[This piece was written as a part of Critical Distance‘s June 2016 Blogs of the Round Table feature] Videogame fiction, like a lot of adventure fiction for young people, places the central character in the position of rescuing a loved one. Often the loved one our hero must rescue is a damsel in distress with an implicit … Continue reading A Family That Plays Together
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
Tropes are difficult to work with. They’re broadly useful to tease apart patterns but because they interact with one another, each individual instance of a trope will slightly escape perfect definition. Encountering this uniqueness is where we have to do the work of reading and figuring out just how texts co-mingle to communicate something greater than the … Continue reading Girl at the End of the World
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Toren opens with a clarity of purpose but a mystery of place that I haven’t experienced in a game since Shadow of the Colossus. Like Ico, Vagrant Story or, more recently, Journey and Dark Souls, it tells a complex story with space, light, and movement. Like Dreamfall and The Legend of Zelda, … Continue reading Toren and the Art of Mythmaking
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