[Originally posted on PopMatters] Secrets of Raetikon is part platformer, part flight simulator, part Metroid-vania, part creation myth. It’s a lot of things without ever settling on what it wants to be most. Really that’s its strongest quality. It just sort of gracefully floats along boundaries. Secrets of Raetikon points to the value of exploration as an … Continue reading Exploration and the Secrets of Raetikon
[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
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
If somebody were to make a game out of that one twitter bot that proposes random situations (@AndNowImagine) the result would look something like Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. I really enjoy the game (Review: Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII. PopMatters. Feb 19 2014.), though I admit that I had an extended honeymoon phase with … Continue reading Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII and Defamiliarization
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