The Magus by John Fowles follows an entitled, selfish English graduate as he escapes his failed ambitions and relationships to a Greek island. There he meets Maurice Conchis, a billionaire intellectual who may be (but probably isn’t) connected to a supernatural force. The novel, set just after the Second World War, explores post-war masculine anxiety, … Continue reading Life at the Grindstone: the small significance of grinding
[Originally posted on PopMatters] One of the strengths of “low-art” popular fiction like the comic book, the summer blockbuster, and the video game is how openly they explore themes on a surface level. Mike Joffe discusses this in a recent series on comic book characters: I find super hero stories interesting because, at their core, they … Continue reading Through the Looking Glass: Games and Curiosity
[Originally posted on The Ontological Geek] A lot of what makes games special is their ability to produce spontaneous and sincere moments of narrative power. Games only move when a player does something, so it’s powerful when something unplanned and beautiful results from a player’s mundane button tapping. Even now videogame apologists are quick to use the … Continue reading Something from Nothing: Authored Emergence in Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive
[originally posted on Unwinnable] Videogame interactivity is so great. Who wants to watch a hero when you can be the hero? That’s the promise games keep giving us on the back of the box, isn’t it? But they seldom deliver on that promise. Games welcome their players to a world, lay out a central conflict … Continue reading View From the Side
[Originally posted on Medium Difficulty] In the great sandwich of videogames, game mechanics are the baguette and game stories are the stuffing. Whether a game is simply a thin spread of butter on an oven fresh bun or a triple-decker steak’n’cheese with pan fried vegetables and extra dressing, a game is composed of these two … Continue reading Tighten up the Narrative in Level 3: The grammar of videogames
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