Anastasia Salter@anasalter

10 Best Reviewed Games of 2016, GameSkinny.com

…but I am exhausted by AAA games.

It says something darkly profound that at this moment in our nation, this time of strife, of disagreement, of disparagement, of conflict, of insanity and chaos, that the best-selling interactive digital media product of the last year was Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Just let the words ‘infinite warfare’ roll around in your head in this Trump filled era of hate and prejudice.

Andy Phelps, January 31st, 2017

Procedural rhetoric affords a new and promising way to make claims about how things work…video games do not simply distract or entertain with empty, meaningless content. Rather, video games can make claims about the world.

But when they do so, they do it not with oral speech, nor in writing, nor even with images. Rather, video games make argument with processes.

“The Rhetoric of Video Games”Ian Bogost, 2008

UNQUESTIONED UNCHALLENGED

VERB

Driven by its suspicion of other media studies, the central question of game studies has, to this point, been: “How are videogames different?” That they are different from other forms is without question -- but, again, neither is there any doubt that novels are different from films. Amidst understandable concern for the things that made videogames unique, game studies tends to lump other media together as “representational” or, more often, “narrative” media such that the prospect of studying narrative in games has seemed to threaten the loss of medium specificity as well.

“A Too-Coherent World: Game Studies and the Myth of Narrative Media”

Edward Wesp, Game Studies 14.2

If Player One is the—-also designed—-white, cis--, heterosexual, young, abled, and middle--class male, then Player Two becomes his counterpart as a mode of designed identity…the games made for Player Two appear to be limiting and limited—-small in scope and absurd in meaning. These games do not appear to be about life--and--death issues; they represent small stories with small outcomes. And yet these games are important.

Shira Chess

PERSONAL

Smaller games with smaller budgets and smaller audiences have the luxury of being more experimental or bizarre or interesting than 12 million dollar games that need to play it as safely as possible to ensure a return on investment.

Anna Anthropy

Critical Code Studies Working Group 2014

Jeremy Douglass proposes three distinct areas of code as feminist act: code feminism, which is made to be used and executed for a feminist purpose; feminist codework, which is code-like but not intended to be run; and feminist code, which is “executable, syntactically subversive embedded language or new programming [code] languages affording a fundamentally different feminist paradigm for software development.

ADVENTURE GAME STUDIO

RPGMAKER

FLASH

TWINE

REN’PY

CHOICES

Dream DaddyGame Grumps

TerminationAstire Games

CAN’T

everything you swallow…Porpentine

WON

Green’s idea to make a videogame about Joel came to him in church, as he reflected on a harrowing evening a couple of years earlier when Joel was dehydrated and diarrheal, unable to drink anything without vomiting it back up, feverish, howling, and inconsolable, no matter how Green tried to soothe him. He had made a few games since then and had been thinking about mechanics, the rules that govern how a player interacts with and influences the action on the screen. “There’s a process you develop as a parent to keep your child from crying, and that night I couldn’t calm Joel,” Green says. “It made me think, ‘This is

like a game where the mechanics are subverted and don’t work.’”

Jason Tanz, Playing for Time, Wired 2016

RESISTANCE

We Become What We BeholdNicky Case

this is fineNick Kaman

this is fine is “an attempt to capture how I felt and how those around me felt after the results of the 2016 election.”

Thank you!Anastasia Salter

@anasalter