Not Just Point and Click

10 Best Reviewed Games of 2016, GameSkinny.com
…but I am exhausted by AAA games.

It says something darkly profound that at
this moment in our nation, this time of
strife, of disagreement, of disparagement,
of conflict, of insanity and chaos, that the
best-selling interactive digital media
product of the last year was Call of Duty:
Infinite Warfare. Just let the words ‘infinite
warfare’ roll around in your head in this
Trump filled era of hate and prejudice.
Andy Phelps, January 31st, 2017

Procedural rhetoric affords a new and
promising way to make claims about how
things work…video games do not simply
distract or entertain with empty, meaningless
content. Rather, video games can make claims
about the world.
But when they do so, they do it not with oral
speech, nor in writing, nor even with images.
Rather, video games make argument with
processes.
“The Rhetoric of Video Games”
Ian Bogost, 2008

Driven by its suspicion of other media studies, the
central question of game studies has, to this point,
been: “How are videogames different?” That they are
different from other forms is without question -- but,
again, neither is there any doubt that novels are
different from films. Amidst understandable concern
for the things that made videogames unique, game
studies tends to lump other media together as
“representational” or, more often, “narrative” media
such that the prospect of studying narrative in games
has seemed to threaten the loss of medium specificity
as well.
“A Too-Coherent World:
Game Studies and the Myth of Narrative Media”
Edward Wesp, Game Studies 14.2

If Player One is the—-also designed—-
white, cis--, heterosexual, young, abled,
and middle--class male, then Player Two
becomes his counterpart as a mode of
designed identity…the games made for
Player Two appear to be limiting and
limited—-small in scope and absurd in
meaning. These games do not appear to
be about life--and--death issues; they
represent small stories with small
outcomes. And yet these games are
important.
Shira Chess

Smaller games with smaller budgets and
smaller audiences have the luxury of
being more experimental or bizarre or
interesting than 12 million dollar games
that need to play it as safely as possible
to ensure a return on investment.
Anna Anthropy

Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014
Jeremy Douglass proposes three distinct areas of
code as feminist act: code feminism, which is made
to be used and executed for a feminist purpose;
feminist codework, which is code-like but not
intended to be run; and feminist code, which is
“executable, syntactically subversive embedded
language or new programming [code] languages
affording a fundamentally different feminist
paradigm for software development.

everything you swallow…
Porpentine

Green’s idea to make a videogame about Joel came to him
in church, as he reflected on a harrowing evening a couple
of years earlier when Joel was dehydrated and diarrheal,
unable to drink anything without vomiting it back up,
feverish, howling, and inconsolable, no matter how Green
tried to soothe him. He had made a few games since then
and had been thinking about mechanics, the rules that
govern how a player interacts with and influences the
action on the screen. “There’s a process you develop as a
parent to keep your child from crying, and that night I
couldn’t calm Joel,” Green says. “It made me think, ‘This is
like a game where the mechanics are subverted and
don’t work.’”
Jason Tanz, Playing for Time, Wired 2016

We Become What We Behold
Nicky Case

this is fine is “an attempt to capture how I felt and how those
around me felt after the results of the 2016 election.”

Thank you!
Anastasia Salter
@anasalter

Not Just Point and Click

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