Max Payne and the Pictoralists
Kent’s post about games and their relation to old media got me thinking. It’s best to read this one if you’ve read his first. Because my 360 is at school and my computer is too shoddy to handle...
View ArticleHaving a minor crank about games PR
There’s something that’s always bothered me about games PR and marketing: some companies turn out hype copy that’s either grammatically incorrect, soulless, or nonsensical. Stuff that reads more like...
View ArticleThe soundtracks for our power fantasies
Okay, so that Civ 4 menu music is pretty iconic, isn’t it? A quasi-orchestral arrangement of the Swahili version of the Lord’s prayer. Awesome. I have a friend who uses that song to de-stress while...
View ArticleGarrysmod anthropologically
Our podcast on griefing and countergaming, and the response to the shownotes, got me thinking about in-game communities and how we police them. What’s the best kind of game community—the one where the...
View ArticleA Palmful of Guilt
The sun rises around 6 am and that’s when it starts to come full force. Something about the hazy pink morning light strikes the perfect chord of misery. The mouse in my hand is a palmful of guilt,...
View ArticleDistilled to a purer substance
Have you ever played a game where the minigames or secondary goals were more exciting and compelling than the rest of the entire game? It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. Through extensive...
View ArticleExpertise
I have just played my best game of Nethack. My best game of all time. I got to level ten and did almost all of the Gnomish Mines but, while backing up to find the Sobokan, I got trapped between a...
View ArticleEnduring Oblivion
When I was a little kid, every trip to the mall was a potential trip to the arcade. A five-dollar bill clutched tightly in hand, my brother and I would rush into that flashing cavern, fidgeting in...
View ArticleDying in Space
I failed to restore oxygen to the moonbase. It was devastating, at first. I knew that I was going to fail long before the moment actually came—by the time I had about 8 minutes left, I was pretty sure...
View ArticleTranslations
For the past week, I’ve been playing through the original Starcraft’s single-player campaign. For the first time. I’d attempted it five or six years ago, but I was embarrassingly awful at it and...
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