[Originally posted on PopMatters] Line of Defense Tactics is a spinoff game based on the Line of Defense MMO and follows the events of the DC comic series of the same name. Perhaps it is because the game is based on two disparate sources—one in beta, the other in issue #0—that it feels so aloof and … Continue reading Review: Line of Defense Tactics
[Originally posted on The Ontological Geek] A lot of what makes games special is their ability to produce spontaneous and sincere moments of narrative power. Games only move when a player does something, so it’s powerful when something unplanned and beautiful results from a player’s mundane button tapping. Even now videogame apologists are quick to use the … Continue reading Something from Nothing: Authored Emergence in Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
“Human sperm cells were seen with the earliest microscopes in the seventeenth century. The human egg is several thousand times larger, but — despite earlier postulates — it was not visualized until 1827. […] For something to be found, it must first be imagined and sought.” (Duffin, Jacalyn. A History of Medicine, (Toronto, ON: Toronto … Continue reading It’s a Man’s World: The Implications of Makeup in Mass Effect
I think Austin Walker’s A(s)century came at an appropriate time for me. I’ve just started re-reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, you see, and I’ve been thinking quite a bit about its influence on pop culture. Granted Ridley Scott probably has more than a little to do with the book’s impact, … Continue reading A(s)century, Philp K. Dick and Videogames
Most games give their player an avatar. The avatar is the player’s body inside the fiction. Obviously, games move because of their audience: players don’t follow a protagonist, the story progresses only in response to the actions of the player’s virtual body. In essence the player’s body, the avatar, becomes the fiction’s narrator in that … Continue reading The Narration and Abstraction of Bodies in Games
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