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
The Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic of Donut County and and the sterile, featureless city blocks of Nova Alea seem mutually opposed upon first glance, but both games share an interest in examining the deleterious effects of gentrification. Donut County allegorizes gentrification via puzzle game mechanics in which homes and buildings vanish into maneuverable holes, transforming lively city blocks into empty lots … Continue reading Opened World: Erasing Places
Writer’s note: This piece was originally published in Issue 3 of the now defunct Capsule Crit. The publication has not been archived, but I have republished the original text here. I’m still astounded at how an unassuming trailer for the PlayStation 4 rerelease of Grand Theft Auto V reframed my entire understanding of the game. … Continue reading The Garden in the Machine
Call of Duty offers a specific kind of action spectacle, that of witnessing career professionals efficiently carrying out their jobs, in which saving the world at the last second is rendered as rote work. By making explosive superheroics mundane, the games ultimately lionize its characters and deeds. The game, especially the thunderous Modern Warfare 2—all climax and … Continue reading The Spectacle of Career Professionalism in Modern Warfare 2
Interview by Miguel Penabella Originally conducted April 21, 2018 Edits and introduction written September 3, 2018 Alongside the bustle of this past spring’s Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco—with its long queues snaking around pavilions for Google and Microsoft, or rows of high-end monitors displaying battle royales amidst unending beer service paid by top company … Continue reading Player Two: An Interview with Hosni Auji
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