Friday, March 25 2011
“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.
Thursday, June 18 2009
The New Games Journalism
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
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)
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
More than a decade after its debut, Neon Genesis Evangelion continues to reign as a 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?
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?
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”
"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
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
"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
"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
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
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
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.
