Archive for the ‘New Media’ Category

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.

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.

An open letter to all my FaceBook friends. Is this really the best we can do?

In the month or so since L.A. Noire has come out, I have read review after review proclaiming it to be a revolutionary game.  I have heard this before.  Reviewers call games genre-changers or “like nothing I’ve ever seen before” or innovative or even, if you’ll excuse the terrible pun, “game-changers”.  I hear this yet [...]

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.