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…
One conceptual structure Phillips introduces is “digital death worlds.” She first brings in the concept of death worlds through a reference to Mbembe, and goes on to describe the digital versions as places that allow and even encourage gamers to play with dying and killing. She says that digital death worlds enact mechropolitics, which means…
This post is an answer to an exam question. I chose Escape from Tenopia Island, a CYOA eBook I downloaded, because I found its sci-fi plot interesting. The novel’s plot centers around an apocalyptic event during which my spaceship collides with a meteor. I am the only person to survive the impact, and I abandon…
The Old Man’s Club is a video game adaptation of the book The Old Man and the Sea. Usually, I do not like adaptations of books that do not follow the storyline exactly, but I actually enjoyed the way this game was made. First off, the sound reminds you of the docks, with the sounds…
The music in Space Invaders gives an other-worldly vibe as the player plays the game. The sound effects evoke the feeling of fighting a presence that is foreign but not too different from your own, as the shooting sounds made by the player and by the invaders are different but similar. As the invaders get…
Today in class, we were told we would be creating our own video game, through the use of the platform “Makey Makey”. At first, I struggled to figure out the meaning project, as we are simply still hitting buttons to operate the platform, we aren’t actually making our own controllers. In line with my thought at…
