The UWM Digital Cultures Collaboratory
Serious Play
Menu Close
  • About
  • Members
    • Serious Play Admin Team
  • Shows
  • Blog
  • Collab Achievements
  • 2023 Live Streaming Conference

Author: Ryan House

A Head in the Clouds: Memories of Final Fantasy VII

February 7, 2022Ryan House Leave a Comment
Featured image

{Cross-posted}   I have something of a confession to make. I’m a big Final Fantasy fan. It’s one of the series that got me into videogames back in the SNES days. Throughout high school, during the “PlayStation era,” those games… Continue Reading →

RPG, Uncategorized

Uncle Dracula’s Phantom Funhouse: Place as Character in the Castlevania Series

October 31, 2021Ryan House Leave a Comment
Candid shot of every parent's inner thoughts as they march through the parking lot at Disney World

It’s October and that means, like every other person worth knowing, I’ve been consuming only the spookiest of entertainment media. In the case of videogames, I started the month circling back to some survival horror titles I had missed (namely,… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Catherine: Full Body – A perfect marriage of narrative and ludic action, Pt. 1, an overview

September 14, 2021Ryan House Leave a Comment
Wall-eyed loser can't decide if he wants to marry his hot, successful girlfriend

The following is an example paper I wrote for my students in a Videogames: history and theories course. You can find the instructions for the assignment here.    Catherine: Full Body (2019) is a “romantic horror story” in which a… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

What I Played Over My Pandemic Staycation

April 9, 2021Ryan House 2 Comments

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the games I spent a lot of time with during our mass social exile. The middle of March might usually be rather late for this kind of year-end retrospective, but if we learned anything these… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Captain Toad and Captain Toad and Me: The Weightiness of the Virtual Body

January 27, 2021Ryan House 6 Comments

  Over the past week or so, I’ve been catching up with a game I missed out on the first time around: Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker. Despite being a spin-off of the Mario franchise, there’s a uniqueness to the world… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Not a Cyberpunk 2077 Review

December 16, 2020Ryan House 4 Comments

Last week, an obscure little videogame called Cyberpunk 2077 was released quietly to absolutely zero over-hyped expectations. For the people who happened across it, it proved to be pretty good. Just kidding, of course. The release of CP2077 was anything… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Oh, The Places You’ll Know: Death Stranding’s Landscape of Data

October 23, 2020Ryan House 2 Comments

Several weeks ago on the Coffee Break stream, I played Kojima Production’s Death Stranding. Watching back that stream, I’m struck by the amount of on-screen data that the player is tasked with parsing at a glance. The game’s environment shows… Continue Reading →

Coffee Break, Uncategorized Death Stranding

Sweet Little Lies: Gender, Power, and Mediated Relationships in Telling Lies

May 10, 2020Ryan House Leave a Comment

No more broken hearts / We’re better off apart / Let’s give it a try / Tell me, tell me, tell me lies -Fleetwood Mac (“Little Lies”)   For the month of April, I’ve been playing through Sam Barlow’s Telling… Continue Reading →

Coffee Break, Uncategorized

Yoku’s Island Express: Queer, Contra-Colonial Game Design

February 12, 2020Ryan House Leave a Comment

[Cross-posted to ludoscholar.net] This week on Coffee Break, I finally played the game that I’ve been talking about for weeks: Yoku’s Island Express. For me, this game excels on a lot of fronts. First, it’s an unlikely mash-up of the… Continue Reading →

Coffee Break, Uncategorized

“Ya can never trust a goat, can ya?”: The Count Lucanor

October 10, 2019Ryan House Leave a Comment

This week on Lunch Zone, Nathan continued the Spook-tober theme with the 2016 horror adventure game The Count Lucanor by developer Baroque Decay. In it, players assume the role of a snotty 10-year-old who’s mad at his mom because his… Continue Reading →

Uncategorized

Post navigation

← Older Articles

Scour the Archives!

Follow Us!

  • Twitch
  • YouTube
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

Check Out Our Twitter!

My Tweets
© 2023 The UWM Digital Cultures Collaboratory. All rights reserved.
Fashionista by aThemes
Skip to toolbar
  • Log In
  • About WordPress
    • About WordPress
    • WordPress.org
    • Documentation
    • Support
    • Feedback