Walkthrough: videogames and technocultural form - Seth Giddings

Table of figures
Figure 1: Halo 2 (2004).........................................................................................................................................1
Figure 2: fungal powerups in virtual and actual Mario Kart: Double Dash!!.................................................... 3
Figure 3: from a walkthrough for The Legend of Zelda: The Windwaker (Howells 2003)............................ 23
Figure 4: Doom (1993) ....................................................................................................................................... 34
Figure 5: Myst (1993)......................................................................................................................................... 39
Figure 6: Spacewar! (1962) ...............................................................................................................................40
Figure 7: instrumental fantasy: one child, one PC (Argos catalogue: 2001)..................................................... 56
Figure 8: the Gillespies’ living room (Flynn 2003: 568)....................................................................................61
Figure 9: playing Lego Racers 2 ........................................................................................................................ 99
Figure 10: top: first-person perspective (l. Doom, r. Halo) bottom: third-person perspective (l. Lego Racers
2, r. Tomb Raider 2)..........................................................................................................................................103
Figure 11: instructional navigation in Sandy Bay .............................................................................................104
Figure 12: virtual construction..........................................................................................................................105
Figure 13: virtual gravity, virtual death ............................................................................................................106
Figure 14: reanimation..................................................................................................................................... 108
Figure 15: virtual and actual gameworlds......................................................................................................... 110
Figure 16: Go! .....................................................................................................................................................111
Figure 17: playing with virtual physics ............................................................................................................. 112
Figure 18: choices and menus........................................................................................................................... 113
Figure 19: playing the Player, using the ‘keyboard’.......................................................................................... 114
Figure 20: enter name....................................................................................................................................... 114
Figure 21: ‘I’m the one who makes the Lego Racers go’................................................................................... 115
Figure 22: encoding, decoding (Hall 2000 [1973]: 510) ..................................................................................124
Figure 23: the circuit of culture (Hall 1997) .....................................................................................................129
Figure 24: affordances and constraints of the Internet (Ryder & Wilson 1995, cited in Flew 2005: 8) .........136
Figure 25: Advance Wars 2 (2003) ..................................................................................................................159
Figure 26: a Wars World map...........................................................................................................................160
Figure 27: Advance Wars 2 (l) and Cannon Fodder (1995) (r). ......................................................................162
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