Papers by Oscar Moralde
InVisible Culture: An Electronic Journal for Visual Culture, 2019
This paper investigates the link between video game genres, aesthetics of duration, and the tempo... more This paper investigates the link between video game genres, aesthetics of duration, and the temporalities of everyday life by examining a relatively young genre predominantly defined by duration: the clicker game, also known as the idle game or incremental game. The genre, whose primary gameplay consists of clicking to make a number go up and activating automated processes to make the number go up faster, was initiated by satirical and absurdist games such as Cow Clicker (2010) and Cookie Clicker (2013), but has been quickly followed by dozens of (mostly) sincere imitators. Discussion of the genre has focused on the seemingly-paradoxical popularity of games with little to no gameplay; however, I argue that the genre’s dominating aesthetic strategy is in recasting the act of waiting as a form of active gameplay through activating both very short durations (scattered momentary gameplay actions) and very long durations (the accumulation of those actions into progress over days, weeks, and months). To function, the clicker genre requires a technocultural environment where individuals have near-continuous access to computing power; in the ways that clicker games reshape temporality through those computing devices, they make visible a technocratic neoliberal logic of extracting value from ever more granular segments of time.
Journal of Popular Culture, 2019
The recent trend of professional basketball players entering the world of high fashion represents... more The recent trend of professional basketball players entering the world of high fashion represents a decisive shift in self-presentation that both challenges racist assumptions about black masculinity and racialized restrictions like the NBA's dress code, but also helps further the league's project of making black masculinity safe for mainstream consumption. NBA All-Star All-Style, a 2015 TV program produced at the intersection of NBA All-Star Weekend and New York Fashion Week, displays the NBA dandy, a liminal figure that redefines athletic black masculinity but remains within accepted bounds of aspirational consumer capitalism.
Well Played, Mar 2015
The indie puzzle “dystopian document thriller” Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) has been critical... more The indie puzzle “dystopian document thriller” Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) has been critically acclaimed for its mix of compelling gameplay mechanics and satirical depictions of bureaucracy run amok. Using a phenomenological approach that focuses on the embodied and subjective experience of play, this paper performs a close examination of the game in order to address the question of how fun and entertaining gameplay might coexist with the representation of serious social themes. This examination identifies and describes key elements of the game’s formal aesthetics (the layout of the interface, in-game representations of the controls, and the management of player attention) which help cultivate a bureaucratic and even dehumanizing player mindset, which is then held up by the game for reflection. This analysis also highlights the avenues of inquiry available to the phenomenological approach and to examining the experience of the game as it is played.
Media Fields Journal, Aug 2014
Holding up the “art game” Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) to critical analysis, this article... more Holding up the “art game” Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2012) to critical analysis, this article explores the ways in which video games can produce embodied spatial experiences through reversible phenomenological relationships with players. As a first-person game set on a Scottish island, Dear Esther intervenes in a long tradition of landscape art and its concomitant discourse on perspective and subjectivity. I unpack the ways in which mobility in a game reveals the contingency and multiplicity of viewpoints in space through a process of oscillating between viewing and movement. Using theories of tactile aesthetics and haptic visuality, I also explore how gameplay generates forms through bodily intention performed on the controls. These forms are vectors through which the player experiences the landscape of a game and maintains an embodied relationship with the game and the image on the screen. I also argue that Dear Esther’s critical engagement with landscape comes from the dynamic tension between these modes of experience and the enigmatic, “thin” narrative that binds them, allowing for a different awareness and relationship to video game space.
Latin American Perspectives, May 2014
This article reviews La jaula de oro (The Golden Cage) (Mexico, 2013) and Un cuento chino (Chines... more This article reviews La jaula de oro (The Golden Cage) (Mexico, 2013) and Un cuento chino (Chinese Take-Away) (Argentina, 2011) as films concerned with themes of migration. The first is a story about a group of Guatemalan youths attempting to cross through Mexico to reach the United States, while the second follows a young man from China who is marooned in Buenos Aires while searching for his family. While one film is a realist tragedy positioned for international festival and art-house audiences and the other is a mainstream comedy designed for domestic consumption, both engage with similar plot points involving language barriers, the role of migrant labor, and the intervention of government and police authority. Most notably, both films feature a cultural outsider as a significant character, whose origins and motives for migration constitute a significant narrative question. This character moves through Latin American spaces, but other characters in the film question or challenge this outsider’s right to belong within those spaces; in each film the fate of the outsider affects the fate of all the other characters involved. Taken together, these films help show that the question of Latin American migration is not merely a one-way northward trajectory but part of a complex and interconnected flow of people, labor, and culture.
