Posts from the ‘video games’ Category

Jul 12

Go ahead. Ruthlessly mine my generation’s bottomless nostalgia.

We’ll keep buying what you’re selling. No really, we will. Seriously. The person who came up with this idea is a marketing genius. My nostalgia button was instantly pressed when I saw these.

Sometimes, when I’m sitting and drifting and not thinking about anything at all, the music from King’s Quest V will start playing in my head. The piece I’m thinking of is actually a classical piece of music, just changed slightly, but I forget which. I learned it on the piano once, I seem to remember. And it was wicked hard. It’s part of my default soundtrack, which consists mainly of computer and Nintendo game theme songs and 80s cartoon theme songs. And I’m a child of the 80s who’s getting old. So it’s pretty easy to press my nostalgia button. Sigh. Just keep shoveling crap at me that reminds me of my childhood. I’ll keep buying it.

Apr 20

Ooh, Heaven is an unspecified beachy place on an unspecified coast

By the always jealousy-inducing, extremely brilliant xkcd, of course.

Which is where I will be for the next five days. I won’t be much in pocket online, as this is a detox from work, and my work involves all things internetty. I’ll be checking in from time to time, of course, probably a few times a day still (okay probably more since I’m a sad, sad addict) but I will NOT be blogging. Because that really does take work. Read more

Jan 6

What’s the difference between video games and art?

Maybe choice, or freedom from it? I feel this is the argument I have tried (as a lifelong gamer, mind you), and failed to make when having this debate before. As an artist, you’re imposing your vision on someone. Otherwise, why bother to make art? Why not just take a survey? The point is much better made over at The Millions today:

There’s a reason it’s high praise, not criticism, to say that a film or a piece of music or a good novel “sweeps you along.” There’s a selflessness in it: not just the pleasure in pausing the parts of the brain that plan and calculate and select, but in the temporary surrender of investing in someone else’s choices. Good art can be where we go for humility: when we’re encouraged to treat each of our thoughts as worthy of being made public, it can be almost counter-cultural to admit, in the act of being swept along, that someone else is simply better at arranging the keys of a song or the twists of a book and making them look like fate.

Freedom from choice is a seductive way of thinking about art—and it’s at the heart of the debate over the cultural value of video games. Video games, for their cultural boosters, promise an art based on choice: an interactive art, possibly the first ever. For their detractors, “interactive art” is a contradiction in terms. Critics can point to video games’ narrative clichés or sloppy dialogue or a faith in violence as the answer to everything; but at base, they seem to be bothered by the idea of an art form that can be “played.” Choice is their bright line.

Read the really fascinating essay here.

Sep 13

1 Comment

Happy Birthday, Super Mario Bros.!

Cake by Artisan Cake Company

That’s right. Today is a very, very special day. Super Mario Bros. turns 25 years old. One quarter of a century of the most famous video game character ever.

As Luke Plunkett over at Kotaku notes:

It seems almost pointless marking the occasion with a round-up, or a few paragraphs outlining his importance to video games – and video gamers – because it’s Mario. He isn’t important to video games. He is video games.

So here’s to Super Mario Bros. (And the amazing peeps who made this Mario street art.) One of the first–and still one of the best–video games I ever played.

Jul 8

2 Comments

Tom Bissell at Powell’s on Video Games and Violence, Among other Things

Few things piss me off more than righteous attitudes about violent video games and children. Like many people my age, I and my friends grew up using cheat codes to do fatalities on Mortal Kombat and we all seem to have turned out okay. (Some of us also listened to a lot of gangsta rap and metal and played Dungeons and Dragons and yet strangely, none of us has shot up a school or slaughtered his or her family. Shocking, I know.)

It’s not that I think kids SHOULD be playing violent video games or watching R-rated movies or whatever–I just think parents should make that decision, not Washington or some censor board or parental advisory committee. And I think blaming violence on video games and heavy metal is an easy, false, and sometimes dangerous answer (the very probably wrongful conviction and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham was in part based on the FACT THAT HE OWNED AN IRON MAIDEN POSTER AND NO I AM NOT KIDDING I WISH I WERE) and that there are always, as Tom Bissell says, other places for the bad son to go:

The other day I finished Columbine, Dave Cullen’s unbelievably good and bulldozingly definitive account of the Columbine Massacre. The perpetrators of the massacre were both fans of a modded version of the classic shooter Doom. Much was made of that at the time. Less was made of the fact that one of the boys, Eric Harris, was also a classic-lit buff. Shortly before the massacre, he quoted a line from one of the most transcendent works of literature in the language, The Tempest: “Good wombs have borne bad sons.” For Eric Harris, the ecstasies of violent inspiration could be found everywhere. If we dutifully close off those forms of creative expression we find distasteful, the bad son will go elsewhere.

Read the whole, very good essay here.

Jun 18

NYT Review of Tom Bissell’s Why Video Games Matter

I cannot wait to read this book.

The New York Times has an interesting review, though I think they make too much hay of the generational divide.

Jun 18

Video Game Heaven

Holy crap. This place looks like how I imagined heaven when I was a kid. I’m still drooling now.

May 21

Have you been to Google today?

Pac-Man's skeleton was built by Le Gentil Garçon and paleontologist François Escuilié.

Have you played lots of Pacman yet to celebrate the little yellow guy’s 30th yet? Well, then. Get to it.

Apr 23

All These Things That are Interesting to Me

Feeling quite a bit better today. Well enough to come back to work today, which is good because lord knows it’s boring just sleeping all day. It sounds really great until you’re forced to do so because you’re sick as a dog and have literally nothing else than you can possibly do.

Anyhow, some things that caught my eye today and made for tasty reading:

PANK interviews The Lumberyard editor Jen Woods. (Disclosure: The Lumberyard published one of my little poems, once upon a time. And that issue is, to this day, still the most lovely thing my words have ever been featured in.)

Yes, yes, the new issue of We Are Champion has no women writers in it. I don’t want to fight that fight again (thought I will say that I think the best thing said on the subject was said right here–and that I was annoyed at the assumption that the guidelines were male-oriented–I mean, what, do men own Basquiat and Back to the Future (two of my favorite things?) In fact, many of my favorite things are listed on WAC’s influences list, which may be why I like this publication so much.) Regardless of the politics, don’t deprive yourself of a good read.

This is just hilarious. You know those infomercials for products no one needs? Here are the people who need them, montage-style.

Poor, sassy Stephen Baldwin. He had it all–money, fame, success–until he became a born-again Christian. Then those Hollywood assholes took it all away. Or at least, that’s what the most awesome website ever wants me to believe. Oh, and also to give Stephen Baldwin my money. (via Balloon Juice.)

Obama calls bullshit on that crazy paranoid nutbag racist Arizona immigration bill the guv there is about to sign into law.

Speaking of Obama, what should he read? Submit your suggestions here and for god’s sake hurry so we can bury some of the tea party insanity cluttering these comments.

Can video games be art? Roger Ebert says no.

Have a good weekend everybody! Go get nuts.

Dec 3

Expressionist Arcade Classics

The other two, done by Brock Davis, are just as cool.