Category: literary games group

[Literary Games Group] 27/4/2021 – Trauma in Games

Hi everyone,

This week we finished our first book as a group, Astrid Ensslin’s Literary Gaming! We had a discussion (sparked somewhat by the last two sections of the book) about the idea of games as vehicles for empathy. Are games that utilize trauma good games? Is it harmful to force us, the player, to experience trauma? What is the purpose of games as empathy generators? Often they are valuable in a subversive way, forcing us to approach standard game conventions from a different angle that mirrors back at us not a reflection of our skill, but of our qualities as a person. Who did we choose to save? Why did we decide to fire then? And so on. Questions that are fairly uncomfortable to answer perhaps, but questions that we are often better for, having at least attempted to answer them. Whether or not you agree that games should be used as a tool to teach empathy, they are a powerful medium indeed.

Now that Ensslin’s book is finished, we have the first chapter of another book lined up – Alexander R. Galloway’s “Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture”.

We’re also continuing with The Dream Machine. It’s been a long chapter of the game, but I think we’re almost at the end, preparing to move onto the next game in probably two weeks’ time. I have really enjoyed this chapter of The Dream Machine though. I think it has come into its own, after a bit of a slow start, and a few patchier puzzles, that I am glad to see have changed into intuitive puzzles with some sense behind them, that don’t devolve into trial and error.

Hope to see everyone next week!

[Literary Games Group] 20/4/21 – Poetry and Sound

Hello again everyone!

After a two week absence from the LGG, we managed to have an extremely productive and interesting session of the group today. We discussed Ensslin’s Chapter 8, in which she wrote about poetry games, auteurship in video games, and the financial burden that creates a weight of commercial expectation around video games. Poetry games can influence the way we see and experience the written word. In fact, The Dream Machine had a particularly cool example of this. As the player gazes down into a strange abyss, when they speak into it the dialogue fades away into the bottom of the abyss, bouncing off walls. And when you get a reply, it starts small, and climbs to a crescendo. They do this all without sound.There’s a problem in the modern games industry that arises from the inevitable collision of art, vision, profit, and finance. There’s a tension between these two things; how successful can a game be without a big-name publisher? What even is the measure of a video game’s success? The fact that it can last twenty hours, stuffed to the gills with side quests that you’ll forget in a week’s time, or the fact that it is a tight, focused two-hour experience that haunts you for years to come? We talked about other tensions in games too – particularly in an open-world game with a cutscene driven story. Such large teams create games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Death Stranding, that the design philosophies of the writing and the gameplay team don’t seem synchronized. This is where we get a disconnect, and not an enjoyable one at that.

We continued with Chapter 5 of The Dream Machine, which is growing into its own at this point. The writing is stronger and more confident, and the puzzles are satisfyingly thought-out (once you find where to start). There are two separate dreams to solve in this chapter, and we’ve dabbled in both, but haven’t discovered the truth to either dream yet.

Next week we will finish up with Ensslin’s book, reading Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 (conclusion). Hope to see you there!

[Literary Games Group] 24/3/21 – Boundaries, Dreams, and Systems

Hi everyone,
This week we went over Chapter 6 of Ensslin’s Literary Gaming. We talked a lot about the antiludicity of games – that is, the way we can challenge how games get us to play them, and how, with that knowledge, we can subvert games as objects to be played. This involved a bit of discussion around pushing the boundaries in games, how we can play them as the developers did not intend them to be played – or if you wanted to push further, you could mod or cheat the game. As we push the boundaries, we find out whether the developers put in safety nets or difficulty barriers to stop people from breaking the game. As we discovered, quite often you can find a way to outsmart games – in this instance, we discussed Pathologic and Skyrim – simply by playing them in an unexpected way – though sometimes the game becomes traditionally unplayable as a result.

We also had a bit of discussion around the idea of griefing, of destroying another player’s works or of pushing past a certain boundary and causing another real person some form of distress through the actions undertaken in a virtual world. This can range from something as simple and “disconnected” from a real person as getting to areas in games that are supposed to be developer-only through exploits and glitches, or something as harmful as the hostile takeover of another person’s avatar and making them perform horrible actions.

Next week’s reading is Chapter 7 from Ensslin’s book. We will meet at the same time – 1pm on a Tuesday (in this instance, the 30th), in room 1W4 in the Arts Building. We are still playing The Dream Machine, though we are also preparing to move on to another game, and discussing possibilities for those games. One of those is The Outer Wilds.

Hope to see you round soon!

[Literary Games Group] 17/3/21

Hello again everyone,

This week we discussed Chapter 5 of Astrid Ensslin’s Literary Gaming, which primarily revolved around the idea of learning how to play through play itself, with engagement and interactivity as a product of the interface and UI itself. There was also an interesting point about categorizing movements – that is, the physical way we play games as in mouse-clicks, arm movements, and eye movements – and the potential of analyzing them to find how we best interact with a game.
We also played the primary text referenced by Ensslin – the game Loss of Grasp by Serge Bouchardon, which you can play here. It is, suffice it to say, very clever, and worth your time. You do need a webcam to see the ending though, as we discovered…

I have also attached next week’s reading to the email, Chapter 6, entitled “Loss of Innocence”. We will be again discussing it in 1W4 in the Arts Building at 1pm on Tuesday.

We continued playing the third chapter of The Dream Machine this week, the game made of real cardboard and clay that took two people nine whole years to finish. Not much new to report on that front there beyond the fact that we are still enjoying the experience of the game, and I’m looking forward to dissecting it a bit more when we’ve reached a later point in the game. The whole game is currently on sale for NZD $6 until the 23rd of March, so if you were interested in buying it to play for yourself, you can pick it up from Steam!

Hope to see you next week!

[Literary Games Group] 10/3/21

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!

[Literary Games Group] 8/5/20 Defining Literary Games and Exploring Subversion

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!