Bioshock and feminism, point/counter-point
A recent series of articles about Bioshock brought out an interesting thought-exercise into play when Richard Terrell wrote an article about how the video game is anti-feminist, “Look. Don’t Touch: A feminist critique of Bioshock.” But that was quickly noticed by another blogger, who took a decidedly different approach to not only criticizing Bioshock but also Terrell’s article on the matter by Alex Raymond, “Is Bioshock Feminist? A response in defense of Bridgette Tenenbaum.”
Certainly, Bioshock has a lot of elements resplendent in the nature of it’s Jules Verne 50’s atmosphere and the Cold War era stereoscopy but it does seem that in its attempt to portray a multitude of characters, it didn’t leave out its own profound narrative about the human condition. This is something particularly brought out by the moral dilemma presented in the game play: The Little Sisters.
Neither
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Virtual Reality System In Tests To Help Drug Abusers
Because if there’s one thing drug addicts know, it’s altered realities. The system, being tested at Janus in Santa Cruz, allows patients to enter a simulation of real-world locations, like a house or a park, where they’re confronted by a situation that could drive them back to drugs. Say, a meeting with the wrong kind of friend, an old ex, or a party with drugs on tap. The patient can then practice their drug-avoidance skills in this safe, simulated environment.
Researchers have also found that patients in the virtual world are more likely to relax and open up with their feelings and experiences.
Read more here.
Zork walkthrough in rock form
For those who have never played text adventure games, they were a staple of the early computing environment—an extension of Choose Your Own Adventure books into a more interactive form. Needless to say, walkthroughs existed even then, when we only had the light of ASCII to guide us.
ERROL:
I asked pifie to write an instrumental that I could write lyrics too. And for some strange reason he said yes and actually made one for me! So here I am singing to it. It is very… very… geeky.
In fact, I think only two of you will get the reference. But… oh well.
This SOUNDS easy, but it wasn’t… and I messed up in the end, but it was 2am and I got tired. Timing was really hard, and I now officially hate the word "Screwdriver".
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Beatles Backers Bet Badly, Sales Simply Simmer
The Beatles: Rock Band was promised as a messiah that would lift video gaming from the depths of an industry slump, but instead, it moved only a merely respectable number of boxes for a top title. Figures come in at just under 600,000 copies for September. Sales are expected to continue, however, with upcoming DLC offerings and a growing awareness amongst the Your Parents market that the Beatles game exists.
I put it down to the characters in the game looking like rubber chickens with bowl cuts flopping around the screen.
Oh, and Halo 3: ODST sold 1.5 million boxes in the same month. Just throwing that out there.
Ubisoft To Spawn New Assassin’s Creed Films On YouTube
To promote their new Assassin’s Creed 2 title, Ubisoft has teamed up with Hybride Technologies and emerged triumphant from the CGI mines with three short films. These episodes will feature the characters of the game, exploring their history and that of the Florentine Republic, where the game takes place.
The first of these Assassin’s Creed short films will be released to YouTube on October 27th.
Gaming In Chinese
I haven’t seen anything like this, lately, so here you go. China is a big place, full of people who could be, and want to be gamers. Outside the gold farms, there is a massive market slavering for new digital reality entertainments.
Then, there’s the Chinese government.
Surprise! The ESRB is not psychic and we don’t expect them to be
Right now, the ESRB is the best rating authority that we have for the video game experience but the tools that they present us do have a major flaw when it comes to rating the people’s behavior in video games…
Wait a sec. Did we actually write that? Did we actually read an article written about how the ESRB may become obsolete because they cannot rate something that their mandate can never cover? Why yes we did, in fact, The Escapist is running an article, “Obsolescence Pending: Rating the ESRB”, on precisely this subject.
“To date, this has meant that the rating given to the designed game content doesn’t cover chat and other forms of player-to-player communication.” This is unsurprising because it’s literally impossible to rate future events based on their content. It is irresponsible and silly to require the
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Flaccid Game Sales Expected To Rise
The last few months have not been the game industry’s best, although by no means a reason for any executives to jump out windows. Sadly. The slump has been blamed on economic factors, as jobless lepers crouched under the freeway overpass with the rest of the dispossessed and downsized tend to spend their meager remaining coins on food and not top titles. Which leads into the other issue, a desolate retail wasteland utterly lacking in top titles to sell to those grizzled survivors who remain ensconced in house and hearth.
But with the release of Ghostbusters, the new Batman, Brutal Legend, Madden 10, and a few others (some FPS type game, what was it?), sales are turning back away from their lemming-like dive off the Cliffs of Insanity.
By the end of August, video game sales had barely cleared a pathetic, meaningless, no money or …
Top 10: Video Game women who don’t use sex to sell
Truly an excellent example of an article that warms our hearts, plus it happens to cover a lot of games we liked simply because they managed to speak to us out of narrative.
It’s no secret that females in video games are typically blatantly, sexualized byproducts of perverted character design. Between their skimpy attire and grossly exaggerated anatomy, most ladies featured in video games look more like prostitutes than crime-fighting, evil-slaying heroes. While games like Dead or Alive,Ninja Gaiden and Soulcalibur continue to perpetuate the demeaning myth that girls should dress like whores to sell games and kick ass, there are those leading ladies that have striven to break the stereotype.
So here are ten, completely badass video game ladies who are more concerned with messing up faces and ending lives than posing as pin-up girls for a nerdy version of Playboy. It
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Drums of War Rally Screenwriter to World of Warcraft Movie
The grinding wheel of billion-dollar franchise inevitability continues to turn. The proposed World of Warcraft movie, under the direction of Sam Raimi (about the only guy who could do the project justice), has set its sights on a new screenwriter.
Robert Rodat will, for the time being, lurk behind the lore of the potential movie. Rodat’s other screenwriting credits include Saving Private Ryan and The Patriot, so we here at Vox are expecting a sappy war movie whose attempts to pluck heartstrings are so artificial and clumsy that playing guitar with a pair of those snappy-grabby shark-on-a-stick things will seem elegant in comparison.
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