When used in relation to video games, the term “genre” primarily functions as a descriptor of the types of interactive play present in the text—e.g. role-playing, shooting, driving, etc. Games’ systems of interaction often become the main identifiers by which they get categorized. While a plethora of genres defined by narrative and theme are represented in video games, this classification is...
Particularly within visual media, genre may be thought of as a way of looking, a kind of thematic and ideological point of view (POV) that distills the innumerable complexities of reality into narrative and aesthetic patterns that work toward imparting rhetorical stances to audiences. For example, the generic POV of the Western privileges guns and open landscapes, inviting an onslaught of...
In my last post, I examined Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. While most of the critical backlash against March Through Time has centered around the project’s “tonal dissonance,”—the seeming incompatibility of civil rights imagery and Fortnite’s...
In August of this year, Epic Games collaborated with TIME Studios to host a special, virtual event dedicated to the 58th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Fortnite’s March Through Time, an interactive experience inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s 17-minute “I Have a Dream” speech, is accessible through the free-to-play game’s creative mode. Creative mode...
The PlayStation game Ghost of Tsushima (2020) sold at a record-setting pace, globally netting six and a half million sales as of March 2021.[1] In the game, players take on the role of Jin Sakai, one of a few surviving samurai present on Tsushima island (located right between South Korea and southern Japan) during a fictionalized retelling of the First Mongol Invasion of Japan in the mid 1270s...
Solve the World’s Most Challenging Puzzle reads the subtitle of Christopher Manson’s 1985 puzzle book MAZE. Manson’s book was originally advertised as a kind of puzzle “contest” in which the first reader to find their way from room 1 to room 45 and back again in 16 steps (or less, if possible) would win $10,000 dollars. The puzzle was solved in 1987, but the book remains an interesting early...
I am deciding to end this series on interesting introductions with video games for a couple of reasons, the most pressing of which is that I wanted an excuse to write about Super Mario 64. Released for the Nintendo 64 in 1996, Super Mario 64 is not the first game I played, nor is it my favorite. But when I look back on some of my favorite opening moments in video games — openings that are...
[10 minute read] In this month’s posts on Metathesis, I have discussed the metaphorical uses of contagious disease and examined the figure of the zombie in some popular late twentieth and twenty-first-century texts. In my final post of the month, I would like to turn to a unique sub-genre of the zombie narrative that unsettles the survivor-centered perspective of zombie outbreaks: the eco- zombie...
[10 minute read] In this month’s posts for Metathesis, I have been looking at how the metaphorical deployment of epidemic disease operates, and how we might understand the metaphorical function of plague zombies in contemporary texts. Why is it that the figure of the plague zombie features so prominently in the twenty-first-century imagination? If the plague zombie is a vehicle for addressing...
[7 minute read] Last week I discussed the use of contagion and metaphor, and mentioned how zombies can serve as “vehicles” for the metaphor of contagious disease. This week I continue my discussion of zombies, but before diving in, I want to draw a distinction between the two major representations of zombies in popular culture: what I somewhat reductively will refer to as the “Voodoo Zombie” and...