Conference Presentations by Oscar Moralde
Janet Murray declared that Tetris (1984) “is a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Ameri... more Janet Murray declared that Tetris (1984) “is a perfect enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990s – of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention…” (1997) While this statement is most famously cited as one of the flashpoints in musty debates over narratology vs. ludology in games, it also provides a basis for thinking about the lived experience of players vis-à-vis genre consolidation, genre preference, and designing within a genre. How do everyday experiences affect how players perceive gameplay aesthetics, and how do players receive design choices that reflect, comment, or subvert those everyday experiences?
This paper examines the formation of a genre which even more deeply exemplifies the tasking characteristics Murray describes: the clicker or idle game, which reduces gameplay action to single clicks or taps of a button to increase numerical values, and where much of the gameplay actually consists of waiting for those numbers to passively increase. Though popularized by Ian Bogost’s satirical Cow Clicker (2010), the core of idle game design stretches back to games like Progress Quest (2002) which intended to poke fun at the temporizing mechanical design of MMORPGs. An explosion of similar games such as Cookie Clicker (2013) and Time Clickers (2015) has established the genre as a durable mode of gameplay, while more recent examples such as Spaceplan (2016) and Megalomaniac (2017) show that narrative and aesthetic variation is possible even with such a seemingly-sparse template.
Ultimately, the paper aims to show how the structure of the clicker experience comports with how many people try to “fit” gameplay itself into the rhythms of everyday life. Clicker games slot comfortably into the multitasking environments of tabbed browsers and smartphones, which compel users to align their temporalities with that of computer processes (Hu 2015). Similarly, if the app and gig economy drives people to extract value from ever-more-granular units of time (Crary 2013), clickers literally valorize the mobile gaming impulse of momentary play by rewarding the diligent player with ever-larger numbers. Exploring this genre should clarify methods for reading specific design choices, their popularity, and their consolidation into genres against the experiences that players bring to games and the experiences they seek from them.
What is a game critic? How does their work stand in relation to other types of criticism? The wan... more What is a game critic? How does their work stand in relation to other types of criticism? The waning influence of the traditional mold of the critical subject, “who by fine scholarship and fastidious rejection… can separate the work that has distinction from the work that has it not” (Wilde 1891), can be felt across all media, but it is clearest in the popular and academic discourse of video games. In discussing games, Ian Bogost has polemically stated “the era of critical communities is over” (2015).
This paper reframes some of the discussion around games criticism through examining certain formal and cultural characteristics of games, including the duration of game experience, the multimodality of gameplay, and the apparatus gating play. I address the limits of critical expression in games, so that in addition to identifying who is able to speak about games, we can understand why and how they do so.
If the idea of video games as vehicles for procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2010) provides an ultimate... more If the idea of video games as vehicles for procedural rhetoric (Bogost 2010) provides an ultimately incomplete understanding of the form's political possibilities, we can turn to the qualities of games as sites of embodied aesthetics (Kirkpatrick 2011), and particularly the way specific design choices produce different types of "game feel" (Swink 2008).
This talk examines the grand strategy game Europa Univeralis IV (Paradox 2013) and the choices it makes in simulating the politics of the early modern era. Its interface effects create specific embodied experiences of political processes, and allow us to ask questions such as "Does colonialism have a shape?" Ultimately, in connecting the details of gameplay experience to meaningfulness in the world, we may find that game processes are far better at raising questions than providing answers.
This paper examines the phenomenon of language contact in films and how the cinema’s audiovisual ... more This paper examines the phenomenon of language contact in films and how the cinema’s audiovisual capacities make manifest the intersubjective experiences of confronting a foreign language. I look at two South Korean films as a case study: Seducing Mr. Perfect (Sang Woo-kim, 2006) and A Season of Good Rain (Hur Jin-Ho, 2009), each of which feature bilingual leads and have a mix of Korean and English spoken dialogue. The English language has a material presence within these films and enacts a site of tension through which the characters (and the audience) negotiate questions of linguistic and national identity.
