Galactic Cafe
Company
2 documents in the library are about Galactic Cafe, from writers such as DiGRA. Each has a summary and key insights with the page they come from.
Connections
Each row is a game or company named alongside Galactic Cafe, each column a document, oldest first. A mark means that document names it. Select a row to see those documents.
Documents about Galactic Cafe
(Semi-)Peripheral Gameplay in Video Games
The document explores how gameplay in video games developed in "semi-peripheral" regions, particularly Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), can be influenced by local circumstances, challenging the notion that gameplay conventions are rigid external forms.
- Stanisław Krawczyk argues that gameplay in video games from semi-peripheral and peripheral industries can be shaped by local circumstances, not only by the content and worlds that scholars usually analyze, challenging the view of gameplay conventions as a rigid external form.
- The central thesis is supported mainly with examples from Central and Eastern Europe, a region increasingly visible in game studies since the mid-2010s alongside growing scholarly attention to European, Asian, and Latin American game production.
- Many CEE developers built their own game engines, and Czech developers favored personal computers, which encouraged complex, stat-based, and realism-oriented game designs.
Oedipus at the Crossroads: Tragic Agency in Contemporary Videogames
The document explores the concept of tragic agency in contemporary videogames, arguing that games offer a unique platform for enacting and reflecting on the tragic experience, which is defined as the total failure of human action in the face of fate.
- The paper defines tragic agency as the total failure of human action in the face of fate, and argues that games can make players experience this as a first-person, affective experience rather than merely observing a character's downfall.
- Close readings of Bloodborne, What Remains of Edith Finch, and The Stanley Parable form the paper's core evidence, with Bloodborne producing an Oedipal recognition of the player's complicity and a final relinquishment of control.
- The author locates the tragic in the frustration of meaningful action rather than in the satisfaction that much ludic scholarship emphasizes, and distinguishes tragedy from the more common notion of the tragic as merely sad.
