Archive for the ‘Games and Life’ Category

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

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.

There’s not really anything like it, every Saturday I get to go to one of our computer lab classrooms, jump around and yell excitedly about Blizzard Entertainment’s Starcraft II. This is CSL, the Colligate Starleague, founded by Mona “Hazelynut” Zhang over at Princeton University. It started in 2008 and has since has grown into over [...]

There are many occasions in an ongoing discussion or debate where you know that the better thing would be to take the high road. Unfortunately, this often involves having to switch off your brain and wear a blindfold. Therefore, low road it is.

Can a film that celebrates the geekiness of gaming succeed in a culture that pathologizes it?

I’ll probably start off with this story in every blog post that I write in my life, but when I was thirteen years old I had the honor to found and lead a clan called The Order in the game Star Wars: Jedi Academy. What proceeded was a five year journey that would change my [...]

Last time I flew it was nothing like the Starship Enterprise cabin that Microsoft offers in its vision of the future. Instead it resembled an overcrowded and singularly malodorous Turkish bath, except that I probably would have had more leg room in a Turkish bath and wouldn’t have had to put up with some snotty ankle-biter kicking the back of my seat while their parental unit lay passed out after too many $15 rum and cokes. Microsoft and their ad agencies really need to get off their corporate jets and try flying commercial once in a while.