Guest post by Søren Ahrensborg Kamper , Star Wars: Gaming Star Wars has a past no one lived through, yet generations of players remember parts of it as places they visited, battles they fought and decisions they made. What changes when fictional history becomes playable? Star Wars begins by telling us that what follows happened “a […]
Category: Scholarship
Guest blog post by Amy Thomas, from the School of Law. Hyperreality went viral recently when Twitter user Juan tweeted in amazement about the lifelike recreation of the streets of Amsterdam depicted in Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. In a, roughly five minute cinematic, the player can take a quick break from their […]
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually all aspects of our lives, with the associated lockdown restrictions affecting how we work, socialise, shop and study. Inevitably, such wide-ranging changes to our day-to-day lives have raised questions about well-being and how we cope with these unusual and uncertain circumstances. In this newly-published study, we explore anecdotal reports […]
Videogames are intrinsically political texts, even when political messages are not explicitly presented, but there is still uncertainty on how game studies can take that into account. Within our field of research, since the earliest debates and publications, we have been interrogating interactive texts for their political messages, and aiming to establish a method for […]
The post below is an excerpt from the recently published paper, The Force Is Strong with This One (but Not That One): What Makes a Successful Star Wars Video Game Adaptation? To answer this question, the critical response to some of the best-reviewed Star Wars games is analysed, revealing a number of potential factors to […]
Paper One: The Potential Effect of Aloy’s Ecofeminist Heroism on Players of Horizon Zero Dawn Todd O. Williams, Kutztown University of Pennsylvania Bio Todd O. Williams received his PhD in Literary Criticism and Theory from Kent State University in Ohio, USA. He is an Associate Professor of English at Kutztown University of Pennsylvania where he […]
The following post is an excerpt from Zombies, again? A qualitative analysis of the zombie antagonist’s appeal in game design, a chapter that appears in The Playful Undead and Video Games: Critical Analyses of Zombies and Gameplay, edited by Stephen J. Webley and Peter Zackariasson. In the chapter, assumptions about the ludic appeal of the […]
Video Games and Religion: Apocalypse and Utopia: Thursday 19 November 2020 Call for Papers: Submission Deadline: Friday 30 October 2020 With the growth of scholarly interest in the religious and theological tropes encountered in video games, there is a developing awareness of the special valence of apocalypticism, millenarianism, and associated themes in video game narratives […]
This blog was guest written by Anna McFarlane (@mariettarosetta) As a cyberpunk scholar, there are a number of cool things that I am asked to do for work, but the most surprising so far was being asked to play a role-playing game (RPG) that speaks to my research interests in cyberpunk, the medical humanities, and […]
This blog was guest-written by Gabriel Elvery The sunlight is fading, you hear the cicadas hum and the waves lap upon the shore. You’ve had a hard but satisfying day. You tended to your garden, caught a fish and even unearthed a fossil which you donated to your local museum. You have worked hard, but […]