Todd Harper Profile picture
Game & media studies scholar studying games as culture and communication. Assistant Professor at University of Baltimore in Simulation & Digital Entertainment.
Jan 27, 2021 6 tweets 2 min read
[heaving the world's heaviest sigh] You know in its own way this Resident Evil character, while being the most basic/bland/uninspired/tropey "greedy character -> fat caricature" shit is also some next-level cinematography because he's always framed in tight/enclosed spaces where he "shouldn't fit"
Jan 26, 2021 9 tweets 2 min read
Okay I genuinely feel the direct quote tweet of someone you disagree with to go in on it is bad practice but can be justified in certain situations, so I'm going for it. This reply, and the story in which he elaborates linked earlier in the thread, is the most hilarious abdicating of responsibility of a content producer with unparalleled access I can possibly imagine.

Oct 24, 2020 10 tweets 2 min read
If you follow game studies academics you're likely to see this thread pop up a number of times in the next few days but

I cannot oversell the extent to which a lot of us saw this yesterday and just shouted "WHAT" I want to offer, as someone who gave at least one ReFIG talk myself, some additional context, especially for US non-scholars.

ReFIG was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant. It's a federal grant program in Canada to support research.
Oct 23, 2020 4 tweets 2 min read
True story: I saw all the memes mocking this but did not in fact know the source was a man kissing his son so that's fun For the record, @iainahendry produced what I think is the best video game-specific instantiation of said meme

Dec 30, 2019 12 tweets 3 min read
Okay I didn't want to engage the current "rewind feature" thing in vidya game twitter r/n because the original statement being parodied in the meme is such obvious stupid bullshit, HOWEVER I see a teaching moment, design-wise, so. Let's say you're a game designer and you are making a platformer. You want it to be really challenging for the player so it requires a lot of disparate things: precise timing, good reflexes, etc.
Apr 27, 2019 15 tweets 3 min read
Hi everyone.
I want to talk for a moment about a common narrative trope, "Person falls out of their normal life into a depressed state and after a timeskip emerges from it a comically exaggerated fat person." Probably the easiest to recall and most egregious example of this is "Fat Adama" from the Battlestar Galactica remake, but honestly, it's super common across cultures. One of my favorite anime, Yuri on Ice, uses it as their entire story hook for the first two episodes.