NWACCo Blog

Weight, Friction, and Degrés de Saut: Thoughts on Super Meat Boy

Weight, Friction, and Degrés de Saut: Thoughts on Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy doesn’t hate you, but it doesn’t mind hurting you. The Xbox Live Arcade release delivers on the promise of the pre-release version that was shown at PAX Prime 2010, where it was my own personal Game of the Show. Here are my initial thoughts after spending a few days (and a few […]

Madigan on Moving

Madigan on Moving

Jamie Madigan wrote about motion controls and the concept of presence on his blog, The Psychology of Video Games. It’s a great post and very much worth a read. In it, he references a paper by a group of researchers at Cleveland State University. He writes: They were interested in how “naturally” a controller was […]

Jeffries on Space, Design, and Content

Jeffries on Space, Design, and Content

L. B. Jeffries wrote an interesting article on Moving Pixels, examining the complex interaction of the concepts of space, design, and content in video games. Jeffries uses Tschumi and Derrida to try to make sense of the layers of objective and subjective inherent in art, from architecture to video games: Many of [Tschumi’s] points are […]

The things you’ve seen and the people you’ve been

The things you’ve seen and the people you’ve been

Baudrillard wrote that “The impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” (19) Media operates in the mode of layered simulation. The interaction of simulations has been readily identifiable in film […]