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 Review
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…
Pink Friend
Paopu Fruit
Traversing the Kingdom
Play in the Pandemic
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.