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Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted November 7, 2019 Edits and introduction written December 2, 2019 With its temperate rainforest climate, the Pacific Northwest has no shortage of natural beauty and biodiversity that has attracted many to places like Washington’s Olympic National Park or Oregon’s Cannon Beach, among the many other forests, lakes, rivers, and … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Heather Gross
Death Stranding, like gig economies under companies like Uber or DoorDash where workers are paid per completed task, aggressively tracks user data. If Kojima means to satirize gig economies via this system, he replicates its gamified systems precisely. Upon completion of a delivery, players are greeted with arcane metrics called the Porter Grade, in which … Continue reading Opened World: What Binds Us
Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted May 3, 2019 Edits and introduction written October 29, 2019 Stefano Gualeni was enjoying the early morning sun, opening his windows to savor “a full blast of Maltese morning air,” when I caught up with him for a friendly chat. Since finding success with adventure game Tony Tough and … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Stefano Gualeni
Aisle rewards plentiful backreading akin to detective work, in which players must construct an obscured backstory from snatches of textual clues embedded in half-recalled memories. In Aisle, narration is presented with the second-person pronoun “You,” linking the protagonist with the player and granting us—in bolded text—brief entrance into his inner thoughts: “Interesting… fresh Gnocchi–you haven’t had any … Continue reading Opened World: Shattered Memories
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
