Editorial: Behind the Making

Few theses, proposals and books in game studies start without some statement of the importance of video games as a media format. However, despite this emphasis on the industry’s size and importance, very little academic attention goes toward what is behind the process of designing games.Game developer Katharine Neil, writing about the state of the game industry and its relation to academia mounts a call to arms: "We can demand research and development into design support technology — not for more tools for prototyping and production or metrics, but for tools that support design thinking".For Neil, these have led to a palpable stagnation in game design. Judging by the articles selected for this issue of Press Start, young game scholars increasingly seek to ameliorate both the lacking academic reflection on game design; and the lack of communication that Neil diagnoses between academics and game makers

Developing Time: Representing Historical Progression through Level Structures

This article explores the use of historical events as a way to structure the narrative in historical action games. The author uses a comparative analysis to show how Call of Duty: World at War (2008) and Assassin s Creed (1) (2007) take different approaches in embedding the past in their stories. A constant representational opposition is at play in historical games. The games have to represent a historical setting, but also need to represent a passage of time within this setting to mark narrative progression. Mediating this opposition happens through the level-structure of these games. The analysed games take different approaches in establishing this passage of time. Both games refer to sequences of historical events to display their passage of time, but do so in a different way. Call of Duty re-enacts the historical events, and Assassin s Creed develops its story between historical events.4679Bremen

Editorial: Behind the Making

status: publishe

Editorial: Body Movements

Today, the juxtaposition between physical bodies and the gameworld is ever more fluid. Virtual Reality headsets are available at game stores with more AAA games being created for the format. The release of the Nintendo Switch and its dynamic JoyCon controllers reintroduce haptic movement based controls.  Pokémon GO’s augmented reality took gamers outdoors and has encouraged the Harry Potter franchise to follow in its mobile footsteps. Each development encourages a step further into the digital world. At the same time, the movement of bodies always has political dimensions. We live in a world where walls seem like solutions to the movement of bodies, while the mere meeting of bodies elsewhere – for sex, marriage and other reasons – is still forbidden by many states’ rules. Games and game-like interfaces have shown the ability to bend those rules, and to sometimes project other worlds and rule systems over our world in order to make bodies move and meet. For this special issue on ‘Body Movements’, Press Start invited authors to focus on embodiment, body movements, political bodies, community bodies, virtual bodies, physical bodies, feminine, masculine, trans- bodies, agency or its lack, and anything else in between. The response to this invitation was variegated, and provocative, as outlined here