Recent Multimedia Features

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Wednesday, September 30 2009

The New American Spook Country

By L.B. Jeffries

Spook Country is about America’s loss of innocence, its various ways of remembering the past, and an attempt to find a way of reconciling those memories with the present.

Thursday, June 18 2009

The New Games Journalism

By L.B. Jeffries

The most useful moments for New Games Journalists are ones that occur in multiplayer, describing experiences that could never occur during just a general session of play.

Wednesday, May 27 2009

Remembering the Orphan: Final Fantasy VIII

By Jack Patrick Rodgers

Warts and all, the ambitious push to expand video game storytelling found in Final Fantasy VIII deserves a closer look at this too-often neglected franchise entry.

Friday, April 24 2009

Reinventing the Music Box (Again)

By David Abravanel

FM3 updated its minimalist masterpiece to include new loops and a fun new pitch controller. But where does this progression stop, and what does it mean to the Buddha Machine's reputation as an instrument of simplicity?

Friday, April 17 2009

On Evas and Angels: Postmodern Fantasy Devotion to Neon Genesis Evangelion

By Cyrus Fard

More than a decade after its debut, Neon Genesis Evangelion continues to reign as an cultural icon in Japan. Understanding how it made such a lasting impact gives us a window onto Japanese social history and fandom.

Wednesday, March 18 2009

Does Video Game Criticism Need a Pauline Kael?

By L.B. Jeffries

Kael, much like video game critics today, was faced with a massive philosophical shift in her chosen artistic medium that large quantities of critics were against.

Monday, December 1 2008

Does Video Game Criticism Need a Lester Bangs?

By L.B. Jeffries

Part of the reason Lester Bangs was a great rock critic was because he reflected the virtues and vices of his medium. Yet as a critic Bangs provided a lot of personal standards that could be easily applied to multiple mediums.

Thursday, October 23 2008

The New YouTube Game Criticism: An Interview with “moviebob”

By L.B. Jeffries

"Working on the web is a great motivator...if you screw up and forget that Stanley the Bug Man was the hero in Donkey Kong 3 instead of Mario there's going to be twelve guys all lined up to correct you."

Monday, August 4 2008

DHARMA’s Bent Reality: The Video Game Sensibility of Lost

By Elwyn Palmerton

Perhaps the most complete and fascinating assimilation of video game-type content into a different medium at a deep and thorough level occurs within the narrative world of the popular television show Lost.

Wednesday, July 16 2008

Redefining the Game: A Look at Machinima

By L.B. Jeffries

"Whatever we're doing, it's all story telling -- and if the story's bad then the appeal can't last to the gamer crowd let alone anyone else."

Thursday, July 3 2008

Beyond the Core Gamer: An Interview with Wideload Games’ Alex Seropian

By Ryan Smith

"There's huge potential for the market to grow, and the only way we're going to get there is if there are games available that address an audience beyond the core gamer."

Thursday, June 26 2008

The World Remade: An Interview with the Creators of Alpha Omega

By Glenn McDonald

Glenn McDonald talks to the creators of Alpha Omega about their new table top game, the challenge of game development, and that little Cloverfield mix-up.

Friday, May 9 2008

The Consumer Consumed

By Claudia Grinnell

In pursuing the convenience of a Web 2.0 world, we are consenting to being incorporated into a finely tuned marketing machine, with ever more subtly adapted gears, to our meet our needs -- manufactured and otherwise.

Wednesday, May 7 2008

Play’s the Thing: The Art of Video Game Writing

By L.B. Jeffries

Many of the people who make the video games you play don't like having a plot at all, much less a good one. It constrains their designs and forces them to sacrifice player freedom for something that the player should be doing themselves.

Thursday, April 17 2008

Accepting the Absurd via Super Smash Bros. Brawl

By Erik Hinton

While video games will always adopt varying levels of verisimilitude, the Wii presents a novel challenge to the conventional consciousness, and that is an attack on realism.

Friday, March 7 2008

The Carolina Games Summit Through the Eyes of the Ex-Core

By L.B. Jeffries

Kids, spouses, and jobs are all huge time drains for former hardcore gamers. The appeal of games with unlockable content, beating impossible odds, or even ones that just take a lot of practice no longer work on this demographic. They really play them to kill time.

Wednesday, February 27 2008

Rejecting the Conventional Industry: The Independent Gaming Scene

By L.B. Jeffries

What makes the games these people produce so impressive is not just the dedication of the people making them, but the staggering creativity that makes so many of them stand out.

Friday, February 8 2008

Headshots 4 Jesus

By Cole Stryker

In its quest to be seen as a legitimate way of life among a legion of detractors, the Christian Church has turned to alternative methods of getting its point across.

Thursday, November 15 2007

First Person of Shooters: An Interview with Johnathan “Fatal1ty” Wendel

By Ryan Smith

"I don't think Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or any of those guys took it lightly when they became who they were. It was because they were obsessed about something, probably a little crazy and I think I do the same thing."

Wednesday, October 31 2007

E for Some But Not All

By Ryan Smith

I felt at times like a kid at an amusement park on a rainy, drizzly day where the weather scares most people off, so the lines for the roller coasters are practically nonexistent.

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