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In my previous installment, I argued that one could look at the re-release of Netrunner by Fantasy Flight Games and compare it to the original Wizards of the Coast version, released sixteen years ago, in order to take a zeitgeist measurement of the social and technological milieu’s that spawned eachContinue Reading

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In the posts in this series so far I’ve demonstrated that games condition humanities. The rulesets of the past, beginning (from the perspective of the traditional canon of Western literature) with the homeric epics, enable the performances of the present; those performances iterate the rulesets, inviting future performances in theContinue Reading

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I promised to deal with one last problem in my “Games are Humanism” line of argument (now that the non-essentiality of the academic ruleset and the incipient humanism of even the least self-aware performance have been established): if we grant that playing BioShock can be doing humanities, where does thatContinue Reading

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One of the most anticipated games of 2012 to be reworked from it’s original design was Netrunner: Android, released by Fantasy Flight Games.  Based on the critically acclaimed 1996 original game by Richard Garfield, known to many as the designer behind the collectible-card-game behemoth Magic: The Gathering, Netrunner: Android broughtContinue Reading

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So is it still humanities if the player, invited to interrogate the méconnaissance that constitutes the epistemology of what s/he perceives as interactivity, says “Meh”? It seems hard to deny that the vast majority of players of BioShock have never thought about the Death-Disarm sequence as a critique of theirContinue Reading