The Pragmatic (Console) Generation

The new console generation really is different this time. I’ve long been PlayStation 5interested in how video game consoles have – at least since the Nintendo 64 – consistently been promoted on the promise that now, graphics were being revolutionized and we would finally be able to play video games that were “just like movies”.

With the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X, the main story is a different one: load times. For example, The Verge’s PlayStation 5 review lists “Games load quickly and run smoothly” as a top positive point, and features a table comparing load times, but graphical capabilities are a bit more theoretical – do you have a 4K TV?

PS5 load times
The load time comparison we did not know we needed

The Xbox Series S|X get a similar treatment, with load times getting top billing in the Verge review. It is definitely becoming harder for non-experts to tell console generations apart graphically.

Sony and Microsoft are actually catching up to Nintendo here. Where Xbox One and PlayStation 4 were in many ways painful hells of just-wait-30-minutes-for-the-update-before-playing, one of the selling points of the Nintendo Switch really was the near-instantaneous launch times, and instant sleep and wake from sleep.

Interestingly, this comes at a time where the game industry at large has begun to talk of “quality of life updates” – the kind of update that doesn’t add features, but just removes some time management or other hassles from the player. The primary barrier to playing is almost always time, and the PlayStation 5 focus on activities is a way for a console to compete with the bite-sized chunks of playtime that we get for free on our phones, but which have been hard to come by on consoles.

Generic Hardware for Unique Experiences

The other apparent thing now is the sheer genericness of the hardware. The Xbox and PlayStations are now both just boxes of ever-so-slightly modified generic PC components, AMD RDNA 2 CPU and GPU, SSD and so on. I think this correlates with a de-emphasizing of console generations, with a larger expectation of backwards compatibility and mid-generation updates (PS4 Pro, Xbox One S|X).

In parallel, the commodification of phone hardware means that the Switch is basically the hardware of large Android phone.

So it’s a pragmatic generation, one of making-do, not of flashy new graphics, not of fancy new technology. It’s just a generation of casualization, of making games fit better into people’s lives.

Game Studies 20/3 is out

For your theoretical consideration: Game Studies volume 20, issue 3.

“Elves are Jews with Pointy Ears and Gay Magic”: White Nationalist Readings of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
by Kristian A. Bjørkelo

This article explores how White Nationalists on Stormfront interpret (decode) Skyrim in accordance with their own worldview and the affordances of the game. In their eyes the Nords are a Germanic people and “Elves are Jews with pointy ears and gay magic”.[more]

A Typology of Imperative Game Goals
by Michael S. Debus, José P. Zagal, Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera

This paper presents a typology of game goals to fill a gap in the literature regarding kinds of goals in games and how they are interrelated. We focus on ludic goals, instead of player created or narrative goals. The typology can be used for describing goal structures, how higher-level goals relate to lower levels and analyzing a games’ design.[more]

Sorry, Wrong Apocalypse: Horizon Zero Dawn, Heaven’s Vault, and the Ecocritical Videogame
by Megan Condis

This article is an examination of the ecocritical potential of Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerilla Games, 2017) and Heaven’s Vault (inkle, 2019). I argue that to properly depict climate change, we must develop new narrative formats and game mechanics that showcase “slow violence” (Nixon 2011).[more]

The New Lara Phenomenon: A Postfeminist Analysis of Rise of the Tomb Raider
by Janine Engelbrecht

Lara Croft, the heroine of the popular Tomb Raider videogame series, has undergone a major transformation after the series reboot 2013. The new representation of Lara Croft is a clear departure from the postfeminist action heroine archetype and is replicated in other post-2013 videogames with female protagonists.[more]

Applying corpus linguistics to videogame data: Exploring the representation of gender in videogames at a lexical level

by Frazer Heritage

This paper argues for applying corpus linguistics to videogames; a method that can reveal textual patterns in a corpus of games. This method is applied to gender representation in an example corpus, offering quantitative analysis of how discourses around social identities are (re)produced.[more]

The Historical Problem Space Framework: Games as a Historical Medium

by Jeremiah McCall

Historical games present the past in terms of historical problem spaces: player agents with roles and goals that are contextualized in a virtual world whose features enable and constrain player action. The HPS framework helps us better understand the gamic medium of history, with utility for historical game scholars, educators, and game designers.[more]

by Liam Mitchell

While Bernard Suits’s landmark book The Grasshopper is as playful as it is rigorous, scholars in game studies tend to reference it only for its apparently bloodless definition of gameplay. This paper responds to this reception by highlighting the productive ambiguities of the text, particularly the relationship between games and society.[more]

by M. D. Schmalzer

This article develops the concept of janky controls to disrupt the assumed cybernetic connection of player and game. Through this disruption, standard notions of player subjectivity is also disrupted allowing for more diverse players and videogame design practices.[more]

Bernie De Koven’s The Infinite Playground is out

I am happy to announce that Bernie De Koven’s final book is now out, courtesy of Holly Gramazio, Celia Pearce, and Eric Zimmerman. I contributed a small essay about what it was like to play with Bernie.

