TreaAndrea Russworm, in her book chapter Dystopian Blackness and The Limits of Racial Empathy in The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, proposes four guidelines that help form a framework for critiquing and building racial dystopian narratives in video games. In her final guideline, she writes that “…game design should be a dialogic process…
Quadrilateral Cowboy is a cyberpunk game that delightfully blends 80’s technology with a futuristic edge. The game mainly consists of players using their hacking skills to pull off heists. As the player progresses through Quadrilateral Cowboy, new abilities are unlocked that allow more creative solutions to the hacking challenges found in the game. For instance, players…
Last class, Professor asked a question that stuck with me: what are the most inclusive games? That led to a few spin-off questions in my brain: what determines how inclusive a game is? Is what I experience to be inclusive necessarily so for everyone, since I perceive that it should be? I immediately thought about…
Thunderbird Strike (https://www.thunderbirdstrike.com/) allows the player to choose whatever actions they deem appropriate in attaining a narrative outcome. The game’s storyline culminates in the restoration of an oil site from capitalist interests that aim to extract oil and in the process damage the woodland environment depicted in the game. Players can choose to reach…
While most people use their interfaces to facilitate interactions with the game, there exist a few who purposefully do the opposite. In much the same way people choose to turn their difficulty up to the hardest setting, there are some who take it a step further by making the very controls themselves harder to use.…
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…
We spent some of Monday’s time in class talking about gender in Assassin’s Creed: Liberation (and also in gaming more generally). This was something I was thinking about as well as I played the game. Which outfit you decide to have Aveline wear changes her abilities and possible actions, based on the way that outfit…
On Wednesday I attended event in Frost with Danika Medak-Saltzman (so this counts as two posts?), where there were digital projects about indigenous futures, including a virtual reality experience about the “Highway of Tears,” a rural highway in British Columbia where large numbers of Indigenous girls and women have disappeared or been found killed over…
I was reading an article about devices that let players put code into games in order to exploit and create bugs in the game. I never knew that it was possible to do things like this. The coding can help the player in the game by allowing them to skip levels, get better items in…
