Recent Posts
The cat’s meow in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) for the last several months has been Monte Cook’s Numerera. Set one billion years in Earth’s future during a time known as the Ninth World, Numenera is a Kickstarter-funded science fantasy RPG that embraces as its core concern one of the fundamental dynamics of most tabletop...
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I’m going to use two examples in this post, Call of Duty and Mario Kart, in order to further my continuing humanistic analysis of the shooting mechanic. In my last post I argued that the concept of “emersion” might be very useful as a way to describe variations of the mechanic, and the cultural effects of those...
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As I discussed in a previous post, videogames tend to take a very deterministic view of technological development. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the concept of the “Tech Tree.” While dedicated players and modders are usually quick to point out other flaws or deficiencies in games (often holding them to an almost absurd...
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The following is a guest post from Richard Bell, a graduate student studying history at Stanford University interested in the political culture of early modern Britain and the history of imprisonment. Note: Gone Home is a game of investigation and discovery, and as such is best experienced with as little foreknowledge as possible....
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“We will bury you!” – Mistranslated quotation of Nikita Khrushchev, 1956
“We will bury them!” – Rhino Tank, Red Alert 2
Introduction
The Cold War defined generations. In the more than 40 years that the Cold War took place, the world witnessed the Korean War, the McCarthy trials, the Cuban...
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A few weeks ago my colleague Colin Fanning (who coauthored this post with me) forwarded me a call for papers for an edited scholarly volume on Minecraft, the beloved and near-ubiquitous sandbox game by Mojang. Initiated by Nate Garrelts, Associate Professor of English in the Department of Languages and Literature at Ferris State...
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Sierra On-Line’s 1995 Phantasmagoria by Roberta Williams has not aged well. Its dated graphics, preset viewpoints, and one-button point-and-click interface mark it as the pinnacle of a short-lived movement in gaming that was quickly supplanted by more modern polygonal 3D graphics, free-look exploration, and real-time motion...
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