his series The Walking Dead a transmedia success. Amid groans and jokes from other men on set, Kirkman spoke about his series for what it is: a soap opera. He explained that “Twilight is to Dracula as The Walking Dead is to Romero movies. I’m the Stephanie Meyer of Zombies. I watched Romero movies and I was like, yeah, but what if they had more kissing?” (BBC). Kirkman agued that it isn’t the zombies that make his comics and show so popular, but rather the traditional soap opera elements such as romance, betrayal, and sex. The zombies are merely the backdrop, the fictional conditions which make the show and the comic socially acceptable to like. Continue Reading