In my last post I outlined the way that the Assassin’s Creed series makes of its players what I call Ubicultural subjects. I argued that through the thematics of culture-clash that the games drape over the mechanics of free-movement within a notionally historical space and violence of a notionally historicalContinue Reading
The historical stories told within the animus of Assassin’s Creed are about the clash of cultures. The Assassins and the Templars are represented in the game’s version of history by those same Assassins and Templars (Assassin’s Creed), the forces of enlightenment and repression in Renaissance Italy (Assassin’s Creed II), NativeContinue Reading
In my last two posts about the shooting mechanic, I tried to demonstrate that an understanding of immersion as the player’s identification with the ruleset that conditions his or her performance can help us find ways that even as entrenched a mechanic as shooting can, together with the shaping ofContinue Reading
How then do we understand our relationship, as players, to the games that for better or worse constitute mainstream game-culture? It would be easy enough to sidestep this question, and instead focus on the amazing things that the enormous “rest” of game-culture is doing. For the future of game-culture, indeed,Continue Reading
My next task, as I see it, is to take my definition of immersion as identification with a practomimetic ruleset and demonstrate its usefulness for understanding the kinds of practomime we encounter most frequently. As I never tire of pointing out, the vast majority of what we call art isContinue Reading
In an intensely personal game like Papo & Yo, I think the connection between immersion and identification becomes more obvious than it is anywhere else. To play Papo & Yo is to identify with the game’s designer, Vander Caballero, because the player-character of the game, Quico, is a metaphor forContinue Reading
In a comment on my last post Rebecca demonstrated that the thought-experiment of narrative knitting is not at all ridiculous–there are several knitting practices that create emergent stories as they provide meaningful variations on the known patterns. Rebecca cited the symbolism of many of the traditional patterns, and the wonderfulContinue Reading
I ended up like this, last time: “the ruleset of knitting is not humanistic because its narrative varies so little.” In this post, I want briefly to explore some of the implications of that statement. Or, really, I want to try it on for size. First of all, the converseContinue Reading
It’s officially summer, on my calendar at least, and so I’m going to change my format to something a little lazier. Shorter posts, more questions, fewer “I argue in this post”s and “as I demonstrated”s. What is the relationship of immersion to flow? By flow, I mean of course CziksentmihalyianContinue Reading
Our immersion in rulesets creates metaphors for our selves that have the power to transform us. I’ve been talking in my last few posts about how that works–about how we identify not only with characters like Odysseus (in the Odyssey) and Quico (in Papo & Yo) but also with otherContinue Reading