In other news, I'll be presenting a public lecture on spatial narrative in the Metroid series this Friday. The details are in the poster below: all are welcome!
My essay "Blasto Sacer: Mass Effect as an Allegorithm of Sovereign Exception" is now up on First Person Scholar. The idea for it came from a course I started teaching last year which deals with, among other things, Giorgio Agamben's work on the ancient Roman legal concept of the homo sacer. In short, the piece deals with the philosophical implications of giving government agents a "license to kill," and how the contradictions of sanctioned rule-breaking is reflected in video games that allow players similar agency. (It had originally been scheduled for publication last week, but had been bumped to make room for a reaction to the ongoing "gamergate" controversy.)
In other news, I'll be presenting a public lecture on spatial narrative in the Metroid series this Friday. The details are in the poster below: all are welcome!
0 Comments
It's been quite some time since I last updated the website: that's what a year and a half of dissertation writing will do to you. But, in the spirit of "better late than never," I'm just getting around to uploading some new material. First up, I've posted drafts of the talks I delivered at the 83rd Annual Congress of the Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, aka Congress 2014, held this year at Brock University. Since this is my last year of departmental funding for these things, and since I have a backlog of material from the last two years, I presented three papers to three different scholarly associations:
Follow the links for text and slideshow images. I know that, thanks to scheduling conflicts, some interested parties missed the talks. My article "Unraveling Braid: Puzzle Games and Storytelling in the Imperative Mood" has finally been published, fourteen months after I first wrote it. (The shorter version I presented, with pictures, at the Canadian Game Studies Association last May is here.) It appears in the December 2012 issue of the Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. However, it pains me to note that, despite my pointing it out to the copy editor, there are a number of typos in the abstract -- the titles Braid (a video game) and Life A User's Manual (a novel) are not italicized, and a screw-up with spacing changed the phrase "This technique signals how ..." into the unintelligible "This technique signal show ..." There were even more such errors in the first proofs I was given, so at least some got fixed. Of course, the text file I sent them didn't have any errors in the first place ... It's especially annoying because, thanks to Sage's (the academic publisher's) paywall, the abstract is the only publicly-accessible part of the paper, and it's the first indicator to researchers whether the article is worth reading. Not only that, but it's such an easy fix that I was able to correct the pdf version myself with Adobe Acrobat in about a minute. So if anyone wants a corrected copy of the paper, let me know and I'll send it along just to spite 'em. THQ's WWE '13 will have a demo at FanExpo Canada 2012. Since Fan Expo Canada is a strange hybrid between an entertainment trade show and a genuine fan convention, it's always interesting to see which big companies are exhibiting, and what they're pushing. For instance, the presence of video game companies at the Expo is hit-and-miss. The local Hand Eye Society of Toronto gamers seemed to be listed in the program erroneously last year, and the XBox booth consisted of just a few demos staffed by suspiciously-leggy young ladies who knew less about the games than I did (and I'd never heard of them before). The Nintendo 3DS exhibit was run like a midway ride. So good luck getting any real industry news. However, this year, some developers seem to be taking a bit more interest in proper promotion. Here's something that THQ sent out leading up to the show: "It’s that time again where we geeks come together as one at Fan Expo Canada! THQ will have plenty for fans to do at the show – hands-on time with Darksiders II and WWE’13, hands-off demos for Metro: Last Light and South Park: The Stick of Truth! We’ll also have an exclusive opportunity with Bryan Williams, Senior Designer of WWE’13 for interviews and guided gameplay. He will be on hand only on Thursday and Friday, so please let us know what time you’d like to drop by if you want." Well, this post is going to be pretty much what it sounds like. It's been some time since I last posted anything, being busy with tedious re-writes of various academic articles and proposals. So I thought it's time for some good-old-fashioned randomness. I've recently got back into Star Trek: Conquest, one of only a few strategy games for the Wii (I hadn't played it since it came out over four years ago). I love me a good strategy game, but even the best ones are hampered by dopey AI, if not other, more mundane gameplay issues. And Conquest isn't one of the best -- but it is oddly, addictively compelling. Part of this is because of its horrible contradictions. On the one hand, it is an absolute mess of a Star Trek game, and yet somebody behind it clearly knows his or her Trek lore. Note the intro: Stardate 41153.2: It is a time of conflict; all major races are at war. Diplomacy is dead, age-old alliances forgotten and galactic borders ignored as each race battle for supremacy. Powerful fleets prowl the galaxy,establishing outposts, vanquishing indigenous and enemy fleets alike, in the pursuit