Complexity
Running across water, I must be arrogant, blue Jesus, infinite Easter with 99 lives (God cheats all the time, so why can’t I?)
Getting a laugh is not the same as being funny, just as getting applause does not mean you have created something great. Yet in our increasingly end-based consumer culture, these distinctions are beginning to blur as never before.
When I was a kid, saying “damn it” would get my mouth washed out with soap. I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons because Bart said “hell.”
What is escapism? I'm not going to turn to psychology journals for this one, but rather attempt to reference my own personal experience. I had a lot of problems growing up: video games offered me a wonderful analgesic against the suffering of my existence. I was pretty miserable for a while, especially as a teenager. I could turn on a video game and lose myself in its colours, interactivity, problem-solving, and narrative. If the game was especially boring or repetitive (like minesweeper), I would often find myself inventing elaborate storylines to correspond with my various actions in game.
Paul has already given something of a vivid opinion on Avatar. And me being a serial cynic of all things existent, I expected that I too would grab the brass hate-ring and hold fast while the carousel of social mania swirled itself into the ground, waiting it out until the bluegasm subsided.
In the Summer of 2007 a team of computer scientists at the University of Alberta announced that they had “weakly solved” the game of checkers (aka English draughts). Their computer program, called Chinook, had reached the point at which it was demonstrably unbeatable at the game. If you are particularly bloody minded you can play [...]
M. John Harrison said it beautifully in his strange and underappreciated first novel, The Committed Men: they had altogether left the maps he had known. This simple statement encapsulates the halting, terrible moment whereupon the speaker recognizes he is no longer in familiar territory. He has crossed the line, as it were, into the Weird Places. And there ain't no going back.
Teasing, groping, and at times abusing the line between gaming and art, Yume Nikki is one of the most beautiful and upsetting games ever made. Little Bo Beep presents a series exploring this slow-burning nightmare.
It’s no secret how the Japanese operate; constant, steady improvement is preferable to innovation, and ultimately everyone is a beneficiary.
Increasingly, videogames are striving to imitate the unexplored worlds of human imagination — from barely-probed ocean depths to the stalward nebulae and distant stars of space simulations. The accuracy of recent attempts, however, is remained as far from the mark asd early scifi pulp magazines. More often than not, the ocean depths and voids of space are filled with life, pirates, battles, and immidiacy — immitations that do not depict the true nature of these depths: cold, lonely, enormous and terribly hostile. It's hard to communicate the experience of deep sea diving, or to imagine space flight. A few haunting releases — like Wholfin's video of an underwater squid birth — offer us clues.
Alright, you’ve just killed exactly thirteen purple gremlins and harvested their nose rings for the Elder of the halfling raft village to use on the nozzles of their inflatable dingies, when the Elder informs you that to complete their nocturnal aquatic mating ritual they require ten live BLUE gremlins chained to a long stick. You [...]
