As in most forms of competition, the equipment you have access to in video games says something about you. Your equipment can say something about your skill, commitment to the game, or your social status. As I grew up, the last of these was especially prominent. Family visits and gaming with cousins always had one…
A few of the most common staples in modern gaming are the port, re-release, and remaster. Normally, these types of games are released years after the original and marketed as an opportunity to experience (or re-experience) some of gaming’s most standout moments on modern platforms (i.e. Tomb Raider on iOS/Android). They may be a direct…
My entire adolescence, I have grown up around game design. My school focused on it, and my friends were interested in it as well. From the 6th grade forward, I would make games as par for course with papers, presentations, and et cetera. As time went on, I stopped making games pure playing pleasure, and…
I understood interface as the hardware the player interacts with that grants them accessibility into the game world. However, after reading GameWorld Interfaces by Krisitine Jørgensen my definition of interface has become more complicated. Jørgensen describes the gameworld as an interface in which the player interacts with cues and symbols in the gameworld to play the game.…
The original Space Invaders was a mega-hit video game that was created as part of Japan’s long road to economic recovery in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When it was first conceived in Japan in 1978, the aliens were humans, but the developers pulled back from making the enemy human, which was considered potentially…
Elizabeth LaPensée, professor and game designer, created the game known as Thunderbird Strike. In an interview with author Jacob Dubé she explains what her game is about. She says that as “a big greenish-blue thunderbird a player can use its thunder to destroy vehicles and construction sites…or they can use the [thunder] to restore the…
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 chose Space and Beyond for my CYOA novel. The book’s narrator speaks directly to “you.” You are a space-native child who begins the book by choosing which planet to attain citizenship in, and then you continue to navigate, in various ways, your journeys to and about these outer-space planets. The branches are of different…
