Theme: Video Games
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One of the strengths of BioShock Infinite, acknowledged less often than its expansive and detailed historical-revisionist steampunk setting, is the way its narrative is punctuated. The extended forays down cobblestone streets – and the intermittent murderous rampages – are connective tissue, linking a series of scenes that are genuinely, jarringly emotional.Read more
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Advertisements from the underwater city of Rapture.Read more
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The great lesson of SimCity, the fact the game was built to display, is the delight of city life, of urbanity in general. Even failing cities are beautiful in SimCity. Their streets are straight and well kempt, their deserted building zones are clean and peaceful and full of possibility. Read more
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McKenzie Wark speaks at the NYU Game Center.Read more
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Isn’t it strange how complex and overwhelming our feelings about fictional people can become? There is a conflict of impulses: the sympathetic and the dramatic. We want characters to be happy for the same reason we want our friends and family to be happy – hell, I’m such a goddamn hippie; I even want my enemies to be happy, if possible.Read more
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We are drowning in myths. Of course, I don't mean myths like primitive folk stories transcribed in anthropology textbooks, transmitted in a way that no shaman could have foreseen. Those myths are under glass, specimens preserved for our edification and amusement. Some commentators – like the great Claude Levi-Strauss – didn't bother acknowledging any other definition of the term.Read more
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In early 2010, Wikileaks released deeply disturbing footage from a US Apache helicopter that showed the gunship’s crew gunning down civilians and a Reuters’s journalist in Baghdad. I have seen photos of battlefields before; I have seen planes smash into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre from a hundred different angles; but I have never before watched through the eyes of someone lining up an individual in a crosshair and opening fire.Read more
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Creators of electronic literature are progressing toward a more pervasive employment of the “ludic” — of the spirit of play inhabiting not just the writing, and not just the programming, but both in an elaborate, symbiotic combination. The tradition of “ludic” writing is well-rehearsed in criticism of electronic literature, for example in the magisterial anthology The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort.Read more
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A videogame corridor is possibly the simplest way to create epistemic suspense through spatial engineering. You can look down the corridor, thanks to games’ adoption of scientific perspective, but you don’t know what lies on the other side of the door at the end, or around the corner, or perhaps the end of the corridor is shrouded in sable shadow or cordite smoke. Read more
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Despite their disembodied engagement, dating simulations nevertheless underscore an affective interaction with the artificial intelligence (AI) of the game engine. As Dominic Pettman contends in his paper, Love in The Time of Tamatgotchi, these are moments whereupon the most “‘human’ of experiences — intimacy or love — is increasingly being mediated by the technologies which link one agent to another’.Read more
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I began my current research project, a book about early video game history, with a handful of motives and enough ignorance to fill several arcades. I wanted to study something that had not been studied very much before. After two projects that were fairly contemporary, I wanted to do historical research on a period far enough in the past that no new developments could change the landscape very radically.Read more
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“That elk is such a dick,” Robbins writes in his title poem. “He’s a space tree/making a ski and a little foam chiropractor.” “Your tribe’s Doritos are infested with a stegosaur,” he notes elsewhere. “That Forever 21 used to be a Virgin Megastore.”Read more
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Throughout his career, but especially in writings from the 1950s gathered together as the essay “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” film critic André Bazin praised the potential of the cinematic image “not according to what it adds to reality but what of it reveals of it.” And, a bit later: “Is not neorealism primarily a kind of humanism and only secondarily a style of film-making?”Read more
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It's cold and wet – the worst kind of early winter morning. I'm traversing a landscape under endless gray cloud cover, the ground softened to the consistency of flesh by a long night of rain. I pass through areas that look like small cities, sprawls of gray buildings groped by the fingers of decay, but almost deserted – whatever people I see are glazed over, lurking in doorways and around corners. Read more
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