Imagine yourself wearing a pair of latex gloves, scraping some dust off the surface of your favourite book or movie with a scalpel and tapping it into a glass vial of clear fluid. Now seal the vial and shake it, stare into its contents. When little Venus symbols to start floating in the solution you can declare to all … Continue reading On Evaluative Criticism
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
Quite a bit of early (or at least earlier) videogame criticism strove to prove videogame exceptionalism. Videogames had a gift, and it was called interactivity. And while the concept of interactivity eventually proved more suffocating than liberating, for a time it felt like videogames actually were unique and by playing them players actually were using … Continue reading The Narration and Abstraction of the Camera in Games
[Originally posted on Game Church] In 1732, Jonathan Swift published a poem called “The Lady’s Dressing Room” about man named Strephon snooping through his lover Celia’s room. Swift opens the poem by telling the reader that after five hours of preparation Celia’s beauty is equal to a goddess’s. Understandably, the love-struck Strephon is excited to take … Continue reading The Gamer’s Dressing Room
Roland Barthes’ “Death of the author” line of criticism has carried a lot of weight in videogame circles. In large part because it’s just an attractive, empowering theory. Barthes was a French literary critic writing in the 1960’s; a time when literary criticism—particularly from French authors—was a new, dynamic and popular discipline. In killing the … Continue reading From Game to Play: Roland Barthes, Videogames and Criticism
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