Archive for the ‘Games and the Media’ Category

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.

I recently read an article entitled “Game Over for Gamestop“ on a website called SeekingAlpha.com which suggested that Gamestop as a business will collapse at some vaguely defined point in the near future if their business model does not change.  Now I see several flaws in the theory and logic that they are using to make [...]

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

In his article Broadpaw made an excellent point about the reluctance of many people to think of games as art or even that particular games might be a form of art; we are lightyears away from someone acknowledging that a specific game might be great art.  Broadpaw noted that the entire debate is structured around [...]

A turd in 3D is still a turd, only now it is disturbingly lifelike and sitting much too close to your face.

One of my former students, Ajay Kumar, has just published a piece on the US military’s use of videogames as recruitment tools.  The piece appears in GW Discourse, the student-run publication of George Washington University’s Political Science Department.  The piece was written prior to the leaked video footage of the helicopter gunship attack in Baghdad, [...]

What do the British do with videogames? They give them awards. BAFTA awards, no less. What do Americans do with videogames? Try and ban them on the grounds of obscenity.