Papers by Francis Butterworth-Parr
Games and Culture
This article develops Kawika Guillermo's ‘machphrasis’ (2016) as a theoretical contribution t... more This article develops Kawika Guillermo's ‘machphrasis’ (2016) as a theoretical contribution to discourse considering the deployment of video games in contemporary literary culture. After presenting machphrasis’ academic stakes, I propose that machphrasis can give explanations for some techniques and images endemic to late 20th/21st century writing with regards to video games represented in prose. By appending Guillermo's conceptual work with three additions, I work towards a reproducible poetics of the video game in prose writing. I will show that machphrasis may be used to understand video games in literature as proxies for anticipated technologies, as discursive tools for reckoning with new subjectivities indebted to play, and as the means for generating new ideological positions for those who play games but are excluded from the normative ‘gamer’ group. This contribution prepares current academic discourse for a future literary landscape increasingly beholden to machphras...
I LEARN THROUGH PARADISE, OR DISCO INFERNO? A BRIEF ETYMOLOGY OF DISCO ELYSIUM, 2021
If we believe Estonian game development company ZA/UM that their critical darling 2018 RPG Disco ... more If we believe Estonian game development company ZA/UM that their critical darling 2018 RPG Disco Elysium (2018) has 'over a million words in the game!' and believe reviews gushing with superlatives-'one of the finest RPGs on PC' (Kelly, 2019); 'wondrous and unique compared to its peers (Dale, 2019); 'a masterpiece, if flawed' (Bell, 2019)-then speculation as to whether Disco Elysium constitutes a generational artistic triumph, what we might call in literature studies a "great work", can begin. In this spirit, and given the textual inundation of this video game, I focus on just two words: 'Disco' and 'Elysium', and will explore the valances of this bizarre word pairing. I begin with disco, move from the putatively recognised reference to disco music, investigate the ways Disco Elysium wears its disco roots, then shift to its Latin root as the verb 'to learn'. This reflects Disco Elysium's growth out of two readerly spaces, notably the 'bibliothéqué' via disco music and Black Isle Studios' equally lauded Planescape: Torment (1999)-Disco Elysium's clearest video game influence. Disco Elysium does not separate its word pairing with a colon, as its ancestor Planescape: Torment does, lending grammatical weight to the argument that the disco in Disco Elysium is not a noun, but a verb doing something to Elysium. From here, the entanglement of reading, dancing, bodies, and knowledge sits as a composite image that pollinates the Grecian paradise 'Elysium', a place between definitions, old and older. This analysis suggests games like Disco Elysium deploy words with remarkable aesthetic deft, and further research into its textual details can destabilise the cultural borders between natively ludic and literary beauty.
Thinking the impossible is an inevitable consequence of nuclear criticism insofar as the real ref... more Thinking the impossible is an inevitable consequence of nuclear criticism insofar as the real referent of its criticism does not exist. If critique is to extend what it criticises, bring forward what was once hidden, then nuclear criticism can only function through anticipation. Having to imagine the scenario gambles on the fidelity of that future event; nuclear criticism can only intervene before the fact and speculate on the limitless potential of total nuclear war, a partial nuclear event, or the historical conditions today that may serve to carry the nuclear world to agreeable contingency.
Disability studies, like all other fields dedicated to studying an oppression, addresses a simple... more Disability studies, like all other fields dedicated to studying an oppression, addresses a simple problem that manifests as a complex social phenomenon. Disability studies at its purest is an emancipatory endeavour; its objective is to unshackle the impaired body from the socio-political oppression placed weightily on top of impairment, that which we call 'disability'. Disability, then, is not something embodied but something imparted to restrict, to imprison, and to demonise an atypical body. Therefore, disability is to impairment what sexism is to sex, and feminism's goal to emancipate women is largely analogous to disability studies' goal to emancipate the impaired. However, where the focus of feminism investigates the ways in which societal structures, norms and values are contradictory to female equality, disability studies has often looked to the impaired body as a square peg in a circular hole.
Drafts by Francis Butterworth-Parr
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Papers by Francis Butterworth-Parr
Drafts by Francis Butterworth-Parr