Kino Maravillas and Daniel Sperling examine Battlefield 4, a critically-acclaimed first person shooter game from Swedish developer DICE. Battlefield combines high quality graphics, directional audio, and realistic gameplay elements to deliver an immersive shooter experience. We used two chapters from Bogost’s book, “Empathy” and “Drill,” to describe how the game conveys these themes and thus supports Bogost’s assertions.
This time I played two games, Depression Quest and dys4ia. Both of them are about psychological stress and provided me a chance to see their world in depth. Unlike the previous games I have played so far in this class, they are both based on the website and the playing surfaces are simple: Depression Quest is simply consisted of text and dys4ia is consisted of simple graphics and text and arcade tropes.
Dys4ia is developed by Anna Anthropy, who is male to female transsexual. Thus, she created this game based on her own experience in which sex is brought up many times in her works. It reminded me of the GONE HOME, the very first video games that I played, which is about gender and homosexual love. Even though gender topic is a grey area that people don’t want to talk about that much, it appears often in games. As I played the games, I can really experience the author’s struggles for the hormone therapy through the daily life experience in the game. The game itself is easy, however, the sentiments that author put in it made the game complex. I gradually felt depressed that I put myself in the author’s shoes and was suffering what she was. The narrative form really engaged people and felt connected to the game.
Depression Quest seems a little boring at first because it is consisted of text and multiple choices. It reminded me of a psychology course I took before. Even though the stories are descriptive and relatable to real life, I felt like I was doing a psychology survey or homework rather than playing a game. I think it is because of the psychology class, in which I learned a lot terminologies. Thus, I like Dys4ia more because my empathy was more easily aroused by it and it is more game.
Have you all already listened to the second podcast episode?
Note that if you head over to the episode on the Soundcloud site, you can leave comments. One nifty thing about Soundcloud is that you can key those comments into specific moments, so as you’re playing just hit pause and enter your comment and it will be tagged to that second in the podcast. Please do leave feedback and comments for Billie and Laura, and for Zach and Rohan on the first episode. Let them know your thoughts on their work!