This morning, Sony announced that in 2028 they will discontinue the production of PlayStation games on physical media. This is presumably part of the lead-in to the release of the PlayStation 6, which is rumored to exist as both a low-power handheld and a high-power home console. This news comes on the heels of Rockstar Games announcing that Grand Theft Auto 6 will release in digital form only – if you buy a box, it will contain a download code and that’s it. Sony’s announcement was followed by reporting from Windows Central that the upcoming XBOX successor code-named “Project Helix” may also drop disc support.
A lot of folks have written in various venues about why digital-only games are bad or harmful for this or that reason – access, preservation, economics – there are a million arguments. This post will highlight a concern I have that is often overlooked in these discussions: the effects on education and the classroom.
Tag: writing
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The End of Physical Video Games Threatens Games Education (and Libraries, and Scholars, and…)
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GDC 2026 Recap
Much has been said about the Game Developers Conference’s rebrand to “GDC Festival of Gaming.” Now that we’re on the other side of it, as somebody who was heavily involved in planning of events in and around this year’s conference, I wanted to write a recap of how things went, my thoughts, and what the future might hold.
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Emergent Meaning and Narrative in the Digital Space
Emergent Meaning and Narrative in the Digital Space
Addressing Tensions in Games and Game-like Media“Most people want to be told a story. Leaving it up to a random number generator is dicey.” – Ed Del Castillo, Producer, Command & Conquer
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of entertainment in human culture. Throughout the centuries we as a species have invented many ways to tell ourselves stories, and continue to do so. In recent years, games have become one of the most popular formats for delivering narrative, but as a new form of storytelling, narrative games face several critical issues.[1] Although the problems facing this burgeoning medium are not insurmountable, they are uniquely twisted by the fact that games are, by their nature, a participatory endeavor – a transaction between the designers and players where the contact is far more direct than it is in other forms of popular storytelling. Although as an industry games are growing and are doing much better than older, more established mediums in the marketplace, critical thinking about games, and especially how narratives in games are constructed, is still in its infancy. There are at least two fundamental unresolved questions in games criticism –, “how do games mean?” and “how do games tell compelling stories?” Answering both of these questions is a much larger task than I am capable of achieving in this essay, but by the end I hope to provide a potential framework for how games mean and from there briefly propose a solution to the narrative question.
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Ludic Epistolary or, Where Have All The Letters Gone?
In this essay, I discuss the evolution of epistolary fiction from its early days in novels through modern incarnations in video games.
Justin Bortnick 