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Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted over two days: December 9, 2017 and December 10, 2017 Edits and introduction written July 31, 2019 With the premiere of the final act of Kentucky Route Zero increasingly close at hand, I revisited old conversations with composer Ben Babbitt that we shared back in 2017, just weeks before … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Ben Babbitt
Critics often praise the ping system of Apex Legends for its utilitarian purposes of easing communication, which it undoubtedly deserves, but more than that, it also creates an affective bond between players that often goes unremarked in such critical conversations. Context-specific tags allow players to mark enemy locations, alert one another to valuable loot, call dibs on … Continue reading Opened World: With Strangers
At the heart of Gravity Rush, however, lies an inherent critique of governmental failures to maintain infrastructures to the detriment of the public good. Flying around Hekseville, Kat quickly encounters the downed bridges, broken elevators, and faulty transport systems in need of repair, shattering initial impressions of the city as a glorious steampunk utopia. While Kat … Continue reading Opened World: The Flâneuse in Flight
The Tearoom is precisely concerned with how institutions define homosexuality as deviant through surveillance practices, reflecting the central role of sexuality in establishing certain social norms to the detriment of entire groups of people. The game takes a page from the controversial 1970 sociological report Tearoom Trade by Laud Humphreys, in which the author analyzes the behavior and … Continue reading Opened World: The Act of Looking
Night in the Woods filters the world through the perspective of the naïve Mae as a way to carefully unravel and critique nostalgia and the privilege that accompanies it, steadily undercutting its own autumnal aesthetic of warm, homespun imagery as concealing the underlying hurt that the protagonist fails to see clearly. The very notion of a … Continue reading Opened World: Standing Still
Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted October 20, 2018 Edits and introduction written November 23, 2018 An interview with Mona Mur on her industrial terror ambience of Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, and her audio work on Ballance and Velvet Assassin. Among the few critics who champion Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days as … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Mona Mur
For most young children, educational games are often the first encounter they have with videogames, and thus, games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? teach children, at the most basic level, how to interact with game software. Long before I ever even touched a console game, the simplified menu-based input of educational games was my … Continue reading Opened World: Finding Her