Seducing Mr. Perfect, in posing the titular American character as an ideal for the protagonist to strive toward, makes visible a number of “ideologies of English” as identified by Joseph Sung-Yul Park (2009): anxiety over English mastery is connected to anxieties over international prestige, economic success, and self-worth. A Season of Good Rain, however, uses English as a third term to bridge understanding between Korean and Chinese characters, and through its strategies we can see the possibilities for cinema to translate and transcend language within a hybridized, contingent space.
The film Boyhood (2014) has received acclaim for portraying the growth of its boy protagonist fro... more The film Boyhood (2014) has received acclaim for portraying the growth of its boy protagonist from age six to eighteen, facilitated by a production cycle that operated intermittently for more than a decade. The critical response to the film accords great significance to the “organic” qualities of its process (in capturing developments outside the total control of the filmmakers) along with the element of “contingency” involved (in the assumption of risk that outside forces posed in disrupting or altering the trajectory of the film itself). These are connected to the duration of the film’s production, and using Mary Ann Doane's (2002) analysis of cinematic temporality, I unpack that notion of duration by juxtaposing Boyhood against a pair of films that embarked on a similar “slow” production process but to very different ends: Doug Block’s documentary The Kids Grow Up (2009) and Michael Winterbottom’s family drama Everyday (2012).
Talks by Oscar Moralde
This talk outlines how the ubiquity of digital computing as a cultural interface has transformed ... more This talk outlines how the ubiquity of digital computing as a cultural interface has transformed the perspectives and assumptions of both filmmakers and film viewers. Drawing upon Neta Alexander's "Rage against the Machine," we can trace how digital imaging, editing, and compositing has made the film image more manipulable and thus more fragmented; this dissolving materiality pairs with contemporary spectators' multifaceted engagement with cinematic texts across a variety of screens and video platforms. Unfriended (Gabriadze 2014) provides one cinematic example of the anxieties of computerized presence through the found-footage horror genre, using long-take spatial-visual montage and a glitch-buffering aesthetic to link narrative questions of suspense to technical questions of hardware and software failure.
Periodicals by Oscar Moralde
Trop Magazine, Nov 13, 2012
Abraham Lincoln in the cinema finds himself defined by the same durable iconography: he’s always ... more Abraham Lincoln in the cinema finds himself defined by the same durable iconography: he’s always a humble rail-splitter who wields the most workmanlike of tools and cuts a striking silhouette in his stovepipe hat. He shepherded his country away from the abyss, a feat that got him enshrined in a throne of marble. And we are meant to gaze upon tales of his youth—of his formative years in which his strength of character was forged—with the supposed hope that, like that monument, they might communicate some fraction of what it means to be a part of this nation we call America. The Founding Fathers may serve as our national pantheon, substitute gods and legends for a youngish country yearning for the weight of time immemorial. If so, their successor, Lincoln, is singular where they are plural; if they are creators, Lincoln is a redeemer figure who (save for that dwindled strain of sub-Mason-Dixon reactionaries who take his name as imperious anathema) carries at least some symbolic significance as the figure of who preserved the Republic in its darkest days and thus also preserved the concept of “American” as being a thing worth a damn. And yet this mythic Lincoln—the Lincoln that was born when the man died and which inhabits both the shadows of our political rhetoric and those of the cinema screen—is not immutable.
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Papers by Oscar Moralde
Conference Presentations by Oscar Moralde
This paper examines the formation of a genre which even more deeply exemplifies the tasking characteristics Murray describes: the clicker or idle game, which reduces gameplay action to single clicks or taps of a button to increase numerical values, and where much of the gameplay actually consists of waiting for those numbers to passively increase. Though popularized by Ian Bogost’s satirical Cow Clicker (2010), the core of idle game design stretches back to games like Progress Quest (2002) which intended to poke fun at the temporizing mechanical design of MMORPGs. An explosion of similar games such as Cookie Clicker (2013) and Time Clickers (2015) has established the genre as a durable mode of gameplay, while more recent examples such as Spaceplan (2016) and Megalomaniac (2017) show that narrative and aesthetic variation is possible even with such a seemingly-sparse template.
Ultimately, the paper aims to show how the structure of the clicker experience comports with how many people try to “fit” gameplay itself into the rhythms of everyday life. Clicker games slot comfortably into the multitasking environments of tabbed browsers and smartphones, which compel users to align their temporalities with that of computer processes (Hu 2015). Similarly, if the app and gig economy drives people to extract value from ever-more-granular units of time (Crary 2013), clickers literally valorize the mobile gaming impulse of momentary play by rewarding the diligent player with ever-larger numbers. Exploring this genre should clarify methods for reading specific design choices, their popularity, and their consolidation into genres against the experiences that players bring to games and the experiences they seek from them.
This paper reframes some of the discussion around games criticism through examining certain formal and cultural characteristics of games, including the duration of game experience, the multimodality of gameplay, and the apparatus gating play. I address the limits of critical expression in games, so that in addition to identifying who is able to speak about games, we can understand why and how they do so.
This talk examines the grand strategy game Europa Univeralis IV (Paradox 2013) and the choices it makes in simulating the politics of the early modern era. Its interface effects create specific embodied experiences of political processes, and allow us to ask questions such as "Does colonialism have a shape?" Ultimately, in connecting the details of gameplay experience to meaningfulness in the world, we may find that game processes are far better at raising questions than providing answers.
Seducing Mr. Perfect, in posing the titular American character as an ideal for the protagonist to strive toward, makes visible a number of “ideologies of English” as identified by Joseph Sung-Yul Park (2009): anxiety over English mastery is connected to anxieties over international prestige, economic success, and self-worth. A Season of Good Rain, however, uses English as a third term to bridge understanding between Korean and Chinese characters, and through its strategies we can see the possibilities for cinema to translate and transcend language within a hybridized, contingent space.
Talks by Oscar Moralde
Periodicals by Oscar Moralde
This paper examines the formation of a genre which even more deeply exemplifies the tasking characteristics Murray describes: the clicker or idle game, which reduces gameplay action to single clicks or taps of a button to increase numerical values, and where much of the gameplay actually consists of waiting for those numbers to passively increase. Though popularized by Ian Bogost’s satirical Cow Clicker (2010), the core of idle game design stretches back to games like Progress Quest (2002) which intended to poke fun at the temporizing mechanical design of MMORPGs. An explosion of similar games such as Cookie Clicker (2013) and Time Clickers (2015) has established the genre as a durable mode of gameplay, while more recent examples such as Spaceplan (2016) and Megalomaniac (2017) show that narrative and aesthetic variation is possible even with such a seemingly-sparse template.
Ultimately, the paper aims to show how the structure of the clicker experience comports with how many people try to “fit” gameplay itself into the rhythms of everyday life. Clicker games slot comfortably into the multitasking environments of tabbed browsers and smartphones, which compel users to align their temporalities with that of computer processes (Hu 2015). Similarly, if the app and gig economy drives people to extract value from ever-more-granular units of time (Crary 2013), clickers literally valorize the mobile gaming impulse of momentary play by rewarding the diligent player with ever-larger numbers. Exploring this genre should clarify methods for reading specific design choices, their popularity, and their consolidation into genres against the experiences that players bring to games and the experiences they seek from them.
This paper reframes some of the discussion around games criticism through examining certain formal and cultural characteristics of games, including the duration of game experience, the multimodality of gameplay, and the apparatus gating play. I address the limits of critical expression in games, so that in addition to identifying who is able to speak about games, we can understand why and how they do so.
This talk examines the grand strategy game Europa Univeralis IV (Paradox 2013) and the choices it makes in simulating the politics of the early modern era. Its interface effects create specific embodied experiences of political processes, and allow us to ask questions such as "Does colonialism have a shape?" Ultimately, in connecting the details of gameplay experience to meaningfulness in the world, we may find that game processes are far better at raising questions than providing answers.
Seducing Mr. Perfect, in posing the titular American character as an ideal for the protagonist to strive toward, makes visible a number of “ideologies of English” as identified by Joseph Sung-Yul Park (2009): anxiety over English mastery is connected to anxieties over international prestige, economic success, and self-worth. A Season of Good Rain, however, uses English as a third term to bridge understanding between Korean and Chinese characters, and through its strategies we can see the possibilities for cinema to translate and transcend language within a hybridized, contingent space.