About Me and this Blog

My name is Lili, I’m 30 years old and live in Brighton. I’ve recently graduated from Media Studies at the University of Brighton and as a part of my degree I had the chance to take a module entitled Critical Approaches to the Video Game. While I always pegged myself as an avid movie fan and thought that Film Studies will remain my absolute academic passion, the video game module changed everything.

Suddenly I was introduced to retro and modern classics in such a way that was nothing short, but mind blowing (the credit goes to my fantastic lecturer, Dr Paul Ryan). Narrative, interactivity, immersion – words with meanings completely transformed by the required academic readings, the thought-provoking lectures and the hands-on experience facilitated on seminars. I had a chance to play Zork on an Atari 800, Manic Miner on a XZ Spectrum, Mario Tennis on a VirtualBoy, Rez with a Trance Vibrator and so on. I felt touched by the history of a medium that changed so rapidly that its technology is in danger of becoming nonfunctional purely because there will be no more cassette players or analog TVs made. Yet, these historic pieces of machinery are still able to provide hours of fun, entertainment, competition and laughter. While we often think that games like Pong are entirely outdated and cannot possibly provide the graphical detail, narrative depth or thrilling excitement that modern day titles can, the loud and competitive rounds of Pong played on seminar seem to prove otherwise.

I also had a chance to discover titles and genres that were completely off my radar before, like Beautiful Katamari, Fahrenheit and indie games like Limbo and Braid. As a result of our weekly assignment that required us to play a game and write a short analysis about it; I found myself immersing myself in niche titles such as To the Moon and Papers Please. While this blog will start out by the release of my weekly blogs written for this module, I will gradually move on to original articles where I’ll consider, analyse, discuss games from a critical, academic perspective. I also hope to find theories and similarities in my analysis that link video and board gaming, as I’m an avid fan of cooperative board games such as Pandemic, Ghost Stories and Robinson Crusoe. I will provide a full bibliography for each post and I hope to update the blog each week.

Enjoy reading and please, do not hesitate to comment or ask questions. 🙂