The Infinite Playground is available from MIT Press and elsewhere.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/infinite-playground

 

Using trademarked objects in a video game

Depicting a Humvee like this in <em>Call of Duty</em> is allowed by the First Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.

There’s no shortage of legal issues in video games, but the recent court case AM General LLC v. Activision Blizzard, Inc. et al, No. 1:2017cv08644 – Document 218 (S.D.N.Y. 2020) was decided in a way that surprised me:

The judge ruled that Activision Blizzard can use Humvees in Call of Duty without any kind of license from the manufacturer, given that it ties in with an artistic goal and does not mislead about the source of the work: “if realism is an artistic goal, then the presence in Modern Warfare games of vehicles employed by actual militaries undoubtedly furthers that goal.”

Military vehicles would not be my choice of example, but it’s an interesting twist.

However, and as always, even with this ruling, this remains the kind of freedom of speech best exercised with a large legal team on your side.

Petscii Jetski – a C64 game in BASIC

Introducing Petscii Jetski!
 
Instigated by Nick Montfort, we returned to the Commodore 64 to write a 10-line game & visual poem.
A very long time ago I used to be into C64 programming, at first BASIC and later assembly. I have severe existential reservations about going back to “things that I gave up years ago”, but it really was like coming home in a holy & broken sort of way.
In a world full of ever-shifting Javascript preprocessors and package managers, a simple predictable machine is a comfort, and yet the BASIC implementation is excruciatingly slow and full of strange decisions. For example, on this 1 Mhz machine, the BASIC implementation only runs floating point, which is really slow. This meant that the C64 was special in that assembly was perhaps a 1000 times faster than BASIC, a much bigger difference than in modern languages.
 
Play Petscii Jetski online at https://nickm.com/montfort_juul/petscii_jetski/ and read a detailed discussion of BASIC optimization at https://nickm.com/trope_tank/TROPE-20-01.pdf

Game Studies vol 20, issue 1

For your theoretical inspection: Game Studies 20/01. 

“I Harbour Strong Feelings for Tali Despite Her Being a Fictional Character”: Investigating Videogame Players’ Emotional Attachments to Non-Player Characters
by Jacqueline Burgess, Christian Jones

This study investigated players’ emotional attachment to two non-player characters from BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. Qualitative analysis of forum posts found players expressed intense emotional attachments but from different viewpoints. These emotional attachments also influenced how players engaged with the game mechanics of Mass Effect 2.

Sick, Slow, Cyborg: Crip Futurity in Mass Effect
by Adan Jerreat-Poole

Can science fiction stories imagine more just futures for disabled bodies? Turning away from a future where technology has eradicated disability, this article explores crip encounters in Mass Effect 1-3 and interrogates the complex relationships between technology, culture, and disability.

Playing Virtual Jim Crow in Mafia III – Prosthetic Memory via Historical Digital Games and the Limits of Mass Culture
by Emil Lundedal Hammar

This article applies the concept of prosthetic memory to Mafia III in order to discuss the significance of both contexts of production and reception in determining memory-making potentials of historical digital games with attention to racialized oppression in and beyond games.

I’d Like to Buy the World a Nuka-Cola: The Purposes and Meanings of Video Game Soda Machines
by Jess Morrissette

Why do soda machines appear so frequently in video games? What purposes do they serve? What values do they represent? This article examines how virtual soda machines help anchor video games in a world we recognize as similar to our own, while simultaneously reinforcing the consumerist values of modern capitalism.

Liminality and the Smearing of War and Play in Battlefield 1
by Debra Ramsay

This article interrogates how war and play are smeared together in Battlefield 1, the first AAA game set in World War I. It advances liminality as a conceptual framework to investigate the ambiguities and contradictions that emerge in the tension between the history, memory and cultural meanings of World War I and the game’s ludic qualities.