DA Hall, PhD

Since its release in September 2015, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain has received international popular and critical success, despite production difficulties that resulted in a split between Hideo Kojima and Konami. The game also sparked renewed interest within game studies scholarship in the Metal Gear series and MGSV as a capstone to the 30-year old franchise. This article argues that the lack of scholarship that contends with the intricate referential structure of the game, specifically the presence of Melville’s Moby-Dick throughout, indicates a gap in game studies critical methods with regards to situating videogames within extant generic traditions. References not only signal a given project’s participation in ongoing aesthetic conversations, but dialogically constitute the intervention therein. I propose generic analysis as a critical praxis capable of articulating the culturally and historically specific projects of videogames. I argue that the usefulness and importance of such a framework through an analysis of Moby-Dick as a central system of signification across MGSV. Kojima, deeply studied in the Western aesthetic canon, resituates Melville’s own critique of Western hegemonic imperialism within contemporary racialized surveillance capitalism, pointedly from the position of Japanese subjectivity. In so doing, the game articulates both the continuity and the shift in expressions of that visual regime, contextualized by some of the most brutal violence produced by the failure to confront its contradictions.

This paper describes a set of spatialized narrative designs that elicit certain practices of intersubjective interpretation; I term these spaces playgrounds of interpretation in reference to the playful and ongoing negotiation of a shared reality that takes place within them. Drawing on Ricouerian hermeneutic theory,performance theory,fan studies, and the history of visual media, I develop a framework of analysis that examines how these intentionally designed spaces attempt to resist the closure of meaning associated with hermeneutic action by distributing signifiers across space such that they are unable to be thought in sequence. I then examine the communal interpretive play that emerges within and around the playground of interpretation and the ability of these communities to engage meaningfully beyond the fictional boundaries of the playground.I conclude by arguing for the importance of critical engagement with these understudied spaces and the potential within.

The end goal of this essay is the articulation of a critical praxis that participates in the reception and production of video game texts by activating liberatory impulses rather than taking the anticipatory and reactionary position. The referential and dialogic nature of genre makes it a key site of intervention in this project, both as a tool for reparative criticism and as a way of identifying the specific paranoid failures of game studies. I have chosen the soulslike as my object of study because it is precisely in the erotics of play associated with this specific genre that I find the language to argue for a reformulation of the critical praxis of game studies.To this end, I move from the specific to the general, occupying various ways of looking in order to trace out a “larger vision.” I begin with a short analysis of the Soulsborne, specifically its capstone installment Elden Ring, and its structural relationship to community in order to contextualize the importance of genre theory. Drawing on a queer tradition of erotics and reparative analysis, I then present three generic markers of the soulslike: stiptease storytelling, autoerotic fatality, and orgasmic temporalities. In my analysis, I engage the games as actors in their own right, neither as naive nor holding hidden depths; I of course rely on my own perspective, partial as it is, to take part in this process of knowledge generation. In so doing, I demonstrate the importance of a reparative genre theory to the future of game studies critical praxis.

This article argues that the work of teaching writing with video games starts before the syllabus, the assignment, and the lesson plan: First, there must be an infrastructure for game pedagogy. Drawing on our experiences at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, we explain that various material considerations – from consoles to classroom furniture, and from grant-funding to graduate students – were necessary to build our game-based classroom, the Greenlaw Gameroom, and the Critical Game Studies Program it facilitates. Our primary aim has been to foster what we call collaborative close play, which is a method of game analysis that resolves the oft-cited tension between playful immersion and critical distance by turning close play into a group activity whereby students cycle between the roles of player, advisor, researcher, and notetaker. A three-day module that pairs Super Mario Bros. with the Inupiaq platformer Never Alone demonstrates how such structured play, scaffolded by flexible furniture, digital data management, and trained instructors, enables students to analyze procedural rhetorics, cultural logics, and design ethics at scale. Virginia Woolf observed that certain material circumstances, like a room of one’s own, are necessary to write; by the same token, this article deals with some of the material obstacles a writing program must face in the process of securing “money and a room” for teaching games.

We argue that Berger’s film positions WWI as the originating point of contemporary capitalist hegemony. We trace in the film an enduring capitalist order shaped by the perpetual threat of destructive weaponry and the resulting precarity. The film thereby collapses the durée between WWI and future conflicts: the Nazis’ rise and WWII are prefigured in General Friedrichs’ (David Striesow) nationalist exploitation of soldiers, while its depiction of decisive technological weapons anticipates today’s ubiquitous threats, not least nuclear and drone warfare. Far from staging a historic war as a cinematic spectacle intended simply to entertain, Berger’s intervention seeks to expose these enduring structures and reveal as human-made and changeable that which appears natural to the film’s soldiers. It refuses the viewer’s complete immersion by foregrounding its own artifice, combining realist and anti-realist elements, to denaturalize mediation. With these alienation techniques, the film creates a cinematic counterpart to Erwin Piscator’s political theatre, itself inspired by WWI, mobilizing art to expose the economic and political forces shaping viewers’ lives and to generate moments of potentially revolutionary rupture.