[Originally posted on PopMatters] The banner stretched over the entrance to Bioshock’s Rapture, “No Gods or Kings, only Man,” makes for a good descriptor of most modern games. Games are spaces where any “Gods” that show up are just a name, a boss fight, or a battery for the player’s magic. Protagonists aren’t accountable to any … Continue reading Machine Gods: Religion in Games
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
[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
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Last week, Daniel Tovrov wrote a piece for Popmatters on the cult of iconic movie “bad guys”.1 Through the characters of Gordon Gekko of Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Tony Montana of Scarface, and Patrick Bateman of American Psycho, Tovrov argues that, even though these figures are cautionary tales about unchecked … Continue reading Playing the Bad Guy Feels Good
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