A frame is not only the structural support around an image, but can also refer to the system that underlies forms of discourse and meaning, like how there are “frames of interpretation” of any given theory or discipline, or how political ideologies can be “re-framed” in news media. The commonality between the two definitions is … Continue reading Opened World: Framing Violence
What Wet wants to do is to try and become a cult classic in the vein of movies like Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! or Barbarella, but the nature of videogame taste and reception renders such objectives impractical. The cult status of venerated grindhouse films, B-movies, and midnight movies relies on the establishment of good taste. … Continue reading Second Shot: A Case for Wet
Foreword: I originally wrote this academic paper some time in 2013 and revised it in 2015, and it was republished at the UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Journal for their Fall 2015 issue. _ This essay closely examines John Ruskin’s literary concept of the pathetic fallacy within the parameters of the survival horror videogame Silent Hill 2. … Continue reading Monstrous Spaces in a Sea of Fog: Silent Hill 2 and the Pathetic Fallacy in Video Games
In this world, roadways are less physical than they are mental. The magnetic tapes of Overdubbed Nam June Paik Installation resemble the tangled highway map of Kentucky Route Zero or the labyrinthine cave systems mentioned by Lula in her recordings, tying the artwork to an imagined world. Drawing from a tradition of distinctly American travel narratives … Continue reading Opened World: Art Imitates Art
The Superhot demo’s understated visual elegance finds its highlight in one lone stretch of hallway with three enemies at the far end, gunfire rocketing towards you. The visual minimalism and your lack of weapons strip away the elements of a shooter game to its essence. Eschewing bombastic action, the demo coerces you to scramble for … Continue reading Moving in Time: A Look Back at the Original Superhot Prototype
Excerpt on The Order: 1886 Awash in a honeyed, candlelit glow, The Order: 1886‘s conception of industrial London as Dickensian steampunk envisions locales like they’re from charred antique daguerreotypes. There’s a painterly attention to detail with the game, scattering objects like vintage advertisements, faded paintings, and gadgets out of a Jules Verne or Sir Arthur … Continue reading 2015 in Games: Words on The Order: 1886, Home Is Where One Starts, & Off-Peak
There’s no denying the genuine horror of Silent Hill 2’s phenomenally lurid imagery of decaying bodies and bloodied environments, but it’s the game’s fleeting moments of dreamlike beauty that isolate the title apart from the generic trappings of macabre survival horror. Recognizing this dreamlike atmosphere makes sense in the context of Silent Hill 2; James’s … Continue reading Somewhere Between Here and Heaven
Off-Peak could justly be called a Kafkaesque game, a sensibility informed by the surreal writings of Franz Kafka and similar-minded visual representations like the aforesaid film by Orson Welles but also Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Richard Ayoade’s The Double. Kafkaesque works emphasize a sense of personal alienation amidst an illogical, unresponsive world resistant to providing … Continue reading The Surreal, Kafkaesque Dream Space of Off-Peak
In the first half of this essay I examined the aesthetic strategies of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days as expressing a documentarian style and commenting on our relation to images. I also analyzed the Shanghai setting and linked it to an exteriorization of the characters’ troubled psyches. I continue my survey on the game … Continue reading Second Shot: A Case for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Part Two
This is the first half of a long-form criticism arguing in favor of the striking, brutal artistry of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days offers abundant thematic and stylistic questions for game critics to probe, yet the series’ unwarranted derision accumulated over the years reflects a medium still regressive and … Continue reading Second Shot: A Case for Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Part One
Invalid Memory 