Tag Archive

Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “Essay”

“Marking the manners of the times:” A Creative Simulation of Metagames in Frances Burney’s Evelina

Kellen Aguilar May 15, 2019 Essay, Humor, Video Games Leave a Comment

This simulation gamifies some of the thematic elements in Frances Burney’s Evelina, such as female delicacy and satire, women’s vulnerability to violence in the public sphere, and 18th century British …

Mountain is a simulation video game developed by David OReilly and published by Double Fine Productions. It was released for Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS and Android in July 2014. The game is an idle game in which the only influence the player can have on the game is at the start of the game where the player is tasked to draw objects. The game is designed to be played in the background while the player uses other applications. From Sean Wejebe's website: 'The Longest Couch is a game where two players have to complete a series of commands on a gampead to navigate their respective boy to the center of the couch. Once the gamepad commands are completed, the players move to a shared keyboard - as the boys on the screen get closer, so do the players. It is very romantic.'

Failing at Gaming: Queer Gameplay in Mountain and The Longest Couch

Kellen Aguilar March 27, 2019 Essay, Video Games Leave a Comment

How are video games queer? This question is central to recent game studies scholarship that attempts to bridge the rigor of queer theory with the playful possibilities of digital games. …

This essay draws on a gameplay glitch in merrit kopas's queer digital game Lim to argue that cross-cultural friendship in E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India is a form of glitch or failure that permits relations beyond the logics (the “code” or “script”) of the colonial system. The friendships in Passage -- namely, between Aziz, Mr. Fielding, Mrs. Moore, Adela Quested -- develop as the product of accidental or unscripted encounters within the rigid stratifications of colonial Indian society: a chance meeting at a mosque between Aziz and Mrs. Moore or an intimate tea party hosted by Mr. Fielding. These encounters contrast with normative, scripted events such as the Turton’s “Bridge Party,” which reify the cultural, spatial, and temporal boundaries between colonizer and colonized.

Glitched Out Fiction Part II: Hacking the Colonial Script in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India

Kellen Aguilar March 19, 2019 Academia, Essay, Graduate School, Video Games Leave a Comment

In the first part of this series, “Glitched-Out Fiction Part I: Hermaphroditic Hackers in Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature, I drew on Jack Halberstam’s theorization of “queer failure” …

This essay demonstrates how Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature and merritt k.’s Lim — a medieval poem and a contemporary queer video game, respectively — deconstruct the binaries of heteronormativity through the particular ways that each deploys allegory and enacts queer failure. By relying on Jack Halberstam’s theorization of “queer failure,” I read Plaint through Lim in order to argue that whether accidental or not, the contradictions/glitches inherent to Plaint and Lim perform queerness despite both works’ ostensible anti- or non-existent queer elements. Observing the contradictions/glitches in these works reveals fruitful avenues for comparative reading — that is, the contradictions of a medieval poem as “glitches” in the poem’s “code” and the glitches in a digital game as “contradictions” in the game’s binary (i.e. 1/0) “language.”

Glitched-Out Fiction Part I: Hermaphroditic Hackers in Alan of Lille’s The Plaint of Nature

Kellen Aguilar March 18, 2019 Academia, Essay, Graduate School, Video Games Leave a Comment

This post is the first of a two-part series in which I analogize the contradictions or elisions in works of literature to the glitches in video games. The series draws …