This is an experiment in sharing a personal experience through game mechanics. It helps communicate daily occurances that happen in my life as a mixed transgender woman.
I know this game came out last year but I love the fact that video games are slowly become something more than what they have been and embracing ideas that are bigger and more interesting than decapitations and shooting giant robots. Not that I have anything against decapitations and shooting giant robots in video games.
This is an experiment in sharing a personal experience through game mechanics. It helps communicate daily occurances that happen in my life as a mixed transgender woman.
I know this game came out last year but I love the fact that video games are slowly become something more than what they have been and embracing ideas that are bigger and more interesting than decapitations and shooting giant robots. Not that I have anything against decapitations and shooting giant robots in video games.
Young Jack Black in a pith helmet advertising Pitfall because what could be finer at this time of night?
Nothing, that’s what.
Young Jack Black in a pith helmet advertising Pitfall because what could be finer at this time of night?
Nothing, that’s what.
I don’t want to be a curmudeonly technophobe who keeps railing at everything he sees in the world but I just can’t help myself when I see things like this.
I can only assume that reality as I imagine it to be and reality as it is are two places that are never going to cross paths.
I’m going to make a cup of tea. For the rest of my life.
Walden: The Video Game. Living deliberatelly virtually – feeling the fan blow stale air around your room as you hunch before glowing screen, back aching, eyes straining, soul dying. It’s exactly what Thoreau was talking about. What could be better to teach children, who are already not getting enough contact with the terrifying reality of nature, than condensing the meaning of Walden and then coding it into a virtual world so that they can enjoy it from the safety of their squalid condominiums? Everything could be better than that. Beating them to death with a paperback copy of the book would be better than that.
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived with my parents, in their basement, a mile from the nearest Dave and Busters, in a house which I did not own, on the shore of my own self-loathing, and earned my living by the answering online questionnaires.”
It would be a reasonable thing to assume that the above, a butchering of the opening sentence of Walden; or, Life in the Woods, would have been the real opening sentence if Mr. Thoreau had, instead of living in the, admittedly faux, wilderness for a year, had remained indoors, in an energy saving light bulb lit room, playing this video game.
How is it possible to approach the notion of living deliberately that Thoreau espoused by playing a video game? My short answer is that it’s not.
It is however hilarious bullshit, pleasure excuse my earthy language, and brings to mind this wonderful comic below, written by the inestimable Grant Snider:
Living deliberately is difficult and worthwhile. Yet even as we attempt to embrace nature we crush it. Even as we try and escape and control nature we lose our essential selves. The Slow Suicide of the Human Race. Happy days, folks!
The Greatest Love Story of All.
Since the early-80s, gaming has done its best to create an emotional link with its player — just as so many books and movies before them. And what better way to emotionally involve people than to create the simplest of story-lines — boy meets girl, another boy kidnaps girl, boy chases down another boy, boy rescues girl. For this, the most triumphant of Hallmark holidays, we’ll celebrate Valentine’s Day by counting down our favorite of video game couples [in no particular order].
Billy and Jimmy Lee + Marion =Â Double Dragon [Arcade]
Cloud + Aerith = Final Fantasy VII [PS One]
James + Mary = Silent Hill 2 [PS2]
Dom + Maria = Gears of War 2 [360]
Vincent + Catherine and Katherine = Catherine [PS3/360]
Wander + Mono = Shadow of the Colossus [PS2]
Yu + Rise or Yukiko or Chie = Persona 4 [PS2]
Mario [Jumpman] + Pauline [Lady]…
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This is a couple of years old but as it’s never a bad time to play a video game based on one of the greatest novels in
American literature, here it is again.
Then read the book.
Then look forward to the Baz Luhrmann motion picture coming out this year.
Then become disconsolate and filled with an unnameable sadness.
Then play the game again.
So it turns out that it’s okay for the American government to kill it’s own citizens via drone strike without due process of law. In the spirit of this rather bleak and hopeless legal outcome please enjoy this existential video game that puts you in the role of a drone pilot. It is not what you think it is.
Welcome, American citizens, welcome to the world that the rest of us have enjoyed living in for some time now. That last sentence is, of course, entirely disengenous. I have never, nor likely will I ever, be under threat from a US drone strike. I hope.
So it turns out that video games can be art and politics at the same time.
So it turns out that video games can be art and politics at the same time.
This game is very simple, very addictive and probably how the candidates are feeling right now…
AND IT’S ONLY JANUARY!
This game is very simple, very addictive and probably how the candidates are feeling right now…
AND IT’S ONLY JANUARY!
The SleepCoat League Presents: 