‘Scholarship’ Category Archive


August 4, 2015

Knots & Loops

Images of Videogame Narratives The following paper was originally delivered at the Readers' Advisory Forum of the American Library Association in Washington D.C., June 2010. As you ...

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June 8, 2015

I AM EXTRA: Manic Compression

How Donkey Kong's programmers used compression to save ROM space. The following section is one of I AM ERROR’s oldest—it appeared in the initial drafts of ...

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June 6, 2015

I AM EXTRA

Cuts, corpora, and commentaries from I AM ERROR. Good writing means making sacrifices, and editing is among the hardest tasks that a writer will face. During ...

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June 6, 2015

I AM EXTRA: The Super C Helicopter Boss

How Konami's developers used the MMC3 scanline counter to create large moving enemies. The following section was originally intended to directly follow the Mega Man 2 ...

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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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March 24, 2012

Porting the Kill Screen

Dissecting the code behind an error The 2007 film King of Kong popularized much of the minutia of high-level arcade play. One scene showed underdog ...

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March 15, 2012

Emulate the Emulators

How will we play NES/Famicom games 10, 50, 100, or 1000 years from now? We can imagine a not-so-distant future where all of the playable Nintendo ...

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December 6, 2011

Tool-Assisted

Console Emulation and Platform Plasticity Since the early 1990s, a special subculture of play, called speedruns, has pushed the limits of videogame skill, performance, and technical ...

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March 20, 2011

Carts Tapes Discs Drives

This paper was originally presented at the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, Penn State, PA, March 18, 2011. Today I want to speak about videogames as ...

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September 22, 2010

The Virtual Pastoral

This paper was originally presented at the Converse College conference 'Culturing the Popular' in September 2010. After Shadow of the Colossus was released for the PlayStation ...

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