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Digital Games and Electronic Literature: Toward an Intersectional Analysis
The line between electronic literature and digital games has started to blur more than ever. For example, Christine Love’s 2012 Analogue: A Hate Story can be read as a literary “story” that builds on the visual novel form. However, critic Leif Johnson (of IGN) reviewed Analogue as a “game-like experience” and even a “game” that “neatly sidesteps the label of mere ‘interactive fiction’ like Love’s other games thanks to some smart design choices.” Phill Cameron (of Eurogamer) describes Analogue repeatedly as a “game” and also reflects on its deviation from the “interactive fiction” category. The slippage between the language of fiction and games, in such mainstream reviews, reveals a fascinating taxonomic undecidability. Though Analogue’s “textual” focus makes it a natural boundary object between electronic literature and digital games, this tension extends to games that incorporate minimal text or even no text at all. In this presentation, I focus on Thatgamecompany’s third and most critically-acclaimed game, Journey, which was also released in 2012. In Journey, the player guides a mysterious robed avatar through a desert and up a mountain.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:46
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Blind Spots: The Phantom Pain, The Helen Keller Simulator, and Disability in Games
For the past thirty years, and especially since the popularization of real time 3D graphics processing in the mid-nineties, the computer and videogame industry has been caught up in a graphical arms race: a relentless and blind pursuit of ocularcentric spectacle culminating in the hypertrophy of the visual economy in games like Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear 5: The Phantom Pain. Alongside this cinematic hypertrophy, a generation of players and designers have internalized the logic and codes of videogames to produce games and game practices which engage the non-visual conditions of the medium. These games have made use of atrophy and the attenuation of visual gameplay as a form of critical game design resulting in games like The Helen Keller Simulator, an unpopular internet meme that consists of a black (or blank) image with no audio, promoted as a first person videogame. While The Phantom Pain terminates in unplayable cutscenes, The Helen Keller Simulator deploys the restriction of vision to uncannily similar effect.
Stig Andreassen - 25.09.2013 - 14:58
