Author Archive


April 3, 2015

Bravely Default’s Temporal Strata

Videogame time is weird. Though all manner of clocks and timers, whether computational or diegetic, drive play, time rarely operates in games as it does ...

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February 28, 2015

Stencyl Tutorial Series: Blockade (Part I)

For our introductory tutorial, we will use Stencyl to replicate the 1976 arcade game Blockade. Blockade is an early precursor to Snake and ...

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December 10, 2014

Unforeseeable Sentences

Last month, professor and media theorist Jay Bolter wrote a short post called 'Browsing culture' that rebuts a refrain commonly heard from fans of ...

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July 26, 2014

A Haze of Bizarre Angles

A Visual Essay on Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) In his 1986 review of Michael Mann's detective thriller Manhunter, Chicago Tribune critic Dave Kehr described the ...

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June 11, 2014

Walkthrough vs. Speedrun

On the spectrum of play between contemplation and corruption. While watching the E3 2014 coverage on Twitch this week, I restrained myself to a brief, six-tweet ...

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June 6, 2014

J.E. Holmes and Fantasy Role Playing Games

I stumbled across an interesting find while browsing the game design section of the library yesterday. J. Eric Holmes, the writer/editor of the original 'blue ...

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February 15, 2014

Human-Car Affect in The Fast and the Furious

My first foray into Paul Walker studies. Via Twitter, Ian Bogost recently outlined criteria for the ideal 'airplane film,' i.e., a film that can help expedite ...

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January 9, 2014

Major League Baseball vs. Retro Criticism

Via Twitter, friend of the site Cameron Kunzelman recently introduced me to Eric Bailey, proprietor of Nintendo Legend, a site dedicated to ...

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November 9, 2013

Rule Horizons

The Obstruction In a recent episode of the Giant Bomb podcast, co-host Drew Scanlon brought up a rather bizarre play that happened in Game 3 ...

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September 30, 2013

Prêt-à-Jouer and Videogame Couture

What happens when we stop thinking about videogames as cinema and instead think of them through other media, like fashion, dance, or architecture? Note: This paper ...

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