• Finding meaning in video game worlds
    • The play area inside of a game is deliberately created and manufactured in order to derive meaning
    • In the context of MGS: Phantom Pain, the landscape is extremely barren and deserted, giving the player the feeling of bringing good to a desolate place and destroying evil
      • Quite literally gives player the power to colonize and imperialize a foreign area
      • Not indicative of what Afghanistan is really like
  • Imperialism in Video Games
    • Games often advance a colonial ideology in which players dominate and control other worlds and people
      • Think of No Man’s Sky - MMO where you can take over planets and exploit them for resources, and the only interactions you have with the inhabitants of worlds is in a fighting context
    • Video games use space as a way to grow and expand and conquer; relates to a male fantasy of domination
  • Studying Video Games
    • Can look at the game design, how players interact with it, how communities around games form, the history of games, etc.
    • Consider multiple parts of gameplay; the mechanics of the game, the agency the player exerts, the control scheme of the game, how you can win/lose a game, the interface of the game