To Play or Pause
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Much of the discourse from proponents of the “video games are art” position is centered on the medium’s interactivity as its distinguishing advantage. Audience...
View ArticlePlaying the Bad Guy Feels Good
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Last week, Daniel Tovrov wrote a piece for Popmatters on the cult of iconic movie “bad guys” (“It Must Feel Good to Be as Bad as Gordon Gekko”, PopMatters, 1 May...
View ArticleThe Inelegance of the Videogame Satire
[Originally posted on PopMatters] Theoretically, there’s nothing holding back games from being an excellent vehicle for satire. Because they require the player to simulate a behavior—rather than just...
View Article“The sole ray of hope” and Other Platitudes
Superheroes are cool. I only read the occasional comic book and usually only if it’s a self-contained story because that’s a deep (and expensive) rabbit hole to fall into but I still love movies based...
View ArticleFighting Games and the Power of Motion
[Originally posted on PopMatters] It’s strange what can become normal when disbelief is suspended. So much of what is culturally understood about guns, government, science, other people, and so on is...
View ArticleSome Thoughts on Katniss Everdeen and Female Emotion
*Spoiler warning for The Hunger Games trilogy, including the latest film, Mockingjay Part 1* Oh, the tears. There are probably reasons why these novels and films hit me so hard. I just finished a class...
View ArticleThe Fascist We Deserve: The Authoritarian Ideology of Christopher Nolan’s...
Director Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy is one of the most respected works of fiction in the past decade, uniting popular and critical audiences in rarely agreed celebration of its value...
View ArticleThe Ludic Rashomon
A Rashomon, named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film, is a story repeated several times from different characters’ perspectives. Each retelling adds more information from each character until, in the...
View ArticleOn Evaluative Criticism
Imagine yourself wearing a pair of latex gloves, scraping some dust off the surface of your favourite book or movie with a scalpel and tapping it into a glass vial of clear fluid. Now seal the vial and...
View ArticleGirl at the End of the World
Tropes are difficult to work with. They’re broadly useful to tease apart patterns but because they interact with one another, each individual instance of a trope will slightly escape perfect...
View ArticleMultiplayer, Multispeaker: How We Talk About Games
As editor of the second edition of “Critical Discourse” for Critical Distance (please hold your applause to the end) on Danger featuring Gita Jackson, Aevee Bee and Nick Dinicola, I was a part of...
View ArticleStranger Danger
Right away, the cinematography of The Gift implies something is not right with the film’s central couple, Simon and Robyn (Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall). As Jim Hemphill writes in his review of the...
View ArticleHit Him Again: For the Sadists in the Audience
[Warning for discussions of violence and genocide] What the hell kind of political dynamics are at work in Star Wars: The Force Awkens? This kind of question normally annoys me but sometimes there is...
View ArticleHow Murderers are Made
Although this take has been off the stove for a long time I found this in my drafts folder and figured it might be a worthwhile blog post. If not, whatever. Content warning for a general discussion of...
View Article“And thus I clothe my naked villainy”: Sympathizing With Devils
At the end of the first act in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the titular king, in true villainous fashion, monologues his sinister plan to capture the hearts of his unsuspecting friends and associates...
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