Month: September 2025

Hi everyone,

This week we had a look at the reading about parasocial relationships with game characters by Joleen Blom. What does it mean to form a connection with a video game character? Advertisers and companies can leverage the narrative connection we feel with a character, selling us merchandise or further stories predicated on our love for the character. The way that connections are formed mechanically within a game as well can be fairly easily codified by meters, gifts, or just saying the thing that the character wants to hear, even if it’s not what we actually believe. Games reward us for making relationships mechanical transactions, thus exposing the nature of the Non-Player Character as a quasi-person. And because of that, a player’s opinion of “a quasi-person may decrease since the character no longer upholds the illusion of being a person-like entity with their own will”. As was also observed during the discussion, game relationships also do not require much maintenance. Once someone is your best friend or your love interest, you can just coast on that relationship being rock solid for the rest of the game, meaning you just move on to socializing with your next best friend – not exactly how relationships in the actual world work!

This week, with our focus on character relationships, I put forward Franz, a mobile horror game based around a manipulative relationship with a small nymph-like creature living in your phone or tablet. At first, it seems you have the control over Franz – but eventually she begins to flip the relationship around, using you just as much as you might use her to pass time. I found that Franz is a legitimately harrowing art-game experience that calls into question these parasocial relationships. However, it also has a deliberately designed destabilizing effect on the player’s mood, and I would even go so far as to call it invasive thanks to the use of notifications to pressure you into spending time with the game. Hence, we ended up returning to the much lighter Expelled! (thanks again to Atom for providing it to the group to play) and we were treated to an audio drama rendition of it by Maddie and El as our main actors – thanks to you both for your involvement playing the game! I think we each found a character to connect to, and even without our group’s collaborative voice acting, it is easy to hear the character’s voices based on how they are written.

This week, I have attached a reading from Sara Humphreys, who interrogates game genre in her book “Manifest Destiny 2.0: Genre Trouble in Game Worlds”. How do literary genres manifest in video games? What is problematic (or successful) in regard to genre? Come next time with some thoughts about genre in video games, and how your favourite games connect to literary genres (and how they might differ). 

See you all next week!

Hi everyone,

This week we had a discussion about simulations and strategy games. What does it mean to avoid simulating critique of empire and imperial systems of oppression in strategy games, as Mukherjee argued that Age of Empires did? How do certain games attempt to model the decay of empire? In Rome: Total War, overpopulation and overextension cause empire-wide riots, and your economy can suddenly collapse due to mismanagement and an overreliance on your imperial war machine as you clash against rival empires.And are there any games that do legitimately attempt to resist the common language of strategy games: expansion and dominance? Even games that allow you to play as the colonized in history ask that you perform those imperialistic tasks, but in reverse, against the actual-world oppressor. It is an interesting thought exercise to consider civilization-building as no longer reliant on dominance and destruction; how do we simulate new ways of thinking?

This week, thanks to Maddie, we played through Kitty Horrorshow’s Anatomy, a haunted suburban house that analyzes the importance of the house, and the inherent monstrosity present within spaces. It was great to play through for me, as it fed into ideas of ruin and discomfort being generated by decay. We also played through Barbotine, which attempts a similar thing, but relates it more to anxiety and a lack of confidence in one’s own body image. Even if it isn’t as effective as Anatomy, it is a fun companion piece. 

Next week, I’ve selected a reading from Joleen Blom’s book Video Game Characters and Transmedia Storytelling: The Dynamic Game Character about the potential to form parasocial relationships that exists between video game players and video game characters. Can we feel anything for these characters? Do relationships extend beyond actually playing the game?