To celebrate the release of Issue 4 of the VGA Reader, we will be featuring one article from the new volume with every zine for the foreseeable future. Click through to see the second article, currently hosted by Amherst College Press and available open source on fulcrum.org.

“This essay seeks to trace the historical articulation of Blackness in the FGC against the meritocratic principles of and the demand for hype spectacles. In this, I hope to contribute to understandings of articulations of racial identity and how they are altered in the spaces surrounding fighting games. It is important to understand exactly how Black Americans may engage with fighting games; how gamers and, to a certain extent, games understand racial identity; and how race factors into constructing a competitive space based on a meritocracy.”

Issue XXII: January 2023Uche AnomnachiJanuary 26, 2023VGA Reader, Uche Anomnachi

Artists as Assets: Labor and Capital in the Unity Asset Store

To celebrate the release of Issue 4 of the VGA Reader, we will be featuring one article from the new volume with every zine for the foreseeable future. Click through to see the second article, currently hosted by Amherst College Press and available open source on fulcrum.org.

“The Unity Asset Store sells amateur designers and artists a promise of being able to participate in an idealized, rationalized vision of how the game design industry operates, riffing on a dream to distinguish themselves as artists. Yet in order to sell this vision to aspiring game designers, Unity and the Asset Store depend on marketing the content created by amateur artists in ways that require the artists to essentially package their work as labor and to mask their unique identities as artists.”