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  • Wired
    January 2013. "Great Expectations": "Here is an incomplete list of the things Ken Levine says have inspired BioShock Infinite: the presidential administration of William McKinley; the Spanish- American war; the blistering pace of technological change in the early 20th century, with the introduction of electricity, telephones, cars, airplanes, phonographs, and movies; the 1893 Columbian Exposition at the Chicago World’s Fair; Eugene V. Debs; Emma Goldman; a black-and-white photo of young boys sitting next to a dead horse on a cobblestone street in turn-of-the-century New York; The Music Man; It’s a Wonderful Life; the sequence in Back to the Future when Marty McFly first arrives in the 1955 town square; that scene in The Shining where the two little dead girls appear; Blue Velvet; the chest-bursting scene in Alien; Roman Holiday; the cover of X-Men #141; the sun reflecting off a metal mailbox during a jog on a sunny day; roller coasters; an off-Broadway play called Sleep No More; and a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s 'Songbird' performed on Glee ('It’s so embarrassing that I’m almost tempted to say this has to be off the record,' Levine says)."
  • NewYorker.com
    October 26, 2011. "The Video Game Art of Fumito Ueda": "As video games have become more and more popular, the medium’s defenders have developed a misguided tendency to point to the ways that games are useful, practical, functional. I do not know if Ueda’s games will make you smarter, or improve your vision, or promote world peace. I very much doubt, in fact, that they will do any of those things. Emphasizing the ways that games are tools for instruction—whether intellectual, physical, or moral—is an unfortunate residue of their origins as children’s playthings. Abandoning it will be the sign, maybe the last one, that this new form of storytelling is all grown up."
  • Grantland
    July 7, 2011. "Hard Times on the Paris of the Plains": "The NBA lockout has begun, and 30 cities now fear the same sad prospect this fall: day after day of staring at a lovely arena built for the pleasures of watching grown men play professional basketball, with no actual professional basketball team around to play in it. Twenty-nine of those cities host actual NBA franchises. The 30th is my hometown, the place where I grew up and will always be from, even if I no longer live there."
  • The New York Times Magazine
    September 12, 2010. "War Games": "Unless you regard something like 'Iron Man' as a film about Afghanistan, the movies inspired by America’s contemporary wars have consistently been box-office flops. Even 'The Hurt Locker' grossed only $16 million in theaters. Video games that evoke our current conflicts, on the other hand, are blockbusters — during the past three years, they have become the most popular fictional depictions of America’s current wars."
  • Wired
    February 2010. "Game Changers: How Videogames Trained a Generation of Athletes": "The many hundreds — even thousands — of hours that athletes put into videogame football give them more game experience than Bart Starr, Terry Bradshaw, or Joe Montana were able to log in previous eras. And there’s the possibility, too, that all this electronic play is changing the structure of their brains, at least in some ways, for the better. For more than 30 years, sports videogames have been focused on simulating real-life athletics more and more perfectly. But over the past decade, games have moved beyond just imitating the action on the field. Now they’re changing it."
  • The New York Times Magazine
    December 24, 2006. "The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion": "The G.O.P., the party of Richard Nixon's 1968 law-and-order campaign and the Willie Horton commercial, is beginning to embrace the idea that prisoners have not only souls that need saving but also flesh that needs caring for in this world."
  • Wilson Quarterly
    Summer 2006. "Playing With Our Minds": "The important thing to find out about video games isn't whether they are teachers. 'The question is,' as game designer Raph Koster writes in A Theory of Fun for Game Design, 'what do they teach?' "
  • Wired
    December 2005. "To Boldly Go Where No Fan Has Gone Before": On Star Trek New Voyages, Captain Kirk "is a professional Elvis impersonator, with muttonchops and a hornlike pompadour, who lives in nearby Ticonderoga. Spock works at a Virginia videogame store. And McCoy is an Oregon urologist." Chekov? Still Walter Koenig, the actor from the original series.
  • Radar
    Sept/Oct 2005. "Last Man Standing": "While some Democrats remain skeptical of candidate Hillary's chances in a general election, Republicans have grasped her biggest strength: The former first lady may be the only Democrat man enough to take back the White House."
  • Slate
    My old stomping grounds. My most recent contributions are a few "Gaming" columns, including an annual, end-of-the-year email dialogue about video games, which I moved to The New York Times in 2012.

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November 28, 2006

Slate: Wii Is the Champion

My Slate review of the Nintendo Wii argues that the motion-sensitive Wii Remote controller provides a greater level of gaming realism than the superior graphics of the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. (The headline and subtitle given to the piece overstate its case, because realism in gaming is overrated, but that's a topic for another day.)

Shorter Slate: "Like nothing else I've ever played, the Wii comes closest to achieving the grail of gaming: a home virtual-reality machine. ... The Wii Remote creates a level of realism that can't be attained through pretty pictures or through giving gamers ever-larger worlds to explore. (Like book reviewers, gamers sometimes confuse sprawl with excellence.)"

Recycled console reviews: The PlayStation 3.

November 28, 2006 at 03:40 PM | | Comments (6) | TrackBack (5)

November 17, 2006

Slate: Is the PlayStation 3 Any Good?

If you're consumed with PS3 fever, read my Slate dispatch from Sony's PlayStation 3 media event in SoHo last week.

Shorter Slate: "Maybe I'm too infected with an Ecclesiastes temperament, but I needed to see something new to be impressed. I glanced at a TV showing NHL 2K7 and shrugged. It looked like pretty much the same game that's been coming out since NHL '94 for the old Sega Genesis. I played one half of NBA '07, in which a ridiculously massive Kirk Hinrich led his CPU-controlled Chicago Bulls to a 55-19 lead over my Washington Wizards. The floor glistened, and I could make out individual fans and yellow-shirted staff members inside the absurdly detailed Verizon Center. Still, other than a few bells and whistles, NBA '07 was just a prettier version of the kind of basketball video games I've played for more than a decade. Old isn't always bad, mind you. But Parker Bros. doesn't ask me for five grand for its latest Monopoly spinoff."

I've been playing the Nintendo Wii for a few days now. Slate should publish my take on the Wii on Monday.

Recycled Slate video-game reviews: Blitz: The League; King Kong; The Godfather: The Game.

November 17, 2006 at 01:52 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)