of the ulimate prize: the capture of all homeworlds and galactic domination. In other words, Total, Random War! This is not Star Trek. And yet note the Stardate: as any Trekkie worth his velour pullover can tell you, this is clearly set in season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation, fully in keeping with its TNG-era ships and races. The game is full of details like this, even as it inexplicably lets your underpowered ships cut through fleets of Borg assault cubes like they were warm butter. Tim, the protagonist of Braid. Tomorrow I'm off to the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, a.k.a. Congress, in Kitchener-Waterloo: it's the big Canadian uber-conference, at which dozens of scholarly associations have their annual meetings. I'll be presenting "Unravelling Braid: Puzzle Games and Storytelling in the Imperative Mood" at the Canadian Game Studies Association (CGSA) on Wednesday morning. Because I always end up scheduled to give papers first thing in the morning. (If anyone is interested, it's at 9:30-10:45 in 202 Regina, Room 138 at Wilfried Laurier University.) Hopefully, I'll upload a summary of the talk and slick PowerPoint slides sometime afterward, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here's a picture of Tim, the player avatar/protagonist of Jonathan Blow's Braid, who ironically looks not unlike a conference-going grad student. UPDATE: I've now posted the text of the "Unravelling Braid" talk with some illustrations, too. Depending on how you measure it, either this year or next year marks the 25th anniversary of the original Legend of Zelda (the Japanese version was released in 1986, the North American one in '87). So it's appropriate that as 2011 flows into 2012, 25YEARLEGEND, the latest Zelda tribute album from the folks at OCRemix.org, should come out. Zelda is one of the most remixed video game soundtracks ever, so what makes this new album different? Each remixer has previously composed music for at least one indie video game. But even without the professional imprimatur, OCRemix's collective efforts are always very well done. So download already! This year marks the 25th anniversary of the seminal Metroid for NES. Not only was the game among the first truly world-exploring adventure games, and with a female protagonist to boot, but it was among the first to use music to create atmosphere, instead of melody. As a pioneer of video game music, Metroid has always been a favourite of remixers. Super Metroid, the second Metroid sequel, was a masterpiece of video game music, and many of its tunes were woven into to moody, if not as revolutionary, scores in the Metroid Prime Trilogy. It's no surprise that Super Metroid was the first game to be remixed as a complete album (Relics of the Chozo) on OCRemix.org. Anyway, Harmony of a Hunter is the latest full-length album remix of Metroid music, and it's worth checking out. I haven't listened to the whole thing yet, but so far, it's lots of orchestral goodness. The creators promise that Harmony of a Hunter "includes music from the original NES Metroid through Metroid: Other M for the Nintendo Wii. The album features a diverse range of talented individuals covering a variety of genres which we hope will appeal to many musical tastes." For those interested in the technical and theoretical side of video game music, I also highly recommend Game Sound by Karen Collins, which discusses the composition of the original Metroid score by Hirokazu Tanaka. Peter Bagge's latest comic is Other Lives, published by DC/Vertigo Comics in April 2010. Unlike his serialized work for Fantagraphics Books (most notably the iconic 1990s series Hate), it's a self-contained graphic novel. Other Lives shares much with Peter Bagge's satirical oeuvre. It asks what it means to "have a life" (or not be able to get one), a question Bagge began posing in his 1980s Neat Stuff magazine. But in Other Lives, the thematic exploration is much more explicit. Other Lives focuses on a quartet of misfits, including Javier Ortiz (aka "Otis Boyd"), a bipolar conspiracy theorist; Woodrow Wooley, a divorced, online gambling addict; Vladimir "Vader" Rostov, a self-loathing journalist; and his fiancée, Ivy. Samus Aran, heroine of the Metroid series. Metroid, along with Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, is one of Nintendo's oldest and most successful video game series. The original Metroid came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986, and had acclaimed sequels on the Game Boy (Metroid II: The Return of Samus, 1991) and on the Super NES (Super Metroid, 1994). By the mid-1990s, there was doubt whether a three-dimensional Metroid, in the manner of Super Mario 64 or The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Nintendo 64, could be made. However, the franchise would be rebooted on the GameCube, N64's successor console. Metroid Prime: Samus Aran's First-Person Adventure In 2002, Metroid Prime was released for the Nintendo GameCube after a number of years in development. Texas-based Retro Studios, the game's developer, didn't want to make another first-person shooter, feeling that the strength of the Metroid series had always been exploration and non-linear gameplay. As a "first-person adventure," Metroid Prime had a number of innovations. Lock-on targeting assistance made blasting enemies intuitive in 3D environments, and a complex heads-up display allowed players to scan for clues, download story-related data, and access schematics and maps. |
Categories
All
Archives
December 2015
|