a now absolute deterritorialization

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Two Recent Publications Of Mine About Games

Two Recent Publications Of Mine About Games

I have two newish academic publications that you might want to check out if you’re the kind of person who enjoys academic publications.

The first is a piece about speculation and video game play that is published in Science Fiction Film & Television. The basic argument is that while we have theorizations of how speculation operates in text or film, with attentive strategies of reading those…

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On At The Existentialist Café

On At The Existentialist Café

I. I’ve been reading At The Existentialist Café a chapter at a time for a couple months now. It’s a weird way to read a book but, you know, things get in the way when you’re writing a dissertation. I barreled through the last third or so over the past week, and it solidified some feelings that I’ve had through reading the entire thing.

II. The book is, broadly, about the existentialist movement…

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Francis Bacon's Gambling

Francis Bacon’s Gambling

“He adored both cards and roulette, often playing at several table simultaneously, displaying the committed masochism of Dostoevsky, who claimed that the real thrill of involvement only began when he had pawned his wife’s jewels and was staking the proceeds. Francis failed to convince me that there was a deep satisfaction in being completely ‘cleaned out.'” Michael Wishart quoted in Francis…

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Carolyn Petit on Blade Runner 2049 Hard to excerpt without spoilers, but Carolyn Petit wrote a piece about Blade Runner 2049 and her own experiences…

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Alfred Bester on What a Science Fiction Author Does

Alfred Bester on What a Science Fiction Author Does

The mature science fiction author doesn’t merely tell a story about Brick Malloy vs The Giant Yeastmen from Gethsemane. He makes a statement through a story. What is the statement? Himself, his own dimension and depth. His statement is seeing what everybody else sees but thinking what no one else has thought, and having the courage to say it. The hell of it is that only time will tell whether it…

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A Bibliographic Resource for Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)

A Bibliographic Resource for Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011)

I’m planning on writing about Melancholia in the near future, and a short fact-finding mission to get a lay of the land of the scholarship on the film turned into something quite different (and much larger) than I imagined. What follows is a sketch of a bibliography of work that is directly about Melancholia. Inclusion in this list isn’t necessarily an endorsement of the work (I have read,…

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On The Yawning Portal at Paste

On The Yawning Portal at Paste

Tales from the Yawning Portal rides the line between nostalgia and ease of access for new players. I can imagine sitting down with Danni, my Mages & Murderdads cohost, and replaying “The Sunless Citadel” and having as good of a time as we did all those years ago when we played it the first time (we’ve already had this conversation, in fact). I can just as easily imagine running headfirst into…

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On Free Fire

I’ve just finished watching Free Fire, the newest film from director Ben Wheatley (and Amy Jump who he cowrote and coedited it with), and while it’s very late I have some thoughts I want to get down about the film. 1. Back when John Wick was released, I wrote this piece about it in which I argued that the most interesting part of that film was how it replaced fists with guns in the martial arts…

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“The horror of life itself”: Wes Craven on his films Christopher Sharrett - "'Fairy Tales for the Apocalypse': Wes Craven on the Horror of Film."

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Weedopia and Everything

Just wanted to crosspost two pieces I wrote that were published today: I wrote a short essay on the game Everything and what I think it does as a game (and how it is in conversation with the creator’s previous game Mountain). I’m really happy with the piece, so please give it a read. I was finally able to write something longform about the game-that-isn’t called Weedopia. If you’ve been following…

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Bad Affect as Game Design, Or It Feels Good For Overwatch To Feel Bad

Bad Affect as Game Design, Or It Feels Good For Overwatch To Feel Bad

This was originally written as a monthly essay for my Patreon. If you like it, consider chipping in $3 a month. There’s a lot of talk in game design about how to make people feel things. For the Skinner Box people, the ones who are trying to psychologically dial in exactly how good it should feel to win a match of a competitive card game you play on your phone, you do it through stimulus. You…

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Postscript on Playerunknown's Battlegrounds

Postscript on Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds

http://amzn.to/2oID9gl I’m sort of fascinated by Battlegrounds, which is basically Battle Royale: The Video Game but with adults who scream profanity at each other instead of high schoolers. I’ve been playing it…a lot? More than one might think, maybe, and I think the most interesting part of the game takes place in between the quick-and-brutal firefights that the game is all about. I wrote about…

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Gombart's Asset and Material Production in Dishonored 2

Gombart’s Asset and Material Production in Dishonored 2

Despite only understanding about 50% of what is going on here, I am fascinated with the materials production for Dishonored 2 (as I am with basically any game). I think it’s fascinating that the heavily-evangelized technology of translating photos to textures in games (“the rock wall…IS A ROCK WALL!”) that we saw so much of a couple years ago has some critics internal to the industry, and I…

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Bernard De Koven on approaching death

Bernard De Koven on approaching death

If you want to do something for me or because of me, grieving is not what I need. What I need is for you to continue your play/work however you can. Play games. Play the kind of games I like to teach – you know, those “funny games” – harmlessly intimate, vaguely physical games of the semi-planned, spontaneous, just-for-fun ilk, basically without equipment, or goal, or score or reason, even. Teach…

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On Dishonored, the Inside, and the Outside

On Dishonored, the Inside, and the Outside

This is a quick post about Dishonored, a game I wrote a lot more about back when it came out. Spoilers abound. I’m playing through Dishonored again after a very long time (so that I can play the sequel, finally), and I’m struck by how often the side characters talk about the “mission area” of the game versus the “home hub” of the game. If you don’t remember, the structure of Dishonored is that…

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Consuming Problematic Media

I was re-reading Alexander Galloway’s Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization earlier today, and I came across this evocation of Magnus Enzensberger’s theory of the media: Taking his cue from Marx’s sometimes sarcastic rhetoric, Enzensberger offers readers the following political warning: “Fear of handling shit is a luxury a sewerman cannot necessarily afford,” meaning that those who…

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"No One Criticized Bioshock Infinite Before!"

“No One Criticized Bioshock Infinite Before!”

All week long I’ve been reading tweets that have intimated that there has been some kind of sea change opinion shift in the way that Bioshock Infinite was received by audiences. The entire conversation has had a kind of “these damn hipsters” feel, as if the HD rerelease of some blockbuster game should be met with the sanctified silence of the venerated tomb, and I just wanted to take a moment to…

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