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The Virtual Pastoral
This paper was originally presented at the Converse College conference ‘Culturing the Popular’ in September 2010. After Shadow of the Colossus was released for the PlayStation 2 in late 2005, I spent...
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Carts Tapes Discs Drives
This paper was originally presented at the Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, Penn State, PA, March 18, 2011. Today I want to speak about videogames as objects of textual scholarship, granting...
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Tool-Assisted
Console Emulation and Platform Plasticity Since the early 1990s, a special subculture of play, called speedruns, has pushed the limits of videogame skill, performance, and technical mastery. The aim of...
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Emulate the Emulators
How will we play NES/Famicom games 10, 50, 100, or 1000 years from now? We can imagine a not-so-distant future where all of the playable Nintendo Entertainment Systems are trashed, lost,...
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Porting the Kill Screen
Dissecting the code behind an error The 2007 film King of Kong popularized much of the minutia of high-level arcade play. One scene showed underdog Steve Wiebe drawing Madden-esque diagrams to...
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Prêt-à-Jouer and Videogame Couture
What happens when we stop thinking about videogames as cinema and instead think of them through other media, like fashion, dance, or architecture? Note: This paper was originally delivered at the No...
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I AM EXTRA: The Super C Helicopter Boss
How Konami’s developers used the MMC3 scanline counter to create large moving enemies. The following section was originally intended to directly follow the Mega Man 2 Mecha Dragon discussion in the...
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Cuts, corpora, and commentaries from I AM ERROR. Good writing means making sacrifices, and editing is among the hardest tasks that a writer will face. During the nearly four-year process of pitching,...
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How Donkey Kong’s programmers used compression to save ROM space. The following section is one of I AM ERROR’s oldest—it appeared in the initial drafts of chapter 2 (which I wrote first) in early 2012....
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Knots & Loops
Images of Videogame Narratives The following paper was originally delivered at the Readers’ Advisory Forum of the American Library Association in Washington D.C., June 2010. As you may notice from the...
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