Dear Player: Troubling Fungi and Desperation in The Last of Us Part II
What does it mean for a human to take on a fungus? In a rotting post-apocalypse, we can feel what it’s like to live a fungal life, to consume ourselves, to act in desperation ludically and narratively. Living beyond our time. There have been many contentious takes on this Summer’s biggest blockbuster, The Last of Us Part II (2020)– critiqued for having a laboured and dissonant moral rhetoric and for the problematic politics of its creative director; celebrated as a narrative of grief, depression and queerness; homophobically attacked for its representation of diversity as well as being legitimately challenged to handle queerness and race with greater nuance and depth. My reading here, however, follows Haraway’s (2016) injunction to ‘stay with the trouble.’ That life is messy, disturbing, and that that’s when it gets interesting.
Read More
Dear Player: We Happy Few, Depression and Brexit
"The past is a foreign country," in the famous words of British novelist Leslie Poles Hartley, and in We' Happy Few, British society is an island that hates everything 'foreign'. "Happy is the country with no past," reads the main slogan of this fictional world, but the problem is that both fictional Wellington Wells and real world Britain have monstrous 'tracts' of past which vested interests wish we would forget. At it's core Wellington Wells is a monstrous, bald pantomime that implores us to be sceptical of invocations to happiness and pushes us to scrutinise our world with all the depressive paranoia of the historical gaze.
Read More
Dear Player: Far Cry 5 and the American West
Far Cry 5 and Westworld illustrate how historical representations of lawless frontiers influence player behaviour in open world game environments. Moreover, I argue that sandboxes tell us as much about our relationship to our colonial past and the neocolonial present as they do about our psychology. The roles we learn are the roles we play.
Read More
Dear Player: Gorogoa and the Language of Comics
Games and comics have much in common as media on the margins, at once ancient (as icons and tokens) and new (as VR and touchscreens). Both are complex hybrids with a deep and varied ancestry of art forms serving as their foundations, but each medium still has much to learn from the other.
Read More
Dear Player: Hearing Hellblade
Hellblade is an exquisite bricolage of cracked wood, woad and lime. It's the experience of suffering humbly and intensely free from fetishized pain or redemptive rescues, and it's ambition is breathtaking.
Read More
Dear Player: Playing with Paint
Paint is the paradox of a beautiful stain. Fundamentally it's a thing people play with - it transmutes the everyday into something Other, and this makes it an excellent material conceit for games.
Read More
