THE DAY BEFORE VIDEO GAME PC

“Cultural time has folded back on itself,” Fisher said. Kukshtel referenced the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher, whose lecture The Slow Cancellation of the Future posited that we’re trapped in a cultural stasis from which no new significant artistic movements or developments can emerge.

But much of the time, I was watching enemies being shot, loot being collected, weapons being crafted, characters levelling up – the reflexive mechanical structures that feel utterly entrenched. There were several games I was excited by during the events season: The Alters, a psychological thriller from 11 Bit Studios the interactive Lynchian adventure As Dusk Falls the space farming sim Lightyear Frontier. Rather than look to the future, video games are now being designed as instant cultural artefacts, because nostalgia has become indivisible from the present. This has always been partially the case with big games, but the gap between products we’re nostalgic about and products that are contemporary has drastically narrowed – hence the excitement for a remake of The Last of Us, a game that’s barely a decade old. Games, he argues, no longer have the capacity to explore innovative concepts because they are trapped in an ever-tightening production loop built around the replication and recommodification of what’s been successful in the past. This fear is tackled brilliantly in a post by game developer Kyle Kukshtel. We did get Japanese gaming auteur Hideo Kojima promising, at the Xbox event, that his next project would make revolutionary use of Microsoft’s cloud gaming infrastructure, but who knows when we’ll see that.įrustrating … a long-awaited look at Starfield It may seem churlish expecting radical ideas from the mainstream industry, and there was a lot of interesting fare from independent developers on show, but now that we’re entering the mid-phase of the console generation, I was expecting at least a couple of innovations. And it was frustrating that our first extended look at the long-awaited sci-fi adventure Starfield focused not on the wonders of interplanetary exploration but on a long shootout with identikit space pirates. Sci-fi horror game The Callisto Protocol, from one of the makers of Dead Space, looked like … Dead Space.

Major reveals included a remake of The Last of Us, a remake of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI and news about the reimagining of the classic role-player System Shock.Įven fresh titles seemed familiar. They were underwhelming for many seasoned players.

THE DAY BEFORE VIDEO GAME PC

Last week, the industry did its best to fill that gaping content maw with three online events – the Summer Game fest, the Xbox and Bethesda showcase and the PC gaming show. T he absence of the E3 expo in Los Angeles for the past two years has left a gigantic vacuum in the video game calendar.

The day before video game