This is one of a series of ‘critical gaming nights’ (for more information, see below) in which games will be available for play and staff are available to help facilitate critical discussions around the gameplay.

Marvel Rivals (Netease, 2024) is a free-to-play hero shooter that has surged in popularity in 2025. Players are able to play as Marvel heroes such as Spider-man, Captain America, and Susan Storm (the Invisible Woman). The combination of well-known Marvel heroes (and some more obscure ones) in the genre of team shooters, when combined with crisp gameplay and engaging environments, has made for a successful formula. At the same time, the game has courted controversy for, among other things, its AI-based engagement optimizing matchmaking.

What does it feel like to play as a Marvel hero? How can one manage ability cooldowns? Position well? Anticipate ultimates? Have good aim? Students will be guided to think about writing phenomenological accounts of their gameplay and to bring to conscious awareness the process of embodied skill acquisition involved in playing this hero shooter. This exercise, over several gaming nights, attunes our thinking to the way that digital gaming makes demands of our minds and bodies, how we entrain ourselves to play well.

We will be joined by research assistant Saad Nazir, who will help instruct players on the intricacies of the gameplay.

Speaker's Info:

Dr Feng Zhu is Senior Lecturer in Digital Games and Culture in the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. His research focuses on the significance of gaming practices as ways in which players carve out habits, dispositions, modes of perception, and relations to self. He is interested in the understanding such processes as informing us about how we have always worked on ourselves and how there may be ethico-aesthetic possibilities to wander away from existing forms of subjectivity.