Kristopher Purzycki

We’re currently watching the Jessica Jones series alongside a second watching of Daredevil. As someone who has only been mildly interested in comics, I was more interested in the X-Men series – a property that Marvel/Disney is (for now?) prohibited from incorporating into the MCU.

Because of this, the MCU seems lacking. Marvel’s done a good job in creating a cinematic/television experience that mimics the comic crossover but it’s incomplete: the Hell’s Kitchen series are fantastic but, other than cursory mentions, the Avengers’ films don’t seem to have had much impact.

P.S. I’m predicting a huge Avengers vs. X-Men event to eventually be used to reinvigorate the super-hero genre after it gets stale in the not-too-distant future.

One of the reasons that these games have enjoyed a resurgence is that the tools to create them are free to use and require very little experience to operate. Already mentioned in the comments, Twine is a perfect example of a simple to use platform that is actually quite sophisticated.

Text adventures are interesting because they foreground the limitations of the computer game and the logics that are used to create them. While most contemporary works are more visual, they can all be stripped down to the same structures that fabricate the text adventure.

One of the more frustrating qualities of games like Zork was in finding the command combination that was required to proceed. Although GTAV might conceal this limitation, even this “open world” is prohibitive of free action. This might be one of the reasons that computer games, like any fiction, are increasingly being studied in academia as forms or literature.

I’ve always thought of the choices in Infinite to be a wry joke from the developers that alludes to the overall theme of destiny and fate disclosed at the conclusion.
But I wonder if we’re actually expecting too much from games in general: do we actually have choices in, say, baseball or checkers? Yes, we make strategic decisions but, even when we’re jumping around with our skyhook, we’re still tied to our rails.
Even when we think about the act of problem-solving: while there are several decisions that have to be made, we tend to take only those that we believe will lead to the optimal result.
What I’m not saying is that we don’t have choices in the real world but it does make one more thoughtful of how our decisions are delimited by numerous factors. Why do we make the choices we make? Is it because of our experience? Our upbringing? Our needs and wants?