Game Studies reports and market data
Documents
Highway to the Golden Zone: PC Bangs and Techno-Orientalism in the StarCraft II Visual Novel
The visual novel SC2VN functions as a site of techno-Orientalist discourse, utilizing the South Korean pc bang as a central trope to navigate Western anxieties surrounding the nation’s dominance in mid-2010s esports.
- The visual novel SC2VN utilizes the South Korean pc bang as a trope to frame Korean esports culture as a resource for Western consumption rather than a lived reality.
- The narrative structure functions as a form of digital tourism, allowing the Western protagonist to appropriate Korean competitive practices to mitigate their own feelings of technological and economic obsolescence.
- By essentializing the pc bang as a 'racial-biopolitical womb,' the game reduces complex Korean esports success to a product of the environment, reinforcing racialized hierarchies in the global gaming industry.
The Man with the Gun is a Boy who Plays Games: Video Games, White Innocence, and Mass Shootings in the U.S.
The recurring tendency to blame video games for mass shootings in the United States functions as a strategic rhetorical device designed to preserve the concept of white innocence.
- Blaming video games for mass shootings functions as a rhetorical strategy to preserve white innocence by framing white male perpetrators as corrupted victims of media rather than agents of ideological violence.
- Empirical research consistently fails to establish a causal link between video game consumption and real-world violence, yet political and media figures repeatedly prioritize gaming as a culprit following mass casualty events.
- The focus on digital media serves as a distraction from the systemic issues of easy firearm access, misogyny, and the proliferation of political extremism in the United States.
Binaries on a Circle: Engaging Whiteness on the Playground
Traditional game studies often rely on rigid, binary frameworks such as colonizer versus colonized or white versus other, which fail to capture the fluid complexities of identity.
- Traditional game studies often rely on rigid, binary frameworks that fail to capture the fluid complexities of identity and power.
- Whiteness functions as a pervasive system of power, capital, and colonial influence that intersects with caste, class, and geography.
- Games such as hopscotch, cricket, and nursery rhymes are historically rooted in colonial structures that reinforce authoritative norms.
On Cooking a Sour Game
Cook Your Way functions as a critical intervention in game design, utilizing an alternative controller and the preparation of traditional Brazilian cuisine to interrogate the dehumanizing mechanics of global immigration systems.
- Cook Your Way uses a custom physical cooking interface to simulate the high-pressure, dehumanizing experience of navigating the Canadian immigration system.
- The game design rejects traditional empathy-driven narratives and player-empowerment mechanics in favor of structural instability and anticlimax to mirror bureaucratic inefficiency.
- By utilizing modular, transparent hardware, the project forces players to confront the friction and futility inherent in state-sanctioned border regimes.