So the semester is finally over! And so is our class. Sadly, I think, so are my video game-playing days. Something that I’ve realized is crucial when playing video games, something that I think I lack, is patience. I’m thinking about playing Assassin’s Creed: Liberation and how long it took me to complete the tasks I…
A couple of weeks ago, I attended Coming To You From the Indigenous Future: A Showcase of Indigenous Women’s Digital media. My experiences at there really meshed with a lot of class discussions, particularly the one we had about the representation of slavery in Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry. The showcase presented a wide array of…
The more I take this class, the more exploration and experimentation become important to me in gameplay. By exploration, I mean the extent to which the player travels through an unknown space (the world of the game) in order to learn about it. How important is spatial exploration to the game? What does such exploration…
Before taking this class, my definition of play was “to engage in any activity for fun or pleasure.” I have worked a lot with children, so when I thought of play, I thought of imaginary games, dolls, tag, and the like. When it came to video games, I thought that to play them was to…
I chose Journey Under the Sea because it was the only novel I saw at Amherst Books. Such worked out, because for the question that determined our blog groups, I chose that I would prefer to explore the deep sea as my adventure choice. I’m both frightened and fascinated by the deep sea–I knew this story…
In “Shooting to Kill,” Phillips engages the concept of “mechropolitics” to describe the politics of death in video games and the digital world and the ways in which these politics come to influence the perceptions of death in the real world. To start her theory of mechropolitics, Phillips’ invokes the the postcolonial theory of necropolitics,…
On Thursday, my environmental studies professor invited us to an interactive documentary film screening about the Maribor uprisings in Slovenia that took place from 2012-2013. My professor recommended that see it because one the filmmakers, Maple Rasza, is an internationally famous anthropologist and activist. Rasza explained that the film would be anti-authoritarian. We weren’t there to…
I’ve been thinking a lot about the comparison between films and video games–why is that we allow such diversity in movies but only have one way of thinking about the “successful” video games? Reading burlison11’s post, Taking Fun Seriously, reminded me of some of the themes we covered in my Digital Africas course. In it, we…
I’m writing this post because I don’t play video games. The only game I can remember playing is Spyro on PS1 when I when I was in middle school (I’ll let you figure out how old I am) . I’m barely even a casual gamer–I did play a little Candy Crush and Fruit Ninja when…
As a few of our readings explained, the notion that videogames should be fun (and form of escape) is why some gamers are so resistant to games being critiqued for being racist or sexist, or why they’re so resistant to games addressing social issues. When I read last week’s readings, and when folks in class…
