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Bravely Default’s Temporal Strata

April 3, 2015

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 in real life. Even games that pride themselves on 'realistic' day/night cycles—games as varied as Assassin's Creed, Minecraft, and Forza Horizon—tend to compress these cycles into tight loops. A few years back, I gave a presentation on videogame time and narrative called 'Knots and Loops' where I compared the temporal structure of many videogames ...

Stencyl Tutorial Series: Blockade (Part I)

February 28, 2015

For our introductory tutorial, we will use Stencyl to replicate the 1976 arcade game Blockade. Blockade is an early precursor to Snake and its ilk, minus the touch-an-item-to-grow mechanic. Each player controls a growing wall, or blockade, steering its leading edge around the screen in an attempt to avoid colliding with itself, the screen border, or the opposing blockade. Players score a point by surviving longer without a collision; first player to reach six points wins. The game is ...

Unforeseeable Sentences

December 10, 2014

Last month, professor and media theorist Jay Bolter wrote a short post called 'Browsing culture' that rebuts a refrain commonly heard from fans of physical books. He writes, 'One of the criticisms one hears over and over about the digitization of the library is that it will eliminate the element of serendipity...Yet one wonders whether these critics have ever gone online to look for anything.' He contends that the web, as indicated by its primary interface, is structured around ...

A Haze of Bizarre Angles

July 26, 2014

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 film as one 'in which government offices sport $900 designer lamps, every building is a masterpiece of post-modern design and an FBI agent, a reporter for a supermarket tabloid and a slobbering psycho-killer all display exactly the same impeccable taste in expensive European casual wear.' He continues: 'Unfortunately, Mann doesn`t restrict himself to dressing up his ...

Walkthrough vs. Speedrun

June 11, 2014

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 burst. As an Ubisoft employee demonstrated the latest Assassin's Creed sequel—now a yearly tradition—I mused about the 'genre' of the developer walkthrough. The gist is this: the developer walkthrough, I'd wager, is unlike most players' experience of a game. The walkthrough is precisely that, a walk through the game's spectacular elements, lingering over the ...

J.E. Holmes and Fantasy Role Playing Games

June 6, 2014

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 box' basic Dungeons & Dragons set, published the book Fantasy Role Playing Games in 1981, just as role-playing was becoming a bona fide phenomenon. The book is an odd specimen. In 1981, role-playing games were less than a decade old, so Holmes makes no assumptions about player knowledge or genre conventions. Instead, he explains the ...

Human-Car Affect in The Fast and the Furious

February 15, 2014

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 time's passage while flying. While length plays an obvious factor in 'absorbing time,' as he said, Bogost also emphasized a 'lack of affect' as the most important property and highlighted the Fast and Furious franchise as perfect specimen. In lieu of quoting, I Storified the series below (along with an important concluding exchange): Note: if the ...

Major League Baseball vs. Retro Criticism

January 9, 2014

Via Twitter, friend of the site Cameron Kunzelman recently introduced me to Eric Bailey, proprietor of Nintendo Legend, a site dedicated to reviewing every North American NES release. I am often pinged for NES-related sites like this, and there is certainly no lack of them online. The 'retro review' has become an active critical subgenre, primarily adopting the modern model of videogame reviews (a la Kotaku, Joystiq, GameInformer, et al.) and applying them to vintage games. Sites ...

Rule Horizons

November 9, 2013

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 of the World Series. The game ended with a Cardinals win due to an obstruction call, a rare circumstance that results from a defensive player obstructing a base runner's path. Though I love and play sports, I don't actively follow any these days (no cable TV), so I had to search online to find the ...

Prêt-à-Jouer and Videogame Couture

September 30, 2013

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 was originally delivered at the No Show Conference on September 14, 2013. Video of the talk is available online (my bit starts around 20:00 in) if you prefer not to read. And don't just watch mine—there were many thoughtful, provocative talks given that weekend. We’re going to begin today with a video clip featuring ...