One approach to the study and criticism of video games emphasizes the experiential aspect of action / interaction. Occasionally this approach is applied with a rigor that reveals the functionally identical nature of concepts that we tend to understand as separate, sometimes apposite and others opposite: concepts such as space, and time, and action. Colliding […]
One approach to the study and criticism of video games emphasizes the experiential aspect of action / interaction. Occasionally this approach is applied with a rigor that reveals the functionally identical nature of concepts that we tend to understand as separate, sometimes apposite and others opposite: concepts such as space, and time, and action. Colliding […]
I’m happy to write that the Game Studies class that I’m co-teaching (with my excellent and inestimable colleagues Carol Stabile and Annie Zeidman-Karpinski) is meeting for the first time today. This class is a bit of an experiment. It is (to my knowledge) the first Game Studies class to be taught at the University of […]
I just finished reading UO colleague Kate Mondloch’s excellent new book, Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art (University of Minnesota Press, 2010, from the thoroughly excellent Electronic Mediations series); and while I’m not ready to thoroughly review it, I do want to take a moment to log a few brief thoughts. It is clear within the […]
I was thumbing through Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life1 the other day, thinking about games as dialogic actors in a scheme of mediated interpersonal communication; thinking about about Super Meat Boy and the critical response to it (the grounded, the hyperbolic, the in-between); thinking about Abbot’s upcoming class; thinking about my own […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]