I presented this last weekend at a conference here in Vancouver. It was 9 am and raining, so not really that well attended, but I got a generally good response from the audience. I wrote it specifically for people who weren’t necessarily familiar with the theory or game, so it should be readable to a lay audience.
I’ve been trying to write more criticism that can be used directly to improve people’s game designs. Extra Credits is a nice show, but they work in far too general frameworks to really be useful as a way to think about games in the specific, in the way that authors trained in criticism might consider certain branches of criticism when writing. Ditto a lot of criticism, which to this point has been mostly works which try to define how video games work. There’s precious little decent criticism on specific games that is geared towards actually figuring out the implications of design decisions as they are made in a production environment – probably because few academics know much about development (academics in the general – the most I’ve seen at conferences is ‘my son plays Xbox’) and few developers really care that much about critical theory. Here, I’m trying to apply Bogost’s theories of how games work to Prince of Persia, and trying to tease out the implications of design decisions beyond the fun factor.
This definitely doesn’t go as far as it could, and by no means is my argument perfect. I don’t pretend to out-academic anyone, much less people like Bogost and James Portnow. I’m going to try to expand this for my MA project, so comments and criticism are expressly welcomed.
