Starting a cult, mothers from antiquity, and cozy games.
Last game you played? I’ve been playing Cult of the Lamb! I accidentally played the first few hours on the game difficulty “very hard”, which was indeed not a walk in the park. When I finally switched to “medium”, I was breezing through the game and worked on becoming a benevolent cult leader.
What’s a topic you’d like to make a documentary about? Ivo Furman and Arda Erdikmen gave a fascinating talk about modifications to Atari consoles called “Attention Users, Please Refrain from Modifying Your Ataris” – Corporate Region-Locking Practices and Creative Computing Responses in Türkiye during Digra 2025. It would be interesting to see how localization of early consoles around the world worked and the funny and bizarre forms this could take!
Quote from a reading you’d recommend? “Cuteness, as both an aesthetic and an affect, creates a hierarchical relationship between the passive cute object and the agentic subject observing it. Cozy games with cute aesthetics thus can grant players an amplified sense of agency because they are the subject taking in the cozy object, evoking a desire to nurture, care, and tend to, similar to the affective qualities of cuteness. Moreover, cuteness has the potential to reverse the affective consequences of its object, exemplifying “a situation in which making a world smaller – or, if you like, cuter – results in an uncanny reversal, changing its meaning into its exact opposite” (Ngai, 2012, p. 87). In this sense, cozy games with cute aesthetics provide strategies to reinstate a sense of control lost in our struggle for ontological security, providing the opportunity to turn a hostile world on its head, reinforcing agency by disarming its threats.” Bódi, B. (2024). The Duality of Cozy Games: Cozy Agency, Neoliberalism, and Affect.
What game has some stellar/your favorite voice-acting? Vampyr! This is also attested by a bunch of the Steam reviews. The game has a strong narrative and amazing music, but the voice acting really makes me want to interact and listen to all of the characters.
What’s a moment of learning or teaching that felt really fun to you? The Michigan State University has some really nice courses on Coursera, teaching the basics of game design in Unity. It’s very satisfying to get things to actually work, and to make sense of the plethora of buttons in the program.
What’s one of your favorite historical anecdotes? I’m really fond of any kind of text, artefact or other evidence that showcases that people in the past were just people. For a course, I read the translation of a papyrus fragment in which a mother was travelling to one of her grown-up sons, and updated her other son about her travel. It was meant to indicate how not just soldiers, or men, or the very elite had mobility in antiquity, but that this mother could also go from one place to the next. However, the phrasing of one particular sentence really stuck with me “is it for this that I carried you ten months and I nursed you during three years that you are not capable of remembering me by letter?”. All throughout the time, parents get upset because their children don’t stay in touch enough, and know how to poignantly bring across that message. Call your mom!
What’s a game that you really should’ve played by now? Another game that has been sitting untouched in my Steam Library for years: ARK: Survival Evolved. Not really within my usual alley, but it has plenty of enthusiastic reviews and since I already got it, I might as well play it (at some point).
What question should be swapped out for another? What’s a topic you’d like to make a documentary about? has been around for a bit now, so let’s swap it out with: What’s a reason you’re looking forward to autumn?
Hello! My name is Corine Gerritsen and I am responsible for the subproject ‘Mechanics’ in the project of Playful Time machines. I got both my BA degree in history and my RMA in Ancient Studies at Utrecht University. I started focusing on the past in video games during my internship at VALUE, and the topic stuck. Always up for checking out new, old, small, big, whacky, and serious ludic renditions of the past.
