Author Archive

Americans no longer reach for the stars. They reach for cars.

If today’s videogames are the bloated, unattractive, past-their-prime but still touchingly vulnerable men who frequent massage parlors, game reviewers are the bored women who try listlessly to appear enthusiastic as they snap on the rubber gloves in order to get to the happy ending over and done with as quickly as possible.

Everyone has heard the old hacker slogan “Information wants to be free.” But it turns out that information doesn’t want to be free: instead, it wants you to buy it an Alexander McQueen dress and fly it to Paris for a night on the town.

What would cause a large group of gamers to call a perfectly ordinary and inoffensive videogame story writer a cunt, a whore, a Jew, and a cancer, among many other things? Apart from the fact that they are users of the Internet? The impending end of their world, that’s what.

I spend a lot of my time trying, in print and in person, to work against a lot of the negative stereotypes that abound about videogames and gamers. Every so often, however, I’m reminded how powerfully the gaming industry is not an ally in this effort.

When it comes to playing The Game of the Year taking a “glass half empty” approach is the saner course.

Occasionally you come across something on the Web that forces you to stare unflinchingly into the dark heart of humanity. Well, OK, on the Web that happens more than occasionally and not simply when you are frequenting 4Chan. Sometimes, however, the experience isn’t simply repellent and/or tedious but actually illustrates something profound about the evolution of human nature and its vexed relationship with digital technologies.