I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want this blog to be. What’s the focus? I can’t possibly write about any and every little thing that catches my attention, right? I know I said I wanted to write more spontaneously but…everything? That’s probably too wide in scope, and a little too ambitious. I’ve got a lot of interests, and they can’t all fit here.

One of my goals in starting Digital Reprise this year is to form better writing habits. To do that, I really need to stick to some kind of central theme and a semblance of routine. My academic research focused on issues around representation, gender, science fiction and American socio-political culture in the 21^st century. Primarily I wrote about science fiction television series, with a side project on video games. I don’t just want to write like an academic here, but these things are all areas that interest me.

In recent years, I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to review video games for ZTGD. I love writing about games – as a reviewer, as an academic, as a player and as a fan. However, I’ve also really wanted to create a forum where I can write about games from all those perspectives, in one place. For example – I’ve long wanted to write about landscape and image composition in games. More than ever, the gaming industry is providing players with a wide breadth of unique environments and worlds to experience. Gameplay and narrative are, of course, just as intriguing and worthy of interrogation when writing about video games – I want to do that here, too. But once in a while I’ll jump into a game and enter a scene that is so visually captivating, I’ll spend more time trying to compose a screenshot that best captures the feeling of that game’s world than actually making any meaningful progress in the game itself. As such, Digital Reprise will have a dedicated section titled Wanderlust: Game Tourism. In it, I want to write about shots like the featured image of this post, from the game Firewatch.

I also have an interest in how the visual aesthetics of a particular game intersect with its narrative and the story it’s trying to tell. I’ve previously written about this in an essay titled “Catastrophic Beauty:” New York City as a Site of Urban Warfare in Contemporary Video Games (published in an edited collection titled Dramatising Disaster). This is to say: I’m curious about the ways in which video games reflect, explore and challenge the contemporary cultural context from which they emerge. In their book Tomb Raiders & Space Invaders: Videogame Forms & Contexts, Geoff King and Tanya Kryzwinska state that video games:

often draw upon or produce material that has social, cultural or ideological resonances, whether these are explicit or implicit and whether they can be understood as reinforcing, negotiating or challenging meanings or assumptions generated elsewhere in society (King and Kryzwinska 2005, 168)

Issues surrounding diversity and representation in video games have been oft-discussed in recent years, and the industry’s economic growth has coincided with a period of flourishing creativity in the medium. The contention that video games should be considered as socio-cultural products that don’t simply exist in a vacuum forms the other key perspective that I want to write about here. What that ends up looking like on a monthly basis, I’m not sure yet. What I hope it does is challenge me to think about those core issues of identity, representation and culture in the games that I play, and draw out some of those issues in smaller, focused essays.

When I think about how Digital Reprise might take shape over the coming year, I wanted to have an answer to the question everyone asks when one says they’ve started a new blog: “what are you writing about?” I still need to work on summarising all of this into an elevator pitch but for now, this is it.

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You can read my chapter “Catastrophic Beauty:” New York City as a Site of Urban Warfare in Contemporary Video Games in Dramatising Disaster, edited by Christine Cornea and Rhys Owain Thomas, here.