Character Assassination
Though they foreground models over characters, systems-oriented video games can’t evade the issues of identity politics The pedagogy of simulation games — city simulators in particular — is worth...
View ArticleAn experiment in forced nostalgia and questionable parenting
Playing With My Son My son Eliot was born in 2004 — the year of Half-Life 2, Doom 3, and the launch of the Nintendo DS. By the time he was born, video games were a $26B industry. I love games, and I...
View ArticleIs Valve Evil?
Forbes offers ‘A More Robust Valve-Is-Evil Hypothesis‘. Kotaku responds by suggesting ‘Valve understands data. Valve does not seem to understand, or seek to understand, people.’
View ArticleA philosopher plays Minecraft
On killing virtual dogs I have killed three dogs in Minecraft. The way to get a dog is to find a wolf, and then feed bones to the wolf until red Valentine’s hearts blossom forth from the wolf, and then...
View ArticleIf You Stop And Look You WIll Literally Die
An Interview with Merritt Kopas – “Talking to the editor of Videogames For Humans about why mainstream games are bad at sex, how traditional narrative structures fail women, and the weird thrill of...
View ArticleThe Perfect Man
How Billy Mitchell became a video-game superstar and achieved Pac-Man bliss at Oxford American. See also: The King of Kong.
View ArticleVirtual Photography
“The more I watched my friends playing WoW, the more I got thinking about how curiously similar the that Azeroth (as the world in WoW is called) was both the most technologically advanced virtual world...
View ArticleIn Soviet Russia…
Once it was determined which games would be produced, the blueprints were allegedly sent to military factories that primarily made electronics used in nuclear testing and weapons. These were perhaps...
View ArticleYou’re in the Aldebaran III spaceport.
A lost mainframe game is found! Wander was probably the first computer game that is recognisable as what came to be known as a “text adventure” (or “interactive fiction”) – pre-dating even ADVENT...
View ArticleI Sing the Story Electric
Much of the material you’re about to watch is obscure, hard to find and not shown very often. Indeed, some of it appears to have gone unnoticed for a very long time. When I informed conference...
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