With 2015 nestling into our memories the time has come to look forward to a glorious future of development, upward mobility and technical innovation. Soon the troubles of yesteryear will settle into a cautionary tale, one that we tell only as a monument to how far we’ve come.
Unless…unless really 2015 was the last good year! And that all those fond memories are lost forever as we naively bury our childhoods in reckless pursuit of “new!” Lord helps us if we wind up like the kids these days who can’t put their phones and appreciate nature, tradition and the value of taking things slow.
Okay, so hyperbole aside, we have some pretty extreme ways of looking at the motion of time. It seems like no matter how hard we try, we keep getting sucked into thinking of progress either in terms of utopia or apocalypse. Like anything else that speaks, games seem to have a lot of things to say about progress, especially as a medium closely tied and contingent on technology, resources and expertise. Let’s welcome 2016 with a conversation on ‘Progress‘ as it pertains to the ways we play and relate to games.
What is the typical story of progress in a game? What exceptions are there to the rules of progress? And how have games changed in relation to social or technical progress? We want to know about the analogue game that captures the mechanisms of technology and the digital game that captures the complexity of social movements. Tell us about the tools you use to build games and how they’ve changed the way you think about play. Where do you see games going? Have they really changed much at all? What does progress mean to you as someone invested, one way or another, in games?
I foresee a bright and devastating conclusion to 2016’s inaugural BoRT, but it can only happen if you get involved and pilot this machine forward. You have until January 31st to submit but be sure to check back throughout the month to see what other writers have had to say.
Use this code to embed the links in your blog, if your publishing platform allows iframes:
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Please email us your submissions or tweet them to my brand new twitter handle, @thecybersteam or Critical-Distance’s good ol’ fashioned one, @critdistance. Be sure to use the #BoRT hashtag so we know where to include your work. Happy blogging!
Suggestions for the Round Table:
- Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
- This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as I receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
- As a knight of the round table we encourage you to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece and give the original writer a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going!
- If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start.
- You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free but we will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.