Books
Kill Screen is a highbrow magazine about video games. If this strikes some as a bit of a contradiction, I wouldn't be surprised, but it certainly makes sense to me. Being a young'en, I didn't exactly grow up during the heyday of print journalism. There were no magazines or newspapers or any kind of
Opinion
In the Guardian, Sam Leith writes an essay [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/nov/29/world-of-warcraft-sam-leith] on the online multiplayer role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft, comparing the free experience of wandering through the game's created universe to “a medieval cathedral, a
Art
If a meteor destroyed all of Queens, we'd probably be pretty freaked out. But might a virtual dragon destroying a virtual city ultimately upset more people? In an article entitled “Cataclysm Coming...” author Tom Chatfield explores what the update means [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/05/cataclys
Opinion
A November 2, Supreme Court hearing attempted to answer the question of whether or not video games are free speech, reports the New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/us/03scotus.html]. How do we decide what constitutes violence in a video game, and who has access to it? Contemporary art
Art
One of protean German artist Joseph Beuys' most famous quotes runs, "Everyone is an artist." Framed within the artist's idea of "social sculpture," a conceptual practice in which our lived world forms a gigantic work of art and individuals become artists in its context, the quote makes sense. The wa
Art
When it came to light that the newest release in EA’s Medal of Honor video game series contained a mode in which players could choose to fight as a group named the Taliban, and the US Army was understandably not too happy about it. After all, they had previously been cooperating on developing the ga
Art
As auteurs of the video game world go, Keita Takahashi is pretty far up there. The biggest game-changer of video games as of late isn’t the advent of 3D or the latest advance in the bloody realism of the latest first-person shooter, rather, a good argument could be made that it’s Takahashi’s Katamar
Performance
Video games appear to be making oddly pervasive cameos across fields as varied as architecture, art, cinema, criticism, and now theater. Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage is exactly that, a series of five plays that Jeff Lewonczyk wrote and Gyda Arber directed at