Alum Chris Gates Publishes on Nostalgic Travel in Videogames
Christopher Goetz, BCNM alum, is set to publish an article in Loading...'s 2018 Summer Issue. His piece, "'The Fantasy that Never Takes Place': Nostalgic Travel in Videogames," explores nostalgia in 1990s and early 2000s videogames.
From his abstract:
The article seeks to expand the established discursive and conceptual function accorded to stillness as a form of play. It discusses three ‘nostalgic gestures’ that stall the game’s action: the glance from foreground to background; the shift from the game to paratextual materials; and the drift of attention out the window or away from the gaming context altogether. Gaming’s promise of exotic transport activates a “fervor of the possible,” a melancholic identification with the world beyond which invests game spaces with the capacity for hopeful discovery, verging on a wish to remove oneself from the flow of time altogether.
Loading... is a print and online journal that publishes research on digital games. It attempts to provide a mixed-methods approach to studying the field, welcoming traditional and contemporary papers for submission.
Read the entirety of his article here.