Yeah, that was a hiatus. Time for a Second Meditation and it’s the biggest piece I’ve done written yet. The inspiration for this manifesto/rant came from reading a back-and-forth debate on the nature of New Games Journalism over a year ago. It occurred to me that neither side of the debate really grasped what NGJ was. Following this train of thought, I came to the conclusion that Kieron Gillen might not have known either. Fast forward a year and the Sony “Michael” advertising campaign has me a-thinking. That foetus of a NGJ rant is now a full-formed gaming philosophy theory. Like the first, this meditation is long and rambling, it tries to touch upon as many different features of the Theory as possible. In the end it reads more like a manifesto. Ho-hum!
The Existence of the Player Character
On this blog I’ve tried to ask questions that claw at the essential subject matter of games. From what we should properly understand as an RPG to what a definition of aesthetic beauty might be in relation to interactive art. Big questions, too much big to answer in the confines of a humble blog. But before we should even deal with them, there is one deeper question that needs to be asked (if not answered). The question is central to games writing; I argue that New Games Journalism should be properly understood as a mass positing of this question, holding it up as the most vital of all. The question is simply this: who(or what) is this phenomenon, the Player Character?