Earlier this week I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday and, while I don’t want to get too shmlatzy about the whole ordeal, the day was marked by that same arbitrariness/ceremony/ennui that all birthdays come with after puberty. I’m an adult. I have been for a few years now. But now it’s starting to hit home a … Continue reading On “Grown Up” Games
After a fairly productive July, I managed to publish nothing but a single review during all of August. While I don’t have an excuse for the first few weeks, my internet went down for a good week-and-a-half in the middle of the month and came back just in time for me to leave for a … Continue reading Rules, Mechanics and Laws in Video Games
I wound up reviewing another adventure game recently. It’s an indie game for the PC called Deponia. I won’t speak at too much length about the game since you can read my thoughts on it on PopMatters (Deponia review. Aug 16 2012), but suffice it to say, as much as I liked it, I really dragged … Continue reading On Genre Preference
In my most recent article I talked about heroism in video games and how few protagonists are forced into an undignified position (“Forced Failure and the Undignified Hero.” PopMatters. Jul 23 2012.). Arguing games as a literary media runs into a wall with the word “game.” A few years ago, Roger Ebert wrote an article … Continue reading Why More Games Need to Make us Fail
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Games are about agency. They also blur the line between character experience and audience experience. The audience is the main character in a game, and the events of the story impact the audience directly. All that holds immense narrative potential, of course. In a game, then, the hero’s victory is the … Continue reading Forced Failure and the Undignified Hero
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