Framing and Playing

“The cake is a lie.” This reminds me of the use of “(All statements within this frame are untrue. I love you. I hate you.)” in Bateson’s “A Theory of Play and Fantasy.” The cake is not a lie! Or is it? You never actually get the cake… Was the cake for you? Is the [...]

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Glimmers of Narrative

So here we go, banging out a few points of perspective on narrative from various game scholars. Now, I’ll start with Jenkins, for the sake that I too have been accused of being a “narratologist” for using Jenkins as a reference in papers. Accused, I say, because that’s how it feels—you dirty, dirty narrative person [...]

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Assassin’s Creed

Pardon me for the less blog-like writing style of this round. I’m clearly channeling my academic and journalist sides while flashing back to a presentation I attended at E3.
“We had nothing except a way of doing things,” said Patrice Desilets, Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal, as he introduced the background of the then-named Project Assassin [...]

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Majestic Lessons Learned

Majestic has been called a great failure, and I’m with that line of thinking. Christy Dena, who is working on a PhD and researches largely in the area of cross-media entertainment, pointed me to two references: Dave Szulborski’s ‘A Majestic Failure?’ in This is Not a Game (2005) and Carol Handler Miller in ‘Digital Storytelling’ [...]

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Into the Matrix, And Out Again

With such a damaged franchise at the time, The Matrix Online MMO was met with mediocre beta reviews, but fan culture persisted in giving it a shot and making their own extensions of the game.
Instead of just relying on reviews from journalists, I asked an online gaming community for feedback from players who had personal [...]

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Dancing with the Stars

But not Mario stars, oh no. I’m not sure that Dancing with the Stars for the Wii is even worth the time it takes to critique it, but okay, here we go. To pull again from Doug Church, who points out that at the very least, players should know what to expect of a game [...]

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Goodbye WoW

I’m not saying goodbye forever. I’m just really busy right now. I have other places to be, other work to do, other games to play. This World of Warcraft is too much of a separate world for me.
Edward Castronova refers to Norrath (EverQuest) as a meeting place, market place, and home in “Virtual Worlds: A [...]

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Wha’ You Sayin’?

Ain’t that the truth. Doug Church in “Formal Abstract Design Tools” addresses the need for a common language among game designers, since “… design evolution lags far behind the evolution of overall game technology” (367). The more I dip past game writing into game design, the more I appreciate breakdowns like Church’s. His work was [...]

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This Is Not Fun

I finally got a DS Lite for Christmas. I rarely ask for gifts for myself, but this time I knew I wanted an upgrade. Slick black case, backlighting, smooooth. I also asked for a poker game, and got the World Tournament version. And damn it’s ridiculously hard.
In the article “Game Theory,” William Poundstone outlines a [...]

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Oasis

I remember Oasis as this PC game I always see in the bargain area with just a flap cover on it. I’ve always been intrigued—I have a weakness to engaging easy-to-learn/fun-to-play games (casual games, ha)—but haven’t actually seen the gameplay until a recent class where David introduced us to it.
Marc LeBlanc, who is behind numerous [...]

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