pubs
Hey, earthquake.
Another writeup from the “I Against Comics” fellow, for the third and as-yet final Dark Horse volume of Museum of Terror.
This is probably my favorite of the three books; the anthology structive gives the work so much more staying power. You don’t have to like every story, and every story has a different draw, handled in a different way. Some will hit you immediately; others are slow burns. It’s bursting with ideas, that you can dive into or select at whim.
I’m doing some other stuff lately. I’m not really sure how much I’m supposed to say, but I’ve a couple of reasonably interesting projects coming out soon…
(October 30th, 2007 @ 8:03pm)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
Originally published by Next Generation, under the title “FEATURE: A Short History of Touch”.
A few years ago, Nintendo launched the DS with a vaguely unsettling catch phrase: “Touching is Good”. Their PR team sent disembodied plastic hands to everyone on their mailing list, in the process creeping out Penny Arcade. As creepy and forward as the campaign was, it had a point. Touching historically has been good, for the game industry.
On a whole, videogames are an awfully lonely set of affairs. They paint an alluring well, then give the player rocks to throw, to see what ripples. From Spacewar! to Pong, you’re always shooting or batting or throwing some kind of projectile, to prod the environment. Even in some of the most exploration-heavy games, like Metroid, the only way to progress is to shoot every surface in sight, with multiple weapons. Little wonder art games like Rez are based on the shooter template: it’s about as basic a videogame as you can get. See things, shoot things, you win. If things touch you, you lose. Except for food or possessions, generally you can only touch by proxy; toss coins into the well; ping things, to see how they respond. To see if they break.
( Continue reading )
(October 30th, 2007 @ 9:17am)
by Eric-Jon Rössel Waugh
A somewhat edited version of this was published by Game Career Guide, under the title “Phantom Fingers“; here is the article in full.
We make communication so darned difficult. We create languages, manners, rules, syntax, subtext, irony… We learn to love the language and its artifice – and the more we cherish our tools, the more signal that gets lost in transmission. Soon we get so caught up in what we’re saying that we no longer have any anchor in our surroundings, the foundations give way, and all our facades collapse around us.
( Continue reading )
(October 25th, 2007 @ 5:32pm)
So Wikipedia does not have a “favorite pages” feature for signed-in members. With an RSS feed, such that you can share the weird things you turn up without having to individually link them all the time.
And Wikipedia also does not spell-check or suggest alternatives when you misspell a search term.
I am puzzled why these are both the case.
(October 21st, 2007 @ 3:34am)
