Ludic Topology

Serres, Linear Time, and the Ethics of Game Design

Steve Wilcox 1 Comment

Recently my research has taken a turn towards Michel Serres and his complex, topological conceptions of space and time. In “Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought,” Steven Connor lucidly describes Serres’ work across a range of subjects and texts. In a subsection entitled “Ethics and Topology” Connor offers the following summary: “The reason for preferring a vision of topological time to a system of linear time is because the latter is founded on and sustained by violence. Linear time is formed out of the monotonous rhythm of argument, contradiction and murder.” What follows is an extension of this criticism to linearity in video games, especially those titles that seek to criticize the very mechanics of linear gameplay, such as Far Cry 3. The overarching claim here is that video games are not violent for their content but for their very structure, for their portrayal of time as successive, and inherently progressive… Continue Reading →

Reality Is Broken

Why Games Make Us Better & How They Can Change the World

JASON HAWRELIAK 1 Comment

Reality is Broken has become a bit of a big deal in gaming, both in the academic and popular presses. Ian Bogost wrote that it “is destined to be one of the most influential works about videogames ever published,” and it has become a New York Times Bestseller. McGonigal is writing to a very broad audience – designers, theorists, academics, the public – and so it is a very readable, lucid text. It is divided into fourteen chapters under three main sections – “Why Games Make Us Happy,” Reinventing Reality,” and “How Very Big Games Can Change the World,” which I’ll summarize below. Each chapter is essentially centered around a ludic “fix” for reality, such as the one for Chapter 2: “Emotional Activation: Compared with games, reality is depressing. Games focus our energy, with relentless optimism, on something we’re good at and enjoy” (p. 38)… Continue Reading →

The Talking Dead

Dialogue Trees & Player Agency in The Walking Dead

LAUREN BURR

Greg Miller at IGN boldly stated that “people will reference the series over and over as the benchmark for story-telling in games. And historically, it will stand as the game that reinvented or at least repopularized adventure games.” And he’s not the only critic expressing such high opinions. Most recently, The Walking Dead took home the “game of the year” award at the 2012 VGAs. So why such great disparity? And what does it mean when a mechanically simple point-and-click adventure game–which gives a player almost no room for exploration or alternate gameplay–purports to “tailor” a “story” to each individual player’s choices? Continue Reading →

Horrific Controls

Resident Evil 2 & the Mechanics of Fear

KENT AARDSE 1 Comment

Resident Evil 2 provides us with an illuminating take on how the controls of a game can play into its immersion. At the time of release, and still to this day, the control scheme of Resident Evil 2 has been the one aspect of the game constantly criticized. The controls are sluggish, requiring the player to constantly press up on the directional pad in order to run forward, regardless of the direction the on-screen character is facing. This is in stark contrast to the majority of other games in which a direction is pressed on the gamepad to correlate with the direction the character is moving on the screen. In retrospect, though, this might just be one of the hidden strengths of the early Resident Evil games, and one of the very reasons for viewing Resident Evil 2 as being a truly definitive survival horror game… Continue Reading →

Über Other

Mortality, Morality, and the Nazi Zombie

JASON HAWRELIAK

In her 2011 book Reality is Broken (2011), Jane McGonigal argues that videogames can in fact be used for “good:” through harnessing the countless hours gamers spend solving puzzles in videogames, we may be able to solve “real world” problems, such as inequality, sickness and conflict. I really like this idea, and though I’m not sure I quite share all of McGonigal’s optimism, I do think that videogames serve some vital functions – cultural and psychological – outside of particular play experiences… Continue Reading →

The Language of Gaming

by Astrid Ensslin

Michael Hancock

Discourse analysis is a fairly new field of study, but one with a very distinguished pedigree, delving deeply into rhetoric and linguistics. Game studies, in comparison, is a relatively new field, but one that has had to fight (or perhaps just “has fought”) fiercely to declare its independence and relevance. In The Language of Gaming, Astrid Ensslin combines the two, detailing over the course of ten chapters how various subsections of discourse analysis can be applied to games and gaming—to the semiotic, textual content of games, and to the discourse and power structures constructed through the discussions of those who play them. As you can imagine with that remit, it’s a rather diverse book, covering everything from how instruction manuals phrase rules to players chatting over a game of Worms 2. By the end, though, Ensslin had me convinced of the value of discourse analysis to game studies… Continue Reading →

In Defense of Procedurality

Procedural Rhetoric, Civilization, and “You Didn’t Build That!”

Jason Hawreliak 4 Comments

I want to write a bit of a defense of Bogost’s “procedural rhetoric,” which he defines as “the practice of persuading through processes in general and computational processes in particular” (Persuasive, 3). I particularly want to counter the claims that procedural rhetoric a) ignores the player, and b) neglects the importance of other representative modes like narrative and aesthetics. I’ll use Miguel Sicart’s “Against Procedurality” article from Gamestudies.org (11:3, 2011) as a dialectical counterpart, since it’s easily available and I think representative of the “nay” camp… Continue Reading →