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Mass Effect Contingency and Canon
Original Post: May 30 2011 In another in a series of pieces discussing largely unanswerable questions, this piece will examine the relevance of the ‘canon’ to an interactive form such as Mass Effect. The background to this discussion is the overall controversy regarding sex in videogames, and why it is such a difficult subject to…
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A Series of Interesting Choices
Original Post: May 18 2011 (Kotaku AU) Kaiden or Ashley? Rescue or Harvest? How do you make decisions in video games? Video games were described by Sid Meier as ‘a series of interesting choices.’ Indeed, many good video games today involve choices that go beyond which gun to use or how fast to run through…
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A Riposte to Blunt Criticism
Original Post: May 10 2011 A few days ago I was cited in a piece by Danc on his Lost Garden blog as being an example of “shallow game criticism.” While I don’t take personal offence to the citation, nor even the tone of Danc’s article, I feel compelled to respond (as many have before…
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First or Third Person – What’s your Perspective?
Original Post: April 18 2011 (Kotaku AU) Adam Ruch is a PhD candidate, currently writing about Video Games Criticism. He is, by most measure, a pretty smart guy! So when he emailed me asking if he could write a post about the first and third person video games, and the different ways in which they…
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Contested Vocabulary in Game Studies
Original Post: February 23 2011 I want to take a moment to pour over the semantics of a few important terms/concepts often used in the context of videogame studies. These terms are fundamental to our study, but are in my opinion, abused. That is to say they are either given new or limited definitions, or…
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The Metanarrative of Videogames Part 1 & 2
Original Post: November 15, 2010 Part 1 Videogames teach their players things: at the least how the internal system of the videogame works. This is a central principle on which Raph Koster’s theory of fun and Ian Bogost’s procedural rhetoric are both built on. Murray’s conceptions of agency and immersion rely on this fact in…
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Unpacking Mechanics and Meaning in FarCry 2
Original Post: November 1 2010 The following is an unpolished ‘critique’ of FarCry 2 in which I attempt to extract meaning from the combination of very strong, though sometimes hard to believe mechanics, with what narrative/aesthetic information is available. This will assume a lot of knowledge about FC2, and doesn’t provide any kind of introduction…
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The Great Undiscovered of Minecraft
Original Post: October 26, 2010 I have to admit, I am not much of an indie gamer. I spend most of my time with the big-budget mainstream titles in my research. There is a reason for that, but it isn’t the point of this article. What is important is that Minecraft managed to get my…
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