Quick-Saves: Player Control Over Narrative & Meaning
Rob Zacny, a freelance writer who often specializes in computer games, recently wrote a piece for the new GameSpy series ‘Command Lines’ titled ‘Quick-Loading Kills Strategy Games‘. Detailing the practice of using save games and constant re-loads to overcome obstacles found in many strategy games, Zacny states that not onlyContinue Reading
Hegemony: Philip of Macedon and the Inspiration of Simulation Games
My original plan for this essay was to analyze the problem spaces filled in by Hegemony and evaluate briefly how defensibly this problem space was presented in light of what ancient evidence suggests about ancient battle. Playing the game, reading the manual, and, most importantly, engaging in the process ofContinue Reading
Choice, multiculturalism, and irrevocability in Mass Effect, part 1 (rules of the text 7)
This post contains spoilers about the endings of the three Mass Effect games. We still don’t know what, if anything, will change either in superficial or in substantive ways, about the ending of the Mass Effect saga. But Mass Effect as it stands demands analysis. Perhaps the practomime is asContinue Reading
A Response to the Concept of Caricature
This post is the second in a multi-part series on the issues raised by Longbow Games’ ancient real time strategy series, Hegemony. Jeremiah McCall will continue this series in the next installment. Hegemony: Philip of Macedon was released in 2010 and was followed by Hegemony Gold, which included the PeloponnesianContinue Reading
The Icon of (Minecraft) Mario
In my previous post examining religious elements in Minecraft, I looked at the presence of pilgrimage in the Minecraft Middle Earth project. Today I want to continue this line of thought and now look at video game recreations utilizing the Minecraft game system and how these recreations take on characteristicsContinue Reading
Detour to the Magic Kingdom (rules of the text 6)
I haven’t had the opportunity to move forward in my thinking about Mass Effect enough to feel that I can write a good post about the central issues I to which referred in my last one, but in the intervening period my attention was grabbed by something very much worthContinue Reading
Playing the Powerless in Videogames about the Powerless
In the 1993 afterward to The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison explains the origins of her devastating debut novel. It began in 1962 with an examination of racial self-loathing. “I focused,” Morrison writes, “on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take hold inside theContinue Reading
The Concept of Caricature as a General Philosophy for Implementing History as Game Mechanics
This contribution from guest writer Jim McNally, President and Lead Designer at Longbow Games, is the first in a multi-part series on the issues raised by Longbow Games’ ancient real time strategy series, Hegemony. Hegemony: Philip of Macedon was released in 2010 and was followed by Hegemony Gold, which includedContinue Reading
The Limits of Playing the Powerless and the Doomed in Videogames
In an unusually redemptive reading of the widely disparaged Atari VCS game E.T. (1982), Ian Bogost observes that the game perfectly (though perhaps not intentionally) captured the essence of Spielberg’s hit movie. “It was a film about alienation, not about aliens,” Bogost writes in How to Do Things with Videogames.Continue Reading
A galactic ruleset under siege: the Mass Effect 3 controversy (rules of the text 5)
Two weeks have passed since the CEO of BioWare attempted to quiet the fans of Mass Effect with an announcement that the Mass Effect 3 development team would be working on a modification to the game’s ending. The announcement was gracious, and whether because internet rage tends to die downContinue Reading