Video games Archive
The Story of a Text Conversation in Bury Me, My Love
The experiences we have through technology is something fiction has struggled with adapting but the recent phone game Bury Me, My Love captures the rhythm and suspense involved in waiting on a text in this story about a Syrian couple as one makes her way to Germany to seek
Matriarchy and the Tired Assassin
Much like its predecessor, Dishonored 2 is a steampunk revenge story painted in vintage graphic design tones combining genre conventions of sci-fi, supernatural fantasy, historical fiction, and action RPG into a stunning nine-chapter video game novella that is as gory and interactive as it is inventive and derivative.
With Those We Love Alive and a Different Way to Write a Short Story
The medium we present something on, often defines the kinds of stories we can tell and how we tell them. In the digital age, With Those We Love Alive shows us another way to write a story even if its written on our skin.
Unhaunting the Small Town Narrative in NIGHT IN THE WOODS
What makes up the American small-town identity feels solidified in the cultural consciousness, but that depiction is a veneer that needs interrogation. The game Night in the Worlds and novel Universal Harvester comes at a time to do just that and rehabilitate that archetypal image.
You vs Me, An Intellectual: Rewriting Pop Culture in Poetry
Pop culture, like poetry, can work like excavation; it authorizes us to ask questions, to uncover, and to translate.
Weekly Round-Up: Howard Zinn, WALDEN, and Stephen King
From a book-banning bill to Stephen King's new collaboration, here's the latest literary news.
The Transformative Violence of Yakuza 0
Violence in media has always been contentious. Violence is in everything, but there’s always a voice in the room trying to convince everyone of its corruptive force. This perspective tends to ignore how when we fictionalize violence, it stops being violence altogether, thematically changing itself into something that’s only
Japanese Boy Band Saves the World: Postcolonial Masculinities in Final Fantasy XV
Only in a Japanese RPG can a boy band save the world from the empire and its demonic biotechnological army. In Final Fantasy XV, four male friends use the empire’s language of violence to decolonize the kingdom of darkness. Somewhere, Fanon’s ghost is drinking sake and smoking Peace cigarettes.
Machine Language
I recently spent a long weekend collaborating with friends on a narrative outline for a point-and-click adventure video game. Relying less on twitchy button-mashing and more on logic puzzles, conversation, and critical thinking, the adventure game genre is a good project for a writer.
Five Literary Games
Roger Ebert once wrote that video games could never be art, which later he would go on to clarify that what he actually meant was video games could never claim the status of “high art,” like that of, oh, say, cinema? While I would obviously refute this sentiment as