Today I saw a clip floating around from the movie Free Guy, a recent moderately-well-received cinematic pastiche of video game tropes, in which the hero wins the day through, essentially, the power of licensing – retrieving iconic virtual movie props…
Nowadays, opportunities to express misanthropic and cynical viewpoints are thick on the ground – cruel and duplicitous politicians who still bafflingly find true believers, fantastical and murderous conspiracy theories, betrayals and close-mindedness, callousness and cruelty everywhere. It makes so much…
I still like the film Inception. This is not an unusual opinion, it was a huge blockbuster hit, but in general the film seems to have diminished somewhat in the public estimation in the decade since its release. Many of…
There are certain ideas that I find myself endlessly revisiting, ideas so flexible that I end up appealing back to their analogies on a weekly basis. One such idea is that of Zeno’s Paradox, which goes thus: In order to…
When I can stand to, I think about the future. Seldom the future of the world at large – that’s entirely too complicated and distressing right now, although I do try to stay aware of opportunities to do what I…
Games have a weird relationship with morality. For a while, many were including ham-fisted ‘morality systems’ – absurd contrivances where you were presented with two exaggerated choices, choosing between senseless slaughter and saintly forgiveness, and then assigned to be good…
The study of game design is, to a significant degree, the study of education. Much as the joy of gameplay lies in the sensation of learning and practicing, the skill of creating that joy in others is similar to that…
There’s two desires that motivate creativity: There’s the desire to create, to pour a part of yourself into crafting art by some sort of cathartic action; and there’s the desire to have created, to have generated some idea, given it…
It’s daunting to imagine all the things I’ve forgotten. What percentage of a life gets remembered? A slender one for certain – even the people and events we remember we remember in silhouette, in snippets of noise and face and…
I was sitting in the waiting room of my doctor’s office when I happened to glance upwards. There was a cutout between the first floor, which I was on, and the walkways of the second. This rectangle was lined by…
