Lumino City is an award-winning game made by State of Play Games that explores the ins and outs of a beautifully hand-built world. To succeed in the game, the player must use investigative skills to work their way through the different machines and processes that structure the city. Through its handcrafted design, the game stimulates the player’s creative side and strives to promote the creation of sustainable energy through the use of reusable objects.
In the absence of light, darkness reigns supreme, amplifying feelings of terror and tranquility. The interactive video game A Blind Legend, published in 2015, captures these emotions by conveying the sensation of being blinded, while also fostering gameplay accessible to the visually impaired. Raising awareness about blindness, DOWiNO and France Culture—the developers behind A Blind Legend—focus on the journey of an old legend: the blind knight, Sir Edward Blake.
Played as a serious game, Ndemic Creations’ Plague Inc. effectively incorporates these elements to underscore its purpose as a game designed to inform players about disease transmission and pandemic culture. Plague Inc. is a single-player video game in which the player takes on the role of a disease and attempts to infect and eliminate the entire global population.
Designed by Lucas Pope, Papers, Please (2013) is a border-security simulator in which the player is “assigned to the Ministry of Admission in the war-torn dystopian nation of Arstotzka” (Pope 2012). While the player carries out their daily duties of verifying passports and identities, they put their meager earnings towards providing for their family and paying down their debt. As the days pass, players are presented with more and more responsibilities—bribe offers, pleas, and threats—as the State of Arstotzka demands disciplined performance from its employees and pays only by person processed. No time can be wasted in the 12-hour work day, lest the player fail to earn enough to support their family.
Andrew Mayers, who also goes by Andrew Malique as an artist, has been drawing and playing video games for a long time. Designing illustrations has given him the chance to express his love for video games and the impact gaming has had on his life. He is currently a freshman at USM. More examples of his art can be found on Instagram at @andrewmalique.
The key turns in the latch and I open our apartment door. To let as little light in from outside as possible, I shinny myself in, almost dropping what I’m carrying. It’s impossible to see in the pitch black of our living room, but the glow-in-the-dark clock I bought to hang right next to the door tells me it’s one in the morning, which means it’s really three o’clock; I always set this clock two hours behind before I leave at night, so if my mother ever catches me coming home this late she’ll see the clock next to the door and think I’m two hours earlier than I actually am. I take my shoes off at the door, careful not to wake her up. She gets so worried when I come home this late.
I stop off at the TV and do what I need to do before I make my way to the room that Bobby and I share. I creak our door open as silently as I could, and I see his covers rising up and down with his breath. Creeping, I go to him and nudge him awake.
Undoubtedly, the last decade was known for its big-budget games. Games like Grand Theft Auto V, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt made headlines for their massive worlds, epic stories, fun gameplay, and huge sales. But the highest selling game of the decade (and of all time) was an independent game made by a small company called Mojang. A game with blocky graphics, basic gameplay, and a simple story.
Minecraft was the first smash hit from the independent side of gaming. Before its release, games with small budgets and little known developers rarely made headway in the gaming market, with notable exceptions including Braid, Super Meat Boy, and Limbo. It was Minecraft that finally showed how indie games can be just as popular as games made by developers with far more resources and manpower.
Because many video games nowadays feature prominent characters that fall under the LGBT+ category, this type of emotional investment that’s built on the in-game interactions with these characters can provide an impact on how the player views people who identify as LGBT+ outside of the game’s magic circle. The increase in LGBT+ representation in Triple-A games puts players in the position of empathizing with characters that fall under the LGBT+ category. Games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Last of Us, specifically the game’s DLC, are two early examples of games known for their representation of the LGBT+ community and the strong reaction they received from critics and players alike.
As a child, my primary form of entertainment was through video games; I grew up with the medium. As I became a preteen, then a teenager, and finally an adult, the target audience of the medium increased as my critical appreciation of the medium grew and technology expanded what games were capable of. When I was a teenager, I sought out games released for adult audiences in the 1990s and early 2000s, due to the design sensibilities that differed from modern video game experiences. The narratives in these older games operated under a different set of standards, focusing more on evocative text descriptions as opposed to complex graphics. One of the masterpieces of this style is a game called The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. It’s a cult classic in part because of how it combines the ambition and excellent writing of earlier works with the technological capacity to depict what is written. This makes it a fascinating specimen of a game, and certainly contributes to the utterly unique visual style that still stands out to this day.
Moonlighter is a beautiful dungeon crawler game that is a throwback to the fast-paced dungeons of The Legend of Zelda and the slow-paced town atmosphere of Animal Crossing. Developed by Digital Sun, Moonlighter captures the idea of a gameplay loop that you just can’t put down. Roaming the dungeons by night and tending your shop by day, you begin to grow your little hometown and find yourself drawn into the story of the main character and the future of the town…
For most of us, quarantining began in March 2019, when the effects of the pandemic reached a point where it was simply safer to remain at home and distance ourselves for everyone’s health. For many gamers, staying at home meant more time to play games——in theory. In reality, the nature of the pandemic shaped the ways we experience, play, and think about games differently than the days before our pandemic experiences.
We asked members of our Game Studies Group to reflect on what it meant to play during a pandemic. How has the pandemic changed our encounters with games? Do we find that games help us cope with world changes? Or has the pandemic negatively impacted the way we view games and gaming? Ultimately, was the pandemic helpful or harmful to gaming culture?
Fifteen of us responded, and the thoughts are telling. We invite you to scroll through our reflections and thoughts and draw your own conclusions.
