Swiss Video Game History and the Smaky Era: Bootstrapping a Platform Archaeology Study

Spaces of Allegory. Non-Euclidean Spatiality as a Ludo-Poetic Device

Studies of digital game spaces have established a solid understanding of the general dissimilarity of game spaces and space in reality, discussing e.g. the particular cardinalities of motion and agency, the significance of projection methods, and the possibility of movement among non-linear paths. This paper applies these theories to a particular phenomenon, the manipulation and defamiliarization of spaces, which has become a rather widespread feature of digital games in recent years. Drawing on postphenomenology and developmental psychology, the paper argues that games with nonEuclidean spatiality challenge real-life epistemologies of space that are acquired early in life. The paper demonstrates the creative use of this form of defamiliarization in two examples, Superliminal and The Witness, which turn it into allegories of dreams, agency, and authorship.

Play as Research in the Work of George Brecht

A Discipline is Always Born Twice1: Is there Room for Interdisciplinary Humanities Methods in Game Studies Scholarship Today?

This short “extended abstract” paper is intended as a provocation (some might say a polemic) whose goal it is to spark a greater discussion, within the field of game studies at large, about 1) possible reasons for and answers to a growing lack of interest in interdisciplinarity within the field and 2) how, or even whether at all, to achieve an increased openness to interdisciplinary methods originating, specifically, within the humanities. The remainder of the abstract then puts forward an analytic stance which I term “humanistic sensibility.”

MMAJams – Multi-Method Analysis of Games in Research and Education

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild through the Lens of Italo Calvino’s Memo on “Lightness”

Playing Disney: Experience and Expression in the Land of Curation

Evocative games

The Games Industry as 21st Century Imperialism & Its Cultivation of Fascism

Towards a Language for Artistic Realism

Realism has been a very vague and broad concept and term regarding videogames. While many related concepts are often subject of study, like representation, presence, historical accuracy, or immersion, there still is no language that can be used to talk about realism in a productive and precise manner. However, the term and concept have been discussed and analyzed in art theory and some language exists in that field. This paper reviews perspectives on realism in art theory and analyzes their applicability to videogames. The result is a concept of counterfeit realism, the quality of how well an artwork resists inquiry of its properties. The artwork can be said to be realistic to the degree to which the inquiry is unable to detect the artwork as a representation.