[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s July 2015 Blogs of the Round Table feature] There’s a section in to the Saints Row IV where the player-character, the boss—in my case a pink-haired woman with a french accent, floral body tattoos and an outstanding fashion sense—rides a purple jet-bike through cyberspace, shooting aliens … Continue reading Rethinking Fun with Saints Row IV
What happens to a videogame hero when they die? There are different theories floating around, the most entertaining of them seems to be that each failure creates a new universe where the hero’s death carries on, as if the game is some kind of Schrodinger box where an endless set of possible universes are created … Continue reading Stumbling Toward Victory: Failure as Creative Performance
A Rashomon, named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, is a story repeated several times from different characters’ perspectives. Each retelling adds more information from each character until, in the end, a full story emerges. The Rashomon effect is a psychological phenomenon wherein multiple witnesses view the same event but describe it with different or even … Continue reading The Ludic Rashomon
Violence is paramount to maintaining fantasy fiction and disembodied violence is a pillar of the fantasy genre. Disembodied violence is the celebration of violent power, or the expression of violent power against unthinking but vaguely human-shaped antagonists; it’s the kind of violence that isn’t really violent because it doesn’t take place against another person. Take Iron Man 2: in … Continue reading Imagine the Power: Disembodied Violence in Fantasy Traditions
[Originally posted on The Ontological Geek] For several years now it’s been semi-standard practice for games to record the amount of time played. When I look at the number of hours I’ve spent playing a game I try to keep in mind a short article by Kat Chastain about the way games consume time. To summarize … Continue reading The Serotonin Machine: On Grinding
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