Games
Love in the Time of Coronavirus

Coronavirus and the Culture Wars

Infodemics, conspiracies -- fault lines beneath the Fractured States of America tremble in this time of global pandemic, amplify splinters, fractures, and fissures past and present.

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Music

Call for Essays and Staff Writers

With the mission to educate as well as entertain, our scope is broadly cast on the best of pop culture (or at least among the more interesting) and we are the world's largest site bridging academic and popular writing.

Culture

Love in the Time of Coronavirus: The Series, the Call for Papers

#Coronavirus #COVID19 #Pandemic: Love in the Time of Coronavirus is a series about art and life and the art of living in these times of global health crisis.

Games

Gaming for Social Change with 'Critical Role' and 'Dungeons & Dragons'

Fans have pledged $11M to a Dungeons & Dragons group because they champion safety and inclusion. Does this have larger, real-world implications?

Books

Thurm's 'Board Games' Winningly Merges Memoir and Cultural Criticism

Thurm's Board Games illustrates one of the charms of Avidly Reads, where a nonfiction author who is enthusiastic about their subject matter strives to maintain an even tone, here, their devotion for board games shines through.

Games

'The Witcher' Game and Those Inescapable Nietzschean Blues

Who is man? Who is monster? Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomies are at play in the video game series, The Witcher, soon to be a Netflix series.

Games

#PopMatters20: The Evolution of Game Criticism

The intersection of personality, ideology, and art criticism in games is a messy place. L.B. Jeffries reviews the genre's history of criticism for this installment of the #PopMatters20 series.

Games

Hideo Kojima + Norman Reedus Talk 'Death Stranding' at Tribeca

Without new footage or a release date, the Tribeca Talk didn't raise my anticipation for Death Stranding, but it was an engaging chat with Hideo Kojima and Norman Reedus.

Film

'Black Mirror: Bandersnatch' Amplifies What Happens to Us When We Experience Narrative Without Form

Without a set form, there can be no water-cooler talk about Bandersnatch, no collective reflection and analysis, because each viewer watched a different movie.

Games

'Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning' Twists Videogame Tropes

Kingdoms of Amalur takes all of the principles of videogames – agency, choice, exploration, conflict – and turns them into an expansive experience of testing the conventions, and even the technical framework, of videogame fiction itself.

Film

Through the Looking-Glass of Black Mirror's 'Bandersnatch'

Netflix's interactive movie, Bandersnatch, doesn't really offer choices, but it does offer something else: a warning.

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The Moving Pixels Podcast Comes to an End with 'Torment: Tides of Numenera'

This month, Nick and Eric talk about the epic and dense high concept sci-fi/fantasy of Torment: Tides of Numenera and end with an important announcement about the future of the podcast.

Books

How Does One Condense the World of Video Games into a Mere 64 Objects?

The staff at the World Video Game Hall of Fame have, with great care, winnowed down objects in the medium that they feel best represents the important developments in the history of the video game.

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Goes to 'Detention'

Nick and Eric got sent to detention and missed Halloween, but they escaped their classroom just in time to talk about the Taiwanese horror game Detention.

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Gets Caught Up in 'A Case of Distrust'

In this edition, we dig into the detective point-and-click text adventure A Case of Distrust, and investigate what makes it good, but not great.

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Becomes Sentient, Discusses 'The Fall Part 2: Unbound'

This week we discuss self-consciousness, self-identification, and awful puzzle design in The Fall: Part 2 - Unbound.

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The End of Endings; or, Why Won't Anyone Stay Dead?

What does it mean, ontologically and narratively, when the seeming finality of death disappears from our stories? What does it mean when our stories and our characters, unlike our lives, refuse to come to an end?

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Goes on 'The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit'

This week we discuss The Awesome Adventures of Captain Spirit, and how its status as a prequel/promo for Life Is Strange 2 makes it less awesome.

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Discusses the 'Circular' Series

This month Nick and Eric discuss the economics of robot sentience in Subsurface Circular and the tricky trust issues of alien first-contact in Quarantine Circular.

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The Moving Pixels Podcast Mythologizes 'Horizon: Zero Dawn'

On this month's games podcast, Nick and Eric discuss the optimistic and mythic post-post-apocalypse of Horizon: Zero Dawn.

Books

Ready Player None: Paolo Ruffino's 'Future Gaming'

Will gamers complete this textual quest?

Jordan Blum
Games

Masks, of Course, Can Be the Subtlest of Traps -- as Seen in 'Ready Player One'


Online games make it easier than ever to design and test masks and to experience the hopes, fears, benefits, and harms of reinvention.

Games

The Moving Pixels Podcast Goes to Hell...blade

We brave the depths of Helheim to talk about the art, craft, and representation of psychosis in Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.

Film

Tribeca 2018:  'Netizens' and 'Every Act of Life'

These important documentaries about online abuse and the works of Terrence McNally attempt to illuminate empathy and social awareness at a time when it is being woefully ignored.

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