The Sunday Papers:
Sundays are for rising from the dead. I have returned from the bleak wilderness of zero connectivity to light the blazing beacon of light reading on Mount Internet. Soon beacons will appear all across the skyline of the digital world, and writing about games will be read by thousands. It is a beautiful new era.
Sundays are for rising from the dead. I have returned from the bleak wilderness of zero connectivity to light the blazing beacon of light reading on Mount Internet. Soon beacons will appear all across the skyline of the digital world, and writing about games will be read by thousands. It is a beautiful new era.
- Over at Edge Online Steven Poole noted that the UK’s premier sesquipedalian, Will Self, had written an essay on videogames, and that – while flawed and inexpert re the medium – made some interesting points, such as why nazi zombies might not be good game fodder, and why being hunted might be a good theme for a game. (And it really is.) Thus: “Self’s essay muses on the theme of predation, endorsing the argument of Paul Trout that “our earliest mythologies” are based “in the experience not of being hunters, but of being hunted” by jawed megafauna such as the sabre-toothed tiger. He finds this a refreshing counter to the modern shooter that tells its customers they are alpha predators. But videogames have long played precisely on a tense alternation between being predated upon and doing the predating. (As Self could have noticed even in Pac-Man.) If we were only prey in games, they would be too depressing a phantasmagorical allegory of real life, since most of us are fundamentally prey to the rapacious dance of global capital, to crypto-psychopathic bosses, to barbarous bureaucracy.” (more…)
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