Video Game Review
Type:Rider (2013)
Elizabeth J. Fleitz
In this video, I review the 2013 iOS/Android/Steam game Type:Rider, created by French company Cosmografik. The game chronicles the history of typography from its origins in cave paintings to present day digital technologies. Each level of the game is focused on presenting a single typeface, situating the form of the alphabetic letters within a specific historical and cultural moment. The gameplay involves the player jumping and running around each letter, attempting to avoid obstacles and traps along the way. This review looks further at the impact of the gamespace that takes symbols with alphabetic meaning (the letter "A," for instance) and reconstructs them to have a physical meaning within the level (using the angled sides of the "A" like a ramp, trying not to get stuck on the peak at the top). This video reviews the gameplay, evaluates its pedagogical usefulness, and explores how this game illustrates Ian Bogost's notion of procedural rhetoric.
A PDF transcript of the video is available here.
Editor's Note: This review is only the second of what we hope to be many more reviews of digital texts, including video games, software, apps, websites, online archives, and more. The Reviews section invites interested authors to propose reviews of digital texts, to diversify the types of reviews published in Kairos, as well as to provide a go-to resource for our readers. For more information, visit the Kairos Call for Reviews page.
References
Bogost, Ian. (2007). Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bogost, Ian. (2011). How to do things with videogames. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press.
Bolter, Jay David. (2001). Writing space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Brownlee, John. (2013). "Type:Rider" is the ultimate video game about typography. Fast Company. Retrieved June 5, 2017, from https://www.fastcodesign.com/3019584/typerider-is-the-ultimate-video-game-about-typography
Cosmografik/Bulkypix. (2012). Type:Rider [Steam for Mac game].
Gee, James Paul. (2007). What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. New York, NY: St. Martin's Press.
Kirkpatrick, Graeme. (2011). Aesthetic theory and the video game. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
SciFi [mp3 file]. (2016). BenSound. Audio retrieved January 4, 2017, from http://www.bensound.com/sci-fi