Pipe Trouble

The Politics of Definition

Michael Hancock 2 Comments

One of the perennial questions of game studies is the basic question of definition: what is a game? And many discussions surrounding games can be traced back to it. The narrative/ludology debate is an obvious one: is a game a story? It’s there in Ian Bogost’s caution against framing games as “limp skins” that don’t properly exist without the player to finish the circuit: does a game have to be played to be a game? And, most recently, it’s there in works created in Twine, works that address issues rarely, if ever, voiced in mainstream videogames: can these things be games at all? (For my two cents: yes; no, but it’s usually more interesting if it is; and yes, of course.) Continue Reading →

Playing with Identity

Otherness & Sexuality in The Witcher 2

JASON HAWRELIAK

One of the ironies of writing a Game Studies dissertation is that after a while, there isn’t really time to play any games. At some point I had to focus all my attention on writing and just get it over with. So once I finished writing, my “to-play” list had grown quite large. As a fan of “open-world” games, I was looking for a game that I could lose myself in for dozens of hours. I asked around, and a friend recommended CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. I picked it up and overall, I’m glad I did. Although it didn’t really satisfy my open-world itch, I found it to be a robust and rich experience. It’s also one of the few games where I was more compelled by the narrative than the “gameplay,” if the two can be separated. For this commentary, I’d like to give my thoughts on its narrative, and then more specifically, on its representations of otherness and sexuality. Continue Reading →

Interview – Brendan Keogh

On Candy Box, Spec Ops, & the future of Game Studies

Jason Hawreliak 1 Comment

In the second installment in our feature interview series, we chat with game critic, author, and PhD student Brendan Keogh. We cover a wide range of topics, from Aniwey’s Candy Box, to Spec Ops: The Line and the future of Game Studies. We reached Brendan via Skype last Thursday [May 9th, 2013]. Continue Reading →

Dungeons, Dragons, & Digital Denizens

Michael Hancock

If you’re immersed in game studies long enough—or just interested in videogames in general—you’re bound to pick up certain acronyms. FPS. RTS. MMO (or, if you’ve really been around long enough, MOO or MUD). And RPG, the abbreviation for role-playing game. In consideration of the quotation above, just what does the RPG have to offer us in terms of thinking about contemporary living? The answer may be a negative one; on the one side, the RPG has its roots in Dungeons & Dragons and fantasy stories, and those roots in turn lead to J. R. R. Tolkien, who famously declared that the use of fantasy was escapism. And on the other side of the Dungeons and Dragons relation, you have statistics and numbers, which lead to horror stories of obsessive grinding and wasteful time commitments. In their anthology on RPGs, Dungeons, Dragons, and Digital Denizens: The Digital Role-Playing Game, editors Gerald A. Voorhees, Joshua Call, and Katie Whitlock provide no definitive answers, and, indeed, any definitive answers for such a complex question should be suspect. What the book offers instead is three sections, sixteen chapters, some four hundred pages on how games commonly labeled as RPG are “designed, played, and made relevant to contemporary society and culture” (18). And while the book tends to dwell on particular areas of the RPG catalog more than others, the quality of the essays make it worth reading for anyone working on a game that fits under the RPG umbrella—and their variety offer several very interesting yet very different potential answers to our question. Continue Reading →

Autis(i)m & Representation

Auti-Sim, Disability Simulation Games, & Neurodiversity

Sarah 7 Comments

Auti-Sim was developed during the 2013 Hacking Health Vancouver hackathon, an event designed to foster collaboration between health experts, programmers, and designers. The first-person simulation game, created in the unity engine and playable in browser, immerses the player in a children’s playground and uses overpowering sound effects and visual distortion to raise awareness of auditory hypersensitivity. During my own trial of the game, my first action was to move closer to a circle of kids that I spotted near the play structure. As I approached them, a static television effect overtook the game world and the background chatter intensified. Continue Reading →

The Greatest Victory

Ernest Becker, Lara Croft, & Death in Tomb Raider

JASON HAWRELIAK

As Tadhg Kelly wrote in 2011, All games are about death. I tend to agree with Kelly, though I’d say that all games are partially about death, and some more than others. After all, some of the earliest games (e.g. 1962’s Spacewar!) framed success and failure within thanatological terms, and even games without anthropomorphized/organic avatars tend to do the same. For example, why does a game like Brickbreaker, which features only inanimate objects, frame success and failure within thanatological terms? Why do I start with 3 lives, and whose lives are lost when I fail to hit the ball? Is Brickbreaker perhaps exploring non-organic modes of being, a la Object Oriented Ontology? I don’t think so. I think life and death are just the clearest indications of success and failure we have. At a very basic level, to die is to fail, and we understand this at a primordial level. Thus, this thanatological shorthand simply lends itself very well to videogames, which are often concerned with success and failure. But death is a very unpleasant subject, so why is it such a prevalent ludic metaphor? Continue Reading →