In its opening ceremony and panel discussion (in lieu of an overarching keynote), PSX assumed the affectation of domesticity and informality, as if to camouflage the impersonality of a show centered on business and industry. Miscellaneous armchairs and couches were set up facing the audience, and hosts Shawn Layden and Sid Shuman routinely played up … Continue reading A Critical Overview of PSX 2017: Framing the Event
Taking Molleindustria’s 2006 release McDonald’s Videogame as a point of reference, we can breakdown its strategy of critiquing McDonald’s on multiple fronts as a way to identify productive ways that games can critique industry concerns. The game adopts the political values of Molleindustria founder and Carnegie Mellon University professor Paolo Pedercini, conveying a left-wing, activist urgency to … Continue reading Opened World: Let’s Eat Capitalists
Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted October 20, 2017 Edits and introduction written November 17, 2017 Greg Heffernan’s games always bear the mark of a musician. Under the pseudonym Cosmo D, his three games—Saturn V, Off-Peak, and The Norwood Suite—all heavily feature his own music in ways that experiment with sound’s relation to space. Saturn … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Greg “Cosmo D” Heffernan
Fallout 4 carries an air of melancholy by juxtaposing the gritty post-apocalyptic setting with the mundane scenarios these skeletons convey. Skeletons seated inside a rusted bus suggest the instantaneous impact of the nuclear bombs, perhaps catching average people by surprise on their way to work. Pairs of skeletons resonate with particular melancholy, suggesting lovers, friends, siblings, … Continue reading Opened World: The Remains of the Day
Like an endless night in which you and other friends are bored and wander the city for something to do, Need for Speed channels the feeling of urban aimlessness. While cruising around an empty city, players can snap pictures in front of murals or blast music from the car. Cutscenes find familiar faces bar hopping, playing pool, eating … Continue reading Opened World: The Night Is Young
Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted September 19, 2017 Edits and introduction written September 21, 2017 Content Warning: This interview includes in-game artwork featuring depictions of videogame blood and gore. Ever since the divisive Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days roared onto screens seven years ago, the game has seen the emergence of a cult … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Rasmus Poulsen
This meditation on human grief unites the stories and themes of Asemblance and Solaris, as both works hinge on the imagery of a ghostly wife haunting the memory of each protagonist… In Solaris, a character calls these visions of Kelvin’s wife “the materialisation of your conception of her,” and later, “a copy, a matrix,” suggesting an unresolved trauma made manifest … Continue reading Unraveling the Traumatic Interior Spaces of Asemblance
Ideally, George’s plotline should reveal the complex and unexpected reasons alliances were made by early black abolitionists, revolutionaries with colonial powers to sabotage the stable labor force of rival colonial operations. Instead, the game shrugs such nuances off. In hearing George criticize the hypocrisy of the Patriots who would uphold slavery, Aveline nonetheless sides with … Continue reading Opened World: Complacent Politics
Black Ops III often borders on the intangible and avant-garde, but only because warfare has evolved so rapidly that it seems unreal and fictional. Soldiers and terrorists hacking into and controlling armed robots is not merely action spectacle, but a fearful reality. Evoking the language of videogames, the real human targets of drone warfare are marked and dehumanized as “objectives.” … Continue reading Opened World: Metafictional Warfare
For Suda51, videogames seem to be a kind of professional afterlife to working in a morgue, allowing him to creatively re-articulate his prior craft. The very structure of games focuses on cycles of death and revival, in which sequences of play are continually punctuated with “game over” screens. Having dealt with bodies that have expired … Continue reading Opened World: A Living Out of Dying
Invalid Memory 