Category: literary games group

Hi everyone,

We had our first meeting of the Literary Games Group for this year on the 10th, where we discussed our plans for at least the next five or six weeks of semester. We’re going to be continuing with our reading from last year, Astrid Ensslin’s Literary Gaming. I’ve attached a link to the book for your perusal. When we reconvene next week (as always, Tuesday at 1pm in the Digital Humanities Hub, room 1W4 on the first floor of the Arts Building) we’ll discuss the chapter we are currently on, hopefully in relation to some of the games we will be playing.

We began playing our first “project-game” as a group, The Dream Machine, a story-rich point-and-click adventure game with some themes that aren’t normally explored in a lot of video games. It also has a fairly unique art style for a video game, being a game made from clay and cardboard. I’m hoping to explore this game’s story and themes as a group, as well as some of the simple and traditional mechanics that the game has, and whether they are good enough to carry the game’s fairly heavy themes.

We also played a short, politically motivated (and darkly humourous) game made in Twine called You Are Jeff Bezos, which is also free if you wanted to check it out. To finish the meeting we also looked at a few interesting, almost archival, videos that attempt to summarize years of gaming in roughly two minutes. You can watch the best one here.

Hope to see some of you again next week!

Today we read through the third chapter of the book Literary Gaming, and found out really why the book is called Literary Gaming – it explores the concepts of how to game in a literary fashion, but also how to define literary games – and even experiences which we wouldn’t define as games, but still involving some ludicity – that is, still some element of play within them. The different types of games are available to look at in the graph I’ve attached at the bottom of this post.

We also discussed the results of our Bartle test – a test which determines what kind of gamer you are personality-wise (primarily in relation to the way you approach multiplayer RPGs, but it can grow to extend the way you approach other games too). I discovered I’m a combination of Explorer and Socializer, with Achiever and Killer far down the list.

After our discussion of the chapter (the next chapter is available to read here) we went on to explore another game I’d discovered just a few weeks prior called Indecision. Indecision. is a game that masterfully subverts the way we approach videogames, specifically 2D platformer, by constantly baiting you to act a particular way and changing the rules for victory, and we can critically examine ourselves and the way we play and function.
It’s also a lot of fun! Extremely clever, too.

We finished our session with a bit of Pathologic 2 gameplay, which we’ll continue with next week to finish the two or so hours of gameplay that are on offer in this particular “chapter” or segment of the game.

Hope to see you around!