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Lies all the way down
A while ago, I wrote and published a peer-reviewed article about the “curious” and very deliberate efforts by the developers of certain games to proclaim that their games shouldn’t be interpreted in a political way, despite all evidence to the contrary. The abstract goes like this: Developers of AAA videogames which feature recognizable military forces,…
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Pleasure in Conveyor Belt Games
Over on CapsuleCrit, Kavi Duvvoori explores their particular and somewhat ambivalent pleasure taken in ‘extractive captialist’ games such as the Rollercoaster Tycoon series and Factorio. In the article, Duvvoori highlights two of the central pleasures videogames tend to feed on, neither of which are the adrenaline-pumping, conflict-oriented “competition” that one might typically associate with games…
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Warcraft Time
World of Warcraft is … well it’s a game because they sell it at game shops, and you ‘play’ it. But it is also a virtually interminable social space in which people interact in competitive, cooperative, and myriad other ways. To put it simply people spend time there, together. The most recent expansion has been…
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Designation of a “Gaming Disorder” by WHO
In January 2018, the World Health Organization identified a “Gaming disorder” as follows: as a pattern of gaming behavior (“digital-gaming” or “video-gaming”) characterized by impaired control over gaming, increasing priority given to gaming over other activities to the extent that gaming takes precedence over other interests and daily activities, and continuation or escalation of gaming despite…
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Arma 2 Wasteland: Development vs Design
Original Post: Jan 13 2013 Let’s talk a little about game design. As a researcher and teacher, I sometimes find it difficult to express in words exactly what it is that game design is, or what I hope to teach to outsiders–even to gamers themselves sometimes. Capturing exactly what the difference is between design decisions…
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Videogames and the Gilette Model
Original Post: November 6, 2012 Lately I’ve noticed a slew of products I can buy, which will subsequently force me to buy ‘refills’ of some description, in order to keep using them. On top of this, I have noticed an increase in the number of household products which determine how and when the consumable is…
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The Gatekeepers of Videogame Culture
Original Post: August 20 2012 (Kotaku AU) There are hundreds of millions of games played across the world every day, there are clubs, conventions, and publications dedicated solely to the practice. In economic terms, the video game industry is certainly a powerful one, growing to rival any other kind of entertainment or media form one…
