Wednesday, May 16 2012
Podcasting for Laughs
Perhaps the jury is still out, but in the sheer number of them available, one can assume that comedy podcasts represent another pivotal moment in the history of American comedy.
Tuesday, May 8 2012
Virtual Worlds, Real Choices: What Blowing Up Megaton (or not) Taught Me About Myself
Developers of games like Heavy Rain, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3 take pride in their ability to provide players with the experience of deciding for themselves exactly how plot lines will develop in their games. So why are we gamers fixated on the idea of making and playing such games?
Tuesday, February 21 2012
Man and Mega Man: Better Living Through Retro Game Demos on YouTube
Mega Man blipped back to his control center and I blipped too. I got pulled out of myself, out of my kitchen, and was thrust back into something wholly new yet remarkably the same. This is not the story of my decline. This is the story of how to make it through life without taking any damage.
Wednesday, February 8 2012
Does Silence Speak in the Loudest Voice?: Misconceptions about Silent Protagonists in Video Games
Granted, Link does “hiyah,” “eyah,” and “ahh” his way through all of his post-64-bit adventures, but no amount of elfish interjections can change his status as a silent protagonist. Is a failure to communicate much, a failure to communicate?
Monday, February 6 2012
Not-So-Central Casting: Kevin Smith and the Birth of the Reality Podcast
Filmmaker Kevin Smith may be in a celluloid slump, but his new podcast network is on point.
Monday, January 30 2012
The Best Games of 2011
This year was a year when something called Lesbian Spider-Queens of Mars could be celebrated alongside the latest Gears of War game. This was a year in which one of the most reviled games, Dragon Age II, was also one of the most revered.
Wednesday, October 26 2011
Is Virtual the New Reality?
Are the massively multiplayer (and massively successful) online games Second Life and World of Warcraft addictive escapes from reality, or brave new worlds which improve upon -- or even replace -- social and individual identity?
Wednesday, October 19 2011
20 Questions: Shudder to Think’s Craig Wedren
Former Shudder to Think frontman Craig Wedren tells us about his uber-ambitious multi-media album project and we're surprised to also find out about his affinity for the "amoral but ultimately just" Willy Wonka...
Friday, July 1 2011
‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare’: A Cautionary Tale for Post-9/11 America
Call of Duty isn't about fussy negotiations, the sharing of feelings, or the deliberate weighing of multiple points of view. Call of Duty isn't UN negotiators patiently trying to neutralize Iran’s nuclear weapons program, it’s the Navy SEALS killing Osama bin Laden. It’s not Woodrow Wilson; it’s George W. Bush.
Thursday, June 23 2011
This Is Your Brain on YouTube
We seem headed towards a videosphere that captures and subdues the totality of human activity like some goopy, billion-eyed, grass-roots-driven surveillance cam.
Thursday, June 16 2011
Great Games and Podcasts for Summer
Yes, summer is about being in the great outdoors, but that doesn't mean you have to stop gaming. PopMatters writers recommend several of our favorite summer gaming diversions.
Monday, May 16 2011
The Retirement of a Gen X Gamer, or My 8-Bit Childhood
I've searched my last castle for that careless princess. After more than a quarter century as a gamer, this Gen Xer is hanging up the controller for good.
Friday, March 25 2011
‘The Art of Immersion’: From Frank Rose’s Book on How Digital Generation Is Changing Our World
Alternate reality games such as Why So Serious? are a new kind of interactive fiction, one that blurs the line between entertainment and advertising, as well as between fiction and reality, in ways barely imagined a decade earlier.
“What a Crazy Random Happenstance”: Destiny and Free Will in ‘Dr. Horrible’
Among other things, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog provides a meditation on good and evil and the role that choice plays in embracing one or the other.
Joss Whedon 101: “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”
From the moment it first hit the Internet in the summer of 2008, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog received near universal acclaim as one of the web's first great creations. With Whedon proclaiming that his future work will be direct to Internet rather than TV, this could be the shape of Whedon's work to come.
Thursday, December 2 2010
Gun Control: The Video Game Obsession with the Sword and the Gun
The key observation to be made about the evolution of games into the violent extravaganzas of today is that, if you change the controller, you change everything.
Wednesday, August 18 2010
Utopie in Berlin: An Interview with Ellen Allien
Ellen Allien, the longtime German electronica producer who has spent much of her career DJing to packed clubs in Berlin and around the world, talks to PopMatters about her latest album, crazy politicians and the status quo of dance music today.
Wednesday, May 26 2010
Brenda Brathwaite: Message in the Machine
Brenda Brathwaite embodies computer games. She punctuates her sentences with sound effects, like "boom" and "bang" and dissects her life into "levels" and "rounds".
Monday, February 1 2010
The Cult of Kindle and the Myth of Digital Utopia
If I could read more with a Kindle, it stood to reason that I wasn’t reading enough without one. Getting and consuming increasingly MORE information is an end in of itself these days.
Wednesday, September 30 2009
The New American Spook Country
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.
