Touching the Screen
The world of video gaming
Lots of huge, multimillion-dollar video games look very impressive from the dominant but qualitative perspective of judging digital visuals by how much they don’t look digital at all.
Far Cry 2 perpetuates and depends on colonial themes and values as much as any open-world game, with the key caveat that it works a critique (or, at least, a cynicism) of the colonialist project into its playing.
It’s easy to make something big with three-dimensional graphics, but it’s hard to create a true sense of overwhelming largeness, of the self as puny in comparison to something else.
Yang’s games are explicitly political, explicitly homoerotic, explicitly masculine. They are technologically proficient and artistically confident. They are some of the most exciting works produced in the video game form in recent times, and are well worth engaging with.
Alien: Isolation’s ingenuity as a work that adapts a film to a video game is in its tacit acknowledgment that the player knows what is going to happen in this universe. It’s a retread of the original film, but one that is aware it is a retread.
To play FIFA ’14 is less to play at what it is like to “actually” play soccer, but instead focuses on mixing together a sense of actually playing soccer with a sense of experiencing soccer as it is most commonly experienced through the television screen.
Every single stroke is added to that overall score; your overall score is always the total number of strokes you have performed. Short of deleting the game’s data and reinstalling it, there are no restarts, no practicing. Just you and the desert in a constant march forward.
The relationship between video games and film is one of love-hate in the various discourses around the two media—the creators of each often seem to both desire and reject the credibility of the other.