(The Cartridge Lit blog.)
I remember playing DDR in 1999 when I visited Osaka as an exchange student. The children in my host family had their own in-home dance pad, and we played it for hours: the perfect, wordless icebreaker.
Start any video game and the beginning is full of fail. Games requiring high levels of twitch facility (think Ghost and Ghouls on the NES or Fallout 3 on modern consoles) result in a lot of deaths early on, until the player masters the dexterity required and the particular skills that respective buttons are mapped to.
I was in awe at the prospect of a same-sex marriage in this world. It was so casual—less than casual, really. The game, being a program, didn’t have any opinion whatsoever about whether my female player-character married a female non-player-character.
The most basic rule, of course, is this: If you feed the cats, the cats will come. If you do not, they will not. A lesson in ephemerality; no conclusive objective. The mementoes changed this.
There was a little icon of a square on the screen. And I was the square. And it was the first sense of existing as a multiplicity (obviously, I didn’t think of it in those terms at that age).
We think video games are literature, and so why shouldn't there be literature about video games? That's the question we're hoping to answer here. Read